Arm is adding Nvidia NVLink Fusion to its Neoverse platform. Neoverse is Arm’s family of infrastructure CPUs. NVLink Fusion is the licensable version of Nvidia’s chip-to-chip interconnect. Companies licensing Neoverse CPUs and peripheral technologies (IP), including soft IP or a CSS hard macro, will now receive Fusion support. This will help them to build chiplets and complete chips that directly interface to an Nvidia GPU, saving them the trouble of independent licensing and integration. Arm and Nvidia collaborated to add Fusion support to the Neoverse platform at the request of a specific customer and expect others to follow. Details about customers’ first Fusion-supporting Neoverse designs have been withheld.
Several hyperscalers already have proprietary Neoverse-based processors that substitute for x86 processors. Fusion will provide next-gen processors with a faster, memory-coherent interface to Nvidia’s de-facto-standard data-center GPUs, previously only available with Nvidia’s Grace or Vera processors. Fusion keeps these hyperscalers in the Nvidia fold, even if it sacrifices a Grace/Vera sale, and enables them to customize their general-purpose processor.