Arm is reportedly developing a major new GPU architecture in order to compete with Nvidia

Arm is working on an entirely new GPU design, and it has Nvidia as its target. This is a bold claim, but the Israeli business website Globes has confirmed it.

Arm is reported to have up to 100 GPU engineers working at its Ra'anana development center in Israel. What's not clear, however, is the kind of graphics architecture that they have been tasked with building. The two obvious options are video rendering or AI inferencing and training.

Arm has several GPU designs already on its shelves. These include the Mali and Immortalis Series, which are typically licensed as IP by chip makers. Arm is not in the business to make and sell GPUs. This also applies to CPUs which are the mainstay in its licensing business.

The Mali and Immortalis are more traditional graphics units, which are designed to process graphics. It's a completely different game to build a GPU for AI.

Nvidia's AI architecture and gaming GPU architectures were developed in tandem, and share elements. There's a huge difference between an Nvida AI chip that costs $40,000 and its most expensive desktop graphics cards.

Arm is a proven performer in graphics processing, and it sells SoCs with hardware that can be used for this specific task. However, it does not have a track record of selling discrete GPUs or AI.

The Globes article provides little insight into the details. The Globes story does mention that the Ra'anana facility worked with Israeli startup NeuReality to develop its new SR1 hardware, which is 90% cheaper than using Nvidia GPUs for the same task.

It's difficult to draw any conclusions. We'd say that Arm's plan is unlikely to involve discrete gaming graphic cards. There's a lot more money to make if you can create an alternative to Nvidia AI hardware.

On the other side, those overlaps remain between graphics and AI. It wouldn't surprise me if Arm's investments in AI benefited gaming graphics.

The Snapdragon X series is Qualcomm's first serious attempt at bringing an Arm CPU to the PC. This means that what Arm can do in graphics could be more relevant for PC gaming, and especially mobile gaming.

Don't expect to buy an Arm graphic card next year. You might be playing PC games on a handheld all-Arm device in the future.