Renowned chip developers plan revolutionary AI CPU with new company Nuvacore
Former employees of Qualcomm, Apple, and Intel want to "rewrite the rules of silicon" with new start-up Nuvacore. It's about AI acceleration.
(Image: Connect world/Shutterstock.com)
Three former employees known for semiconductor development at Apple, Intel, and Qualcomm have founded a new startup. At “Nuvacore,” Gerard Williams III, John Bruno, and Ram Srinivasan aim to develop a new processor core that, as a general-purpose CPU, can compute everything but should be able to execute AI calculations particularly quickly and efficiently. To achieve this, they promise nothing less than to “completely rewrite the rules of silicon.”
So far, there is neither a product nor specifications, but the three renowned CPU developers have found a prominent investor in Sequoia Capital, which also co-finances the Berlin-based AI start-up n8n. Gerard Williams III and John Bruno were responsible for the development of iPhone processors and the M1 chip for ARM Macs in Apple's semiconductor division before founding a new company for server chips with Nuvia in 2019.
From Intel, Apple, Nuvia, and Qualcomm to Nuvacore
Just two years later, Nuvia was acquired by Qualcomm to develop notebook processors with their CPU cores. Williams joined as Senior Vice President of Engineering and continued to work with Bruno at Qualcomm, who was responsible for system architectures. For Nuvacore, Williams and Bruno have brought on board their former Apple colleague Ram Srinivasan, a specialist in system-on-chip architectures who worked at Intel as a performance architect for seven years before Qualcomm, Nuvia, and Apple.
Videos by heise
Together at Nuvacore, they now want to develop new CPU cores. “For decades, the semiconductor industry has been dominated by an 'old guard', titans of tech that design for the ground, iterating on yesterday’s architecture,” reads the first blog post from Nuvacore. “But as artificial intelligence and core infrastructure demands skyrocket, iteration is no longer enough.”
High-End CPU for Server AI Likely Based on ARM
Although Nuvacore remains vague in its announcement, the start-up promises a “general-purpose CPU core that refuses to compromise,” developed from the ground up. The focus is on “maximum performance and absolute area efficiency.” The goal is therefore not only the fast processing of standard tasks in data centers but also “intense, continuous demands of advanced AI systems and agentic computing.”
The instruction set architecture Nuvacore will use for the new CPU core is not mentioned, but given the participants' experience with ARM architectures, this is precisely what can be expected. After all, ARM server CPUs come not only from specialists like Ampere Computing. The world's largest cloud service providers (hyperscalers), Amazon AWS (Graviton), Microsoft Azure (Cobalt 100), and Google Cloud (Axion) also use their ARM server processors.
(fds)
