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Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

arstechnica.com

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Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#131

Post by pankajdoharey »

klelatti wrote: post #108
blinkingled wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the current story - where ARM is independent. If a competitor buys it and decide to not invest as much in ARM or keep things for themselves that's where this discussion plays off. I was saying it won't matter much for Apple but on the other hand Apple buying them would be a much worse outcome for the industry as a whole.

I'm reasomably sure that Apple does care about the ISA that will soon power 100% (to a reasonable approximation) of its products. My (less than fully clear) point was that there is a strong relationship there and that it's two way. Sure, Apple has escape routes if things go wrong but it's very very unlikely they will be needed.

So What Stops Apple from hiring the ARM Team and design the next generation of big.LITTLE independent of ARM, without actually purchasing ARM the company?

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#132

Post by mjw1007 »

earthscienceman wrote: post #89
mjw1007 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 64-bit ARM ISA was basically redone from scratch, around 2010. It isn't "mostly the same instructions but with 64-bit registers" the way 64-bit x86 is.

Do you (or anyone else) know where I can read about that?

The reference manual is at https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0487/latest/

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#133

Post by bfuclusion »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #84

Interesting article. I wonder what is really happening. Looking at moves by Chinese vendors and others, I'm going to hypothesize that ARM said to itself: "We can't compete with 'free' and RISC-V is 'good enough' that its going to wipe out the commodity micro-contoller licensing stream that is over 50% of our revenue. That means we won't have the resources to invest in designing higher end features in the high margin…

The day a RISCV SOC on par with the Raspi 1, is the day I never buy another ARM board. It'd be nice if the whole SOC is open cored like the CPU, but I'll take what I can get.

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#134

Post by trasz »

earthscienceman wrote: post #89
mjw1007 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 64-bit ARM ISA was basically redone from scratch, around 2010. It isn't "mostly the same instructions but with 64-bit registers" the way 64-bit x86 is.

Do you (or anyone else) know where I can read about that?

Just google for "ARMv8".

(Also, it's not like ARM was a single instruction set before either. For quite some time ARM had two totally different instruction encodings, the "usual one", and Thumb2, with microcontrollers usually only supporting the latter.)

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#136

Post by klelatti »

tadfisher wrote: post #128
simonh wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>True. As mentioned above, architecture success != economic success ARM is enormously economically successful, they're just not a manufacturer and thus not remotely a comparable business to the entirety of Intel, fabs and all. Apple has a perpetual license from ARM, so it doesn't matter who buys ARM, Apple is all set license wise. There is a risk that a new buyer might under-invest in the evolution of the architectur…

> Most of the really interesting RISC-V chips include proprietary enhancements. 100% of ARM chips on the market include proprietary enhancements. I don't think that has any bearing on the adoption of the core ISA, unless you can point to cases where a decision was made to avoid RISC-V over licensing an ISA extension.

Isn't the point though that a lot of the enthusiasm around RISC-V is that it's 'free' and that's no longer the case if you're using a proprietary extension. Plus you're looking at much greater possible fragmentation than can happen with ARM?

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#137

Post by mtgx »

sitkack wrote: post #14
AWildC182 wrote: post #8

I wonder if softbank sees the writing on the wall here. Yea they want cash but ARM is rapidly coming under fire from the open source RISC-V architecture. ARM's licencing model in particular is steering people away from their offerings in new designs and I think they're pretty much at peak value right now with Apple's adoption of their architecture. I know there aren't tons of news articles about new high performance…

I am a huge RISC-V fan, like Cathy Bates level, but there is so much that ARM can do over the next 5,10,15 years but it looks like they are incapable of the required transformations. Everything that is good about RISC-V is already at ARM's disposal. Currently it looks like SiFive was borne out of a solution for the organizational issues that plague innovator's dilemma companies. I am envious of SiFive's position righ…

Sure, but whether Arm remains with a cash-starved Softbank or is sold for tens of billions of dollars to a company like Nvidia, it seems inevitable that royalties for their licenses will drastically increase in the near-to-medium future. And this will inevitably open the market for RISC-V chips.

I mean, this is already the case, when Arm licenses are still very reasonable, just on a much slower trend/adoption rate. Once license costs rise to 4x or more, I expect RISC-V adoption rate to grow by at least as much, too.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-softbank-group-arm-exclus...

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#138

Post by basch »

H8crilA wrote: post #82

Nvidia's stock is in a massive bubble, so an all-stock transaction is a no brainer here. They will be getting ARM for free.

I've been thinking about this "stock is a bubble" with regard to Nvidia and Tesla. Normal investing logic says to pay attention to P/E.

However, if you look at stock as its own currency, basically dollars*managementskill, putting a dollar into Nvidia or Tesla basically means "if I give this money to someone else, they can do better with it than if I hold onto it. It would also be a way of "investing" in a management team, helping support them financially so they can go out and make acquisitions.

Then Nvidia and Teslas stock price becomes less "a bajillion times their next five years of earnings" and more "what could these great teams buy or build if we pump them full of cash." Youre investing more than just the future of the current company, as it exists right now.

I don't see Softbank wanting Nvidia stock though, unless they intend to liquidate it quickly.

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#139

Post by klelatti »

pankajdoharey wrote: post #131
klelatti wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reasomably sure that Apple does care about the ISA that will soon power 100% (to a reasonable approximation) of its products. My (less than fully clear) point was that there is a strong relationship there and that it's two way. Sure, Apple has escape routes if things go wrong but it's very very unlikely they will be needed.

So What Stops Apple from hiring the ARM Team and design the next generation of big.LITTLE independent of ARM, without actually purchasing ARM the company?

If reports are correct they did hire some of the Imagination GPU design team.

So they probably could but whilst the relationship is good the best of all worlds is a strong ARM team plus a strong team in-house.

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#140

Post by klelatti »

bfuclusion wrote: post #133
ChuckMcM wrote: post #84

Interesting article. I wonder what is really happening. Looking at moves by Chinese vendors and others, I'm going to hypothesize that ARM said to itself: "We can't compete with 'free' and RISC-V is 'good enough' that its going to wipe out the commodity micro-contoller licensing stream that is over 50% of our revenue. That means we won't have the resources to invest in designing higher end features in the high margin…

The day a RISCV SOC on par with the Raspi 1, is the day I never buy another ARM board. It'd be nice if the whole SOC is open cored like the CPU, but I'll take what I can get.

Genuine question. Why is this the case? What would a RISC-V board enable you to do that you can't do with an ARM board today?
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