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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

#141

Post by bfuclusion »

klelatti wrote: post #140
bfuclusion wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Mostly have a hope of having a bootloader process that doesn't hinge on binaries. I mean at some level I may have to, but it's really annoying I can't move an image from machine to machine even though the arch is all the same.

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

#142

Post by klelatti »

bfuclusion wrote: post #141
klelatti wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Mostly have a hope of having a bootloader process that doesn't hinge on binaries. I mean at some level I may have to, but it's really annoying I can't move an image from machine to machine even though the arch is all the same.

But that's not an ARM issue is it? PI has strange boot by GPU but issue is SoC implementation I think not CPU architecture.

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

#143

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

klelatti wrote: post #136
tadfisher wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The big difference is RISC-V has been designed to handle that situation from the start. That's why the ISA is modular.

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

#144

Post by moonchild »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #57

I would never want to buy ARM if I were Apple. Here's why. Apple can design AND manufacture chips based on ARM architecture, essentially without any interference from ARM the company. Just pay a (relatively small) license fee and you're all set. The article says it well: > Arm’s licensing operation would fit poorly with Apple’s hardware-focused business model. > There may also be regulatory concerns about Apple ownin…

> I am bullish on Risc-V and think there's a good chance we will all eventually converge to that.

I'm very hopeful for the mill. I think they have a good 15-20 years left to get their stuff together before we can definitively say they've succeeded or failed. Barring that, though, riscv is quite nice. 'Specially the vector instructions—so much nicer than simd.

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

#145

Post by wahern »

pankajdoharey wrote: post #130
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 think if someone anyone who buys a 32+ Billion dollar company would want to get returns from it, so surely they won't stop investing. The problem really is if it is someone like NVIDIA then they have this rent seeking behaviour. Which almost everyone is trying to run away from. For instance In the cloud NVIDIA shuns the usage of its commodity GPU's through the use of EULA and force you to buy there expensive and ov…

> Anyone else is fine.

Even Qualcomm?

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

#146

Post by chubs »

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.

The open-source RISC-V core 'SonicBoom' aka 'Boom v3' has a claimed IPC that beats the ARM generation in the raspi4. It's only on FPGAs currently though. All it needs is someone to make them as real chips! It's really something interesting i think.

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

#147

Post by bfuclusion »

klelatti wrote: post #142
bfuclusion wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly have a hope of having a bootloader process that doesn't hinge on binaries. I mean at some level I may have to, but it's really annoying I can't move an image from machine to machine even though the arch is all the same.

But that's not an ARM issue is it? PI has strange boot by GPU but issue is SoC implementation I think not CPU architecture.

Right, it's not CPU arch, but there's a much higher chance of having the entire thing open arch if the CPU is. I expect the probability of reaching a de-facto "standard" SoC to be much higher in RISC-V and I'll take the pain of being the early adopter.

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

#148

Post by zelly »

klelatti wrote: post #140
bfuclusion wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Freedom.

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

#149

Post by jki275 »

aleppe7766 wrote: post #24

A wide coalition must form: every single OEM acquiring ARM will reduce its value. BTW Apple won’t let Nvidia control a central part of its Long term hardware strategy.

I don't know the details of Apple's licensing agreements, but note the fact that the word "ARM" is totally absent from all their marketing. They own their own chip design company (PA Semi), we know they're using the ARM ISA, but I suspect they don't need anything from ARM the company anymore.

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

#150

Post by smabie »

wronglebowski wrote: post #16

Is regulation really that big of an issue? I realize all the tech companies in the running and ARM are global brands. Recently T-Mobile and Sprint were allowed to merge in the US. Is it really that certain that Apple or another giant purchasing ARM wouldn’t be allowed?

T-mobile and Sprint were allowed to merge because they were both uncompetitive as stand-alone companies: their merger deconsolidated the wireless space, not the other way around.
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