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Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

bbc.com

11–20 of 313 posts

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#11
The Observer proposed an interesting solution last weekend:

"The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors — some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers — to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry..."

https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/08/10/0358216/should-the-...

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#13
post #2

Any other real non US company can benefit from it except Chinese companies ?

There are all kinds of Euro-based electronics firms such as Alcatel or Phillips or Siemens.

I’m aware of them but do they really develop any mainstream devices ? I might be wrong but aren’t those companies working in their niche eg cell towers etc. Isn’t that a way tooo narrow application of such a great tech ?

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#14
post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#17
Seems like alarmist FUD to me. While I agree that having Arm owned by any one of its major customers creates some potential conflicts of interests, I think the notion that NVIDIA or any other company would start to drive licensees away with draconian terms/costs with some poor business planning pretty silly.

The more interesting question to me is what would any single (major customer of Arm) company gain from owning Arm? For instance, if NVIDIA wants to be competitive in data center CPUs (which would put them at equal footing with AMD and Intel, not more monopolistic), why couldn’t they go the Apple approach with a perpetual license and design it entirely custom (or not) as they see fit? (AFAIK they already design custom mobile CPUs.)

What do you gain by buying out an expensive, large licensing company that essentially makes no money that leaves you in a weird position with various rivals? Doesn’t quite click for me.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#19

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I think you're confused. He didn't own ARM, it wasn't his choice to sell. Hauser was vehemently against the SoftBank sale.

You're right. I retract my criticism of his position. It's completely consistent. Thank you.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#20
post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

CUDA is probably the biggest thing here, also I don't think they open source much.
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