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

bbc.com

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

#41

Post by com2kid »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #31
chongli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. There's far too much at stake here. Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?

I think there’s some MIPS and SH-3/SH-4 smartphones from the early 2000s still around. I had an SH-3 PDA in 2001, but Microsoft dropped support for SH-3 and MIPS in Windows CE by the time “Windows Smartphone 2002” came out (my 2002 HTC Canary runs ARM, IIRC) so it’d have to be a non-CE platform. What did the Palm Handspring use?

Internally we supported SH4 through CE7!

Source: I maintained the compiler test infra for it.

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

#42

Post by zaphirplane »

awalton wrote: 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…

Wouldnt there be IP that Apple needs if they go their own way There was something about how qualcomm Bundles ip licensing with hardware purchases

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

#43

Post by tinktank »

Surely a sale would be allowed if regulatory compliance compliance is met? I was part of a private semiconductor company bought by a public American company and the buying company had to convince the US gov they would not turn the product line into a captive portal. I expect it's the same here?

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

#44

Post by karlshea »

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #29
mud_dauber wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There was the apple gpu fiasco. Apple laptop GPUs were failing at an extraordinary rate in 2010-2011, and Apple were getting harangued in the media about it (which was justified). Apple eventually announced a program to cover replacement of the GPUs, but it was very delayed. I'm 100% convinced the delay was caused by Nvidia refusing to accept responsibility. When the program was released, in order to have the repair…

That situation was also following Nvidia spoiling one of Steve Jobs' announcements even further back, so there was already a bit of bad blood.

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

#45

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

com2kid wrote: post #41
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s some MIPS and SH-3/SH-4 smartphones from the early 2000s still around. I had an SH-3 PDA in 2001, but Microsoft dropped support for SH-3 and MIPS in Windows CE by the time “Windows Smartphone 2002” came out (my 2002 HTC Canary runs ARM, IIRC) so it’d have to be a non-CE platform. What did the Palm Handspring use?

Internally we supported SH4 through CE7! Source: I maintained the compiler test infra for it.

I salute you sir!

What’s the current roadmap for CE? I saw there’s a new CE environment in Win10 IoT, but it feels like too-little-too-late to save the myriad of embedded enterprise CE systems.

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

#46

Post by 01100011 »

jcheng wrote: post #37
01100011 wrote: post #3

Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. "most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia" Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).

Tegra (as found in Nintendo Switch). Have they given up on that line of SoCs?

They still make them and they're expanding them, but mostly for the mobile/robotics market. AFAIK they're not venturing into mobile again.

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

#47

Post by coldtea »

01100011 wrote: post #3

Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. "most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia" Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).

>Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity.

Yeah, so? If the 21st century taught us anything, is that protectionism makes sense for many products/services (not that big countries really forgot it - they only "forgot" it when for the time that their products was the only game in town).

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

#48

Post by jaimex2 »

01100011 wrote: post #3

Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. "most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia" Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).

Isn't Tegra their mobile chip?

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

#49

Post by throwaway2048 »

bonzini wrote: post #26
numakerg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall the GeForce Partner Program raised some controversy, although I couldn't say whether or it was bad or good or why. There's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers. Supposedly this is because they throttle workstation GPUs to create a market for higher-end versions while reducing the manufacturing diversity, but I haven't heard a definitive source for this.

> they throttle workstation GPUs Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured ou…

It is absolutely not a bug, Disassembly of NVIDIA drivers shows that its looking for specific KVM signatures, and if you modify those signatures, magically it starts working again...

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

#50

Post by scarface74 »

xdavidliu wrote: post #25
awalton wrote: 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…

> Apple won't be phased Nit: fazed, not phased.

That doesn’t jive with how I’ve been spelling it....
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