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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

#111

Post by klelatti »

He's absolutely right. Unless there is a 100% firewall between ARM and Nvidia then Nvidia will influence ARM to move in directions that help Nvidia's wider business and not the ARM ecosystem as a whole - and that will adversely affect everyone who uses an ARM CPU - and that's basically everyone.

I don't believe that such a firewall is possible in any event. Who will enforce it?

For those who are saying that it's great as it will give RISC-V a boost. Fine in principle, but how long will it take before the RISC-V ecosystem is anywhere near comparable to ARM in mobile?

One final point: the UK government is now considerably more interventionist than at any time in the recent past. Not completely impossible that they intervene in this in some way.

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

#112

Post by pjmlp »

01100011 wrote: post #46
jcheng wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And shield, as set top box.

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

#113

Post by duskwuff »

axaxs wrote: post #77
duskwuff wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ARM has little use except for open source. Huh?? ARM is probably the most popular CPU architecture in use today -- unlike x86, which is largely limited to desktop/laptop and server computing, ARM is used in a lot of embedded applications.

Have you the counts of systems using ARM on Linux(Android) vs ARM in everything else? It's not even close.

You're underestimating the number of ARM microcontrollers in deeply embedded devices. For example, most hard disks and SSDs have at least one ARM core -- and often several -- running the device. They're also quite common in peripherals, like keyboards and mice. The firmware for these devices is often either a realtime embedded OS (like FreeRTOS), or is entirely bespoke. It's virtually never open-source.

Even if you're only looking at mobile phones, the cellular baseband is often implemented on ARM as well, and it definitely isn't a Linux system either. (Nor is it open source.)

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

#114

Post by mvn9 »

H8crilA wrote: post #18

NVIDIA's stock is so massively pumped up. They will simply make an all-stock offer that's pretty much impossible to refuse and that will be the end of it (most likely).

NVIDIA is the only hardware company that takes software serious.

In every hardware thread, someone complains about hardware people being behind on software technology. And then there is NVIDIA, the company that provides the best development environment for GPU development, the company that used chip simulation for their first processor.

AMD was kept alive by oil money and console contracts. NVIDIA made it on their own. They were innovative in the past, they can be innovate in the future. To me, that's an opportunity for much more future growths.

How much is too much if NVIDIA can take Intel's market? And we are only at the start of machine learning and product simulations.

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

#115

Post by thayne »

mud_dauber wrote: post #14
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…

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

nVidia has a very long history of not getting along with Linux.

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

#116

Post by thayne »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #102

AMD have to license their cpu to China in order to get a life line. when AMD stock was in the toilet. Softbank doesn't want ARM anymore. what do Hermann Hauser proposed? Let ARM holding die(?). He offer no solution.

If I understand correctly, his solution is to make ARM a publicly traded independent company, rather than selling to another company like nVidia.

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

#117

Post by mappu »

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.

SH4 is out of patent now - do you know if the J-Core can run CE7?

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

#118

Post by thayne »

georgewfraser wrote: post #91

I find it baffling that SoftBank isn’t simply taking ARM public. If ever there was a company that should be independent, it’s ARM. Is there a good explanation out there for why this isn’t the obvious choice?

Most likely, money. Specifically, they probably think they can get a better price from nVidia than on the public market.

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

#120

Post by asddubs »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #90
foota wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I had no idea, so I just searched and found there are 201 repositories in their github: https://github.com/NVIDIA

that's a pretty meaningless number without further context
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