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

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

#231

Post by stragies »

outsomnia wrote: post #210
stragies wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't produced the processor, and the tooling, and the base components all by yourself?.

shrug someone is wrong on the internet... you have a choice to learn something, or keep trying to pretend to have been right... nobody cares...

I enjoy learning every day. And -generally- I'd like to know, where my knowledge has limits.

You seem to care, and claim to be wise, so please, do enlighten me, where I'm wrong. We may be misinterpreting, what the other one is trying to say.

I'll try to re-word what I mean: If your "system" uses standard off-the-shelf parts (CPU/SOC/Mem/...), then the fact, that you can go out to the shop, and buy standard replacements, means that you can be reasonably sure to be able to thwart/detect a targeted attack on your supply-chain easier, than if your device contains a e.g. custom, specific CPU for that device, that could contain god knows what extensions to the instruction set, and that you can only get a replacement for from that one specific vendor.

Or where do I have dent in my logic?

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

#232

Post by vageli »

panpanna wrote: post #161
shrikant wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how much sway British authorities would have, since ARM is now wholly owned by SoftBank?

In a merger of this scale all the big powers (US, EU, China, and I assume also UK now) have basically veto right. There are countless examples where country 1 has stopped a merger between a company from country 2 and one from country 3.

> In a merger of this scale all the big powers (US, EU, China, and I assume also UK now) have basically veto right.

> There are countless examples where country 1 has stopped a merger between a company from country 2 and one from country 3.

From what I've seen, the only method of enforcement for a third-party country is to ban the sale of goods in their respective markets following the merger (like GE/Honeywell in the early 2000s). Would that even be possible in this case?

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

#233

Post by CydeWeys »

voltagex_ wrote: post #221
baybal2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets. > Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former... MIPS SoCs simply fell too much behind. They kept presence in the STB, and router boxes for some time, but even there they lost due to overall "deadness" of the entire ecosystem: Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM Want…

Ubiquiti will still sell you a shiny, expensive MIPS box, as will GL.inet.

Interestingly, they've gone ARM in their latest generation of hardware, e.g. the UDM-Pro uses a Quad ARM Cortex-A57 Core at 1.7 GHz: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-routing-switc...

So their MIPS stuff might be consigned to the past at this point.

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

#234

Post by vageli »

nabla9 wrote: post #173
shrikant wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how much sway British authorities would have, since ARM is now wholly owned by SoftBank?

Antitrust regulators power is determined by the size of the market, not the location of the company HQ. Antitrust regulators for big markets like the US, EU can effectively block mergers from any internationally operating company. Both AMD and Nvidia need access to EU - their customers certainly do.

> Antitrust regulators power is determined by the size of the market, not the location of the company HQ.

> Antitrust regulators for big markets like the US, EU can effectively block mergers from any internationally operating company. Both AMD and Nvidia need access to EU - their customers certainly do.

They could block the merger and if the companies decided to go ahead with it anyway, the EU would ban imports. But, wouldn't that further consolidate the market?

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

#235

Post by mikerg87 »

tedk-42 wrote: post #99

I suspect Apple would buy ARM before NVIDIA would ever get a chance to. That is of course, to protect their own interests as opposed to making it into a successful business in its own right.

Apple walked away from the opportunity. Anyone know why?

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

#237

Post by JonathonW »

znpy wrote: post #206
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?

Are you sure? Intel makes both CPUs and GPUs. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. nVidia would make both CPUs and GPUs. What would be the difference? Actually, as long as there are a number of arm design licensees, the situation would be way better than it currently is for x86: beyond Intel and AMD there is basically no other player in that field (Via? Transmeta? are they even noticeable?).

nVidia already makes CPUs and GPUs (they make the CPU that goes into the Nintendo Switch, for example). Buying ARM doesn’t change much in that regard, except that they can save on licensing fees and it puts them in a position to disrupt competitors who also produce ARM processors.

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

#238

Post by [deleted] »

protomyth wrote: post #60
frandroid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves Their new notebooks are still moving to an ARM-based CPU... Even if they enhanced the ARM design they still have an ARM licence.

I would assume they had protected themselves before the SoftBank purchase. Also, it's odd that they refer to the new stuff as Apple Silicon.

[deleted]

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

#239

Post by unix_fan »

simonh wrote: post #150
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’s ARM chips contain an awful lot of different components, some of which are highly customised. The neural engine stuff they use for image processing for example. The CPU cores are custom tuned, but I believe they are still 90% based on ARM CPU core designs. For example the Secure Enclave is actually an ARM developed CPU extension. Apple focuses their efforts vary specifically on areas that give them features th…

Apple‘s designs are already far better than the equivalent ARM coRe. I doubt they're using anything besides the ISA.

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

#240

Post by [deleted] »

axaxs wrote: post #34

I for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV. That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at t…

[deleted]
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