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Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

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Re: Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

#81

Post by ansible »

ksec wrote: post #70
rvz wrote: post #15

The UK is actually the one that has ignored and destroyed ARM (and Imagination Technologies) and it has been compared to 'selling off the crown jewels' [0] to SoftBank which was welcomed by a UK government cabinet minister in 2016 as a 'big vote of confidence in British business.' [1] Actually, SoftBank got ARM at a special Brexit discount. For them, they saw it as the best deal of 2016 and for the UK, you might as w…

I am not sure I am reading this correctly? >SoftBank got ARM at a special Brexit discount... ARM was sold for $32B. It is easy to say they got a discount when even AMD is currently valued at $100B+ today. ( Yes.... the market is quite insane ) At the time many thought it was over priced, just like how WeWork was over priced. ARM make less total revenue than Intel's Net Profits. And at the time, $32B was 100x + its Ea…

> You have RISC-V chipping away the bottom, low end embedded category...

Yes. For relatively simple in-order cores, the RV32 instruction set is far simpler to implement than ARM, or even MIPS, and should be able to provide better performance.

If the existing SW dev toolchain is sufficient for your needs right now, I think RISC-V can be a great choice for small embedded SoCs.

Re: Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

#83

Post by banjo_milkman »

ethbr0 wrote: post #25
rvz wrote: post #15

The UK is actually the one that has ignored and destroyed ARM (and Imagination Technologies) and it has been compared to 'selling off the crown jewels' [0] to SoftBank which was welcomed by a UK government cabinet minister in 2016 as a 'big vote of confidence in British business.' [1] Actually, SoftBank got ARM at a special Brexit discount. For them, they saw it as the best deal of 2016 and for the UK, you might as w…

Would be curious on any Brits' opinions on if this (failure to support revolutionary technology) happens more there, and if so then why. Recognize biases of hindsight, but it seems like private equity markets in Britain aren't interested in technology at the requisite scale. There's an incredible historical tradition [1], but the majority tend to be either developed with the help of a (1) few angel investors (and the…

There are multiple examples of revolutionary technology from the UK: 1) ARM - dominates embedded systems, >90% of cellphones and IoT, sold to SoftBank, now on the way to NVidia 2) DeepMind - arguably global leader in AI, now part of Google 3) Illumina/Solexa - >90% of global DNA sequencing market, biotech leader, sold to Illumina for $600, Solexa sequencing now the basis for a $50bn market cap

Britain has the problem that too much of the country is focused on finance + the services that surround it, the country bends over backwards to support those industries through deregulation/not enforcing rules (LIBOR scandal et al), intervening with foreign governments to protect banks (see HSBC 'too big to jail') while pretending it is lassez-faire & does not have an industrial policy.

The ironic thing is that the financial industry could help develop these seeds of technology into behemoths but have misguidedly focused on inflating land values + developing dodgy financial instruments.

Another problem is culture - many Brits have the ambition of making $ millions of money and then retiring to a country house. Not many Zuckerbergs have emerged from the UK.

Re: Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

#84

Post by valuearb »

DudeInBasement wrote: post #78
valuearb wrote: post #72

Hauser is worried NVidia will pay $40B so it can light ARM on fire. That’s crazy on it’s face. Follow-up by noting ARMs actual economic value is less than $10B, do it seems unlikely NVidia or anyone else would pay what SoftBank is asking. Lastly Hauser says NVidia would do this to become the “dominant microprocessor company” in the world, then cut its customers off from new developments. First, ARM isn’t a dominant m…

ARM might be sold from SoftBank to get money. They aren't doing so well after the 'WeWork' garbage.

I understand they need money, but expect it will have to be a fire-sale. Unless my understanding of ARM financials is far off base, no financial buyer would pay even $10B, and it’s hard to imagine strategic buyers paying over 3x that.

Re: Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

#85

Post by deepnotderp »

adventured wrote: post #63
ArkVark wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extreme wealth is not valued in Europe. To the contrary, income (even upper-middle class income) and consumption is incredibly highly taxed. Many small and mid-sized business struggle or refuse to scale because it exposes them, their owners and management to taxes which cannot be escaped (by contrast small businesses can pay their staff in cash, and charge personal expenses to business accounts for VAT writeoffs). Al…

> Extreme wealth is not valued in Europe. I think that's too much of a blanket statement. France (the second or third largest economy in Europe depending on the year) is a potent counter argument to that premise. Bernard Arnault, $89 billion. Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, $66 billion. Francois Pinault, $42 billion. Alain Wertheimer, $32 billion. Gerard Wertheimer, $32 billion. Those are immense dynastic fortunes and…

Well, taxes hurt new money the most, which is why so many of those people on your list are inherited money and very few of them got rich from tech.

It turns out that extreme taxation helps aristocrats...

Re: Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

#86

Post by ethbr0 »

justaguy88 wrote: post #80
ethbr0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a lot of options available when you own a company, that you don't have when they're independent. Example: Nvidia would prefer certain specifications on an internal bus they'd use, but nobody else uses as a standard.

They can already do that

Not exclusively. ARM's roadmap is driven by what all of their customers want, not just Nvidia.

There doesn't appear to be sufficient profit margin in the industry for too many greenfield, non-reference custom implementations.

So if Nvidia-ARM sticks out a reference implementation or architecture choice that's beneficial to Nvidia, there's limited capability for others (Apple, Cavium/Marvell, Qualcomm, & Samsung?) to strike their own path, and they'll certainly be paying steeply to do so.

Re: Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

#87

Post by johnday »

deepnotderp wrote: post #85
adventured wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Extreme wealth is not valued in Europe. I think that's too much of a blanket statement. France (the second or third largest economy in Europe depending on the year) is a potent counter argument to that premise. Bernard Arnault, $89 billion. Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, $66 billion. Francois Pinault, $42 billion. Alain Wertheimer, $32 billion. Gerard Wertheimer, $32 billion. Those are immense dynastic fortunes and…

Well, taxes hurt new money the most, which is why so many of those people on your list are inherited money and very few of them got rich from tech. It turns out that extreme taxation helps aristocrats...

Taxes on income do as you say. There are other forms of taxation which are gaining political ground over time, including a land value tax and (to a lesser extent) a wealth tax.

Re: Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

#88

Post by dathinab »

yoran wrote: post #24

> Hauser says the acquisition would allow Nvidia to swipe “the microprocessor crown from Intel”, and become the chip supplier for 95 per cent of mobile phones, 90 per cent of embedded controllers for the internet of things, as well as taking the PC and data centre markets. Is it a possibility that an acquisition by Nvidia will be blocked due to anti-trust reasons? Who is the authority who has to decide on that? Is it…

I don't buy the "Nvidia to swipe “the microprocessor crown from Intel”" thing it just doesn't add up.

ARM sells licenses for instruction sets and IP cores for processor layouts but not finished processors.

Companies like Apple might have started by buying IP cores but have moved from there to just licensing the ISA and parts of the IP cores but making their own processors (Which is why saying Apple runs a ARM processor is wrong, they run a Apple processors with ARM ISA and some ARM invented components in them).

Furthermore companies like Apple have likely long running binding license contracts where Nvidia has little power to mess with them.

OpenPower, MIPS and RISC-V are also still a thing which have each their own potential to "eat up" ARM if ARM gets "burned" (well OpenPower is more a concurrent to the server/pc space then the tablet/phone or the embedded space).

The ARM ecosystem is fundamentally different to the classical PC ecosystem due to how Android/iOs differ from Windows/Linux and due to a good amount of it being embedded. Which makes it generally easier to switch away from it for new products as no one expects to "carry over binaries" or similar.

So if Nvidia tries to burn ARM I think it would due to all kind of reasons (existing contracts, chips etc.) take long enough so that affected parties can "move on" without to much fallout.

But then Nvidia has good reasons not to burn ARM but keep it like it is and then slowly sprinkle their thinks in.

I mean Nvidia totally lost out on the mobile (phone/tablet) but with controlling ARM they can use that to get back into that marked (i.e. Android phones and tablets with Nvidia graphics) they already shipped chips which are viable for tablets (e.g. the one in the switch) and had some major improvements from what I heard in their coming generations which should allow them to ship pretty good low power GPUs.

But not only do they missed out on Mobile they also are trying to get into "AI at the edge" thinks like self-driving cars and Robots all based on Nvidia chips combined with ARM CPUs. By controlling ARM not only will it be easier for them to do so, but by keeping ARM open they can slowly nudge people to consider/use Nvidia GPUs/Tensor Cores.

So a lot of benefits for Nvidia to buy ARM and keep it open for now.

Through yes on the long run they might slowly close ARM up so that there aren't ARM chips with non Nvidia GPU and similar. But to prevent legal and image problems they should take many years to get there everything else would hurt them on the long term I think.

Which also means there is enough time to switch to alternatives.

But will you switch if ARM keeps being good and now ships with powerful reasonable priced GPUs or TensorCores just because it a bit more vendor lock in which you are likely used to anyway from other HW thinks?? Which is I think what Nvidia is out for.

Re: Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

#89

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

coliveira wrote: post #76
adventured wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a difficult and slippery slope type problem. If the Europeans stop the US from acquiring companies there, the US ends up doing the same to European companies trying to acquire US assets. We let Germany buy one of the most important companies on the planet in Monsanto. I consider Monsanto to be a national security level company, we should have never let it go. Seed & AG tech is critical for the coming century a…

That's not even comparable. The reason pharma companies relocate is to have access to tax havens that in the past were available only to oil and finance industries. They remain still American companies in essence. Even tech companies like Apple and Google have used European countries as a tax haven scheme.

Not to tax havens but to regulatory bodies as well.

Re: Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

#90

Post by dathinab »

numpad0 wrote: post #44
ethbr0 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best play would be to take the Intel approach: run ARM independently, and just build best-in-class integration with Nvidia GPUs / features. Substantial anti-trust concerns are avoided, while building exactly the moat you want: no competitor can afford to compete with the level of integration investment.

That's the Tegra, every luxury sedans has them, plus Nintendo Switch use one of them, as they're GPU focused and power management don't matter.

Buying ARM + their manufacturer improvements with Samsung might give Nvidia another real chance to enter the mobile marked!

Thats if they keep ARM alive and mostly like it is for now at least.

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