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SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

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Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#61

Post by bartread »

BluSyn wrote: post #3

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likel…

> Nope, now Nvidia is going to destroy that progress and set everything back another 5+ years.

You're blaming Nvidia. You should be blaming SoftBank and Masayoshi Son: bunch of fucking hucksters misleading people and making bad investments.

Now they need to sell ARM to fill some of the gaping void that has resulted. They couldn't care less who they sell to and what the outcome of that sale will be. I have nothing but contempt for them.

An absolutely miserable turn of events.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#63

Post by klelatti »

On reflection I'm a bit surprised that a consortium hasn't emerged to offer more for Arm given the concerns expressed here:

- $40bn isn't a lot in aggregate for the companies that are heavily invested in the Arm ecosystem (Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon etc) - maybe even Intel would take a small stake!

- The $40bn is partly in Nvidia's (arguably) inflated stock. Would cash be more attractive?

- Could probably partly fund through a public offering in due course.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#64

Post by 01100011 »

jayd16 wrote: post #12

Well... on the bright side I like what Tegras have been able to achieve. The Shields and the Switch are neat machines. Maybe we'll see some more ARM designs that can compete with Apple.

No, everything Nvidia is evil. We're supposed to be hating on them, right? Can I get my upvotes for perpetuating the hive mind now?

Seriously. I'm excited to see ARM owned by a hardware centric company. That said, I really don't expect this to have much impact in the near term. Licenses are already in place. China will probably spin competing chips based on their own ISA before too long(5-10 years).

I'm frankly interested to hear what folks in HW have to say. Hearing the repetitive, uninformed opinions of users and SW folks isn't really telling me anything informative about this. I'm an embedded SWE and I'm not seeing much to worry about. Would it be better if Apple bought ARM? Huawei?

This notion that a hippie commune is going to buy ARM and lead us all into open source nirvana where free, cutting edge IP rains down from the sky is frankly goofy.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#66

Post by SahAssar »

klelatti wrote: post #42
perardi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the screaming anti-trust issues they’d run into, that’s not really Apple’s business model, is it? Selling IP to other companies? I get they would want to control their own ISA, but I can almost imagine them creating their own, versus buying ARM and then being forced to maintain existing licenses.

Except they owned almost 50% of Arm in the 1990s and were very supportive of their business model.

Back then apple's business was quite different. They licensed their OS, they collaborated on stuff like the pippin, they were not sure if their future was in software or hardware.

The apple now is a very different beast.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#67

Post by nabla9 »

Nvidia already has their own ARM SoC, they just merge Arm developers to the team.

I suspect that Nvidia changes the business model of Arm a little and starts to sell high performance Nvidia Arm CPU's directly to server, laptop and mobile manufacturers.

Then we will have Intel, AMD and Nvidia in both CPU and GPU markets.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#68

Post by ethbr0 »

rvz wrote: post #16
BluSyn wrote: post #3

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likel…

Unfortunately, you are correct. This is what Nvidia was looking for since out of the big 3 US semiconductor manufacturers, it doesn't have its own IP on CPUs. Now it will soon be able to control ARM to its advantage against the competition. This will indeed push the urgency for RISC-V to be worth looking at in the next few years to be used by hardware vendors soon. But it will be a long wait. As for the UK now realiz…

> This is what Nvidia was looking for since out of the big 3 US semiconductor manufacturers, it doesn't have its own IP on CPUs. Now it will soon be able to control ARM to its advantage against the competition.

In all fairness, consider the market from Nvidia's perspective: they've spent a few decades being a stone's throw from Intel eating them. They started as one of many add-on card manufacturers and have turned into a dominant player by innovating, iterating, and being ruthless.

Some here might not remember how cutthroat the early-GPU days were. Nvidia survived.

Now, an opportunity to become a technical peer to Intel at the CPU level? To control their own destiny?

They'd be insane not to take this opportunity.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#69

Post by Retric »

perardi wrote: post #31

Regardless of the consequences of selling to Nvidia…that’s not a great exit, is it? They bought ARM for $32 billion, and they are getting $40 billion for it? With all the money sloshing around in the debt markets, I figured they’d get a bit more.

Depends on how much leverage they used. If it was all cash on hand the that’s a poor ROI, if they only put up say 8b then that‘s a nice return over 4 years.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#70

Post by ethbr0 »

klelatti wrote: post #63

On reflection I'm a bit surprised that a consortium hasn't emerged to offer more for Arm given the concerns expressed here: - $40bn isn't a lot in aggregate for the companies that are heavily invested in the Arm ecosystem (Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon etc) - maybe even Intel would take a small stake! - The $40bn is partly in Nvidia's (arguably) inflated stock. Would cash be more attractive? - Could probably partly fund th…

> The $40bn is partly in Nvidia's (arguably) inflated stock.

This is SoftBank we're talking about. Do we really want to bring up inflated stock as one of their concerns? ;)

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