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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

#121

Post by techdragon »

valuearb wrote: post #100
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…

Nvidia isn’t likely to invest $40B and then do anything to damage ARMs licensing efforts. They are likely to look to find synergies so ARM can incorporate Nvidia technologies and Nvidia can better utilize ARM technologies.

That sounds like a great strategy to announce and do for a year or two... before changing course to “maximise value” by merging operations, jacking up licensing costs, making nvidia gpus part of the arm ISA, etc...

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

#122

Post by manquer »

perardi wrote: post #39
spzb wrote: post #8

I would have thought Apple was a better strategic fit for Arm and likely to be able to pay bigger bucks too.

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.

Why should they continue the ARM model ? . They could shutdown that revenue stream, keeping competitors behind on chip design to justify the huge premium on apple devices is worth that kind of money.

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

#123

Post by ac934875390 »

akvadrako wrote: post #29
ysleepy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 128bit ISA is super unlikely. We're barely using the 48bit implemented in AMD64 of 64 possible address bits. Wider data arguments are already implemented as AVX/2/512.

Architectures with 128 pointers exist, but the extra bits are used for metadata. I don’t see much indication this’ll become mainstream through. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri...

Arm is actually building this:

https://developer.arm.com/architectures/cpu-architecture/a-p...

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

#125

Post by techdragon »

manquer wrote: post #117
jb775 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindsight is 20/20 in regards to the Nvidia stock gains. $5-$8 billion profit plus whatever they managed to extract in-between is a pretty astounding investment.

Perhaps the how much of nvidia stock gains are 20/20 . It was never in doubt that nvidia was going to grow massively. 3-4 years back cryptocurrency mining made it next to impossible to actually buy a gpu. Machine learning was always going to keep growing massively. Cuda had cornered the market . AMD GPU is far behind . Similarly AMD's growth is never in doubt after ryzen launched , there is nothing on intel's next 3-…

It’s worth remembering that a significant percentage of CUDA users are unhappy with the nVidia lock-in and also that the AMD GPUS are capable enough to do the work. So should any of the efforts to break the CUDA lock-in succeed... nvidia is likely to lose a significant percentage of their machine learning business.

The only people I’ve ever met that actually love nVidia, are enthusiast PC gamers and that’s because the games are optimised for nVidia due to nVidias anticompetitive efforts in the game development space.

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

#126

Post by occamschainsaw »

pm90 wrote: post #59
gumby wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory is that clusters form around “anchor tenants”; Cambridge has the University (and its excellent CS departments), ARM and some others, and is close to he largest capital marketplaces in the world, grandiosely bundled into a so-called “silicon fen”. So school leavers can get jobs, network, start companies, develop other tech in a virtuous circle. Well that’s the theory; nobody has actually been able to reprod…

This is a bit of an aside, but it never ceases to amaze me how many would be tech hubs try variations of Silicon Valley in their (maybe informal?) branding. Silicon hills, Silicon fern.. (I knew a couple more but I’m forgetting atm). It’s not like it’s the name which made it what it is.

You can find all the places on Wikipedia with the "Silicon something" name here[1]. Look under "S".

I live in Silicon Peach.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Information_technolog...

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

#128

Post by mgh2 »

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…

What will happen with Apple Silicon?

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

#129

Post by rrss »

techdragon wrote: post #121
valuearb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia isn’t likely to invest $40B and then do anything to damage ARMs licensing efforts. They are likely to look to find synergies so ARM can incorporate Nvidia technologies and Nvidia can better utilize ARM technologies.

That sounds like a great strategy to announce and do for a year or two... before changing course to “maximise value” by merging operations, jacking up licensing costs, making nvidia gpus part of the arm ISA, etc...

> making nvidia gpus part of the arm ISA

what would this mean? are there any CPU ISAs with a GPU integrated into the ISA instead of just a peripheral?

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

#130

Post by Retric »

valuearb wrote: post #97
Retric wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

8B at zero percent interest would only increase the return to about 6% compounded.

SoftBank bought Arm in 2016 for $32 billion. A 32B investment turned into 40B over 4 years is 6% ROI. (32 * 1.06^4) = 40.3

8B + 24B loan turned into 40 Billion - 24B loan = 16B or 8B in profits minus interest. Which could be up to a 19% annual ROI 1.19^4 ~= 2x. I don’t know what their loan interest rate look like, but I suspect it’s shockingly low.

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