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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

#131

Post by landryraccoon »

cptskippy wrote: post #112
ethbr0 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

I don't remember it being all that cutthroat tbh. 3dfx was arguably the only game in down and ATi was it's whipping boy. Matrox was over in the corner saying "look nah two monitors at once!" 3dfx stumbled right as nVidia dropped the GeForce and blew everything away. ATi became nVidia's whipping boy and Matrox just added the ability to drive more monitors. I mean aside from not knowing if Matrox is still around, not m…

You just described a space with 4 competitors fighting for the same market. How could it be anything other than cutthroat? GPUs are not the kind of space where it’s easy for new companies to enter. It very much was a winner takes all market.

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

#132

Post by wwice »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #11
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #9

Do Apple actually work with Arm currently or is all their Apple Silicon stuff completely on their own? I don’t actually understand the issue they have with Nvidia but they seem to have one.

As I understand it, Apple has a special perpetual license for the architecture thanks to it being one of the companies that founded ARM. This deal shouldn't have too much impact on Apple.

From this article https://www.imore.com/mac-moving-apple-silicon-not-arm

"First, ARM has two different kinds of licenses. One is for chipset designs. You pay your fee, you take your Cortex cores or whatever, you get them fabbed, and you've got your CPUs.

The other is an ISA license. With that, you get no chip design. None. All you get is the instruction set architecture. You have to roll the actual design yourself.

And that's what Apple's been doing. Making their own custom designs that use the ARM instruction set. For years."

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

#133

Post by mekster »

bartread wrote: post #61
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…

Would anybody have bought ARM if SoftBank didn't back in 2017? I wonder if Nvidia had bought it at some point anyway.

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

#134

Post by manquer »

techdragon wrote: post #125
manquer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Nobody loves oracle either. They still buy

It is just not the developers either, even the bean counters hate them. There is always constant chatter they will replace nothing actually happens.

Developer happiness is not how most of enterprise sales happens. Most of the big cloud vendors today only offer Nvidia GPUs . Unless AMD GPUs can become so much better that nvidia is left behind nobody is going to change.

Cost of change is enormous in large organizations . This why intel is and will still make money even though they are behind in tech in almost all parameters.

That is actually when they are behind , AMD has nothing on the horizon to actually beat nvidia.

I don't buy nvidia GPUs because I like it, I buy them because the total cost of ownership of investing in a stack everyone uses is cheaper. Hiring is easier , cloud and library support is great, lesser bugs that is already not been seen and handled before.

The only reason it will make financial sense is if either Nvidia is so expensive that it is worth exploring alternatives or AMD is offering something radically different that the effort in going a different path can generate a lot of biz value. Neither is applicable today or next few years

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

#135

Post by wyldfire »

cptskippy wrote: post #112
ethbr0 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

I don't remember it being all that cutthroat tbh. 3dfx was arguably the only game in down and ATi was it's whipping boy. Matrox was over in the corner saying "look nah two monitors at once!" 3dfx stumbled right as nVidia dropped the GeForce and blew everything away. ATi became nVidia's whipping boy and Matrox just added the ability to drive more monitors. I mean aside from not knowing if Matrox is still around, not m…

ATI/AMD remains nearly the only competitor nvidia has in the discrete GPU space. But we started out with 3dfx, S3, nvidia, ati.

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

#137

Post by sfifs »

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…

Given how SoftBank has mismanaged things across their portfolio companies, wouldn't literally anyone else be a net positive to get ARM out of SoftBank?

For all the PR ARM's old founder has been doing, i don't see he's been able to scare up a buyout partnership.

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

#138

Post by stewbrew »

Oh the joys of stock markets. Nvidia makes around 3B a year (profit), they have 10B cash. IIRC Arm isn't really a cash cow. How can they afford such a deal? There market capitalization is 330B - for whatever reason people are willing to pay that much for their shares. Money is cheap nowadays - also thanks to Corona. So, they sell some warrants, sell a few new shares and it's done.

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

#139

Post by npunt »

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…

Apple almost certainly has some kind of long term or perpetual contract that assures access to ARM instruction set and perhaps some other IP, given they co-created ARM Holdings back in 1990. While A-series chips use ARM instruction set, they've moved on from using actual ARM cores to their own custom cores with the A6 (2012), so they're probably not that exposed on IP if ARM changes hands.

Additionally, since Apple controls the whole stack including dev tools on their platforms, they have a lot more freedom to change underlying chip architecture changes than many others, who must rely entirely on third party software ecosystems to move.

Apple probably wouldn't get their money's worth at current price, given they wouldn't want to take on ARM's tech licensing business, since it's well out of scope for Apple's core business. A consortium would only be another messy strategic entanglement to deal with.

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