I wish they went public. I’d love to invest in them long term
I’m sure many people would like the idea of investing in it. ARM Holdings was public and listed before. Then SoftBank bought it and delisted the company from the stock exchanges.
SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
231–240 of 268 posts
Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
SiS also had 3D graphics chips. Tseng Labs was probably one of the earliest victims of the 3D GPUs wars, having developed but never completed the ET6300. PowerVR still exists and is seems successful in the mobile market (having provided Apple's GPUs until A10).
Imgtech/PowerVR was successful in the mobile market until Apple stopped buying their GPUs. Now they have practically no mobile customers though they're still reasonably successful in the automotive market.
PowerVR died when Mali became a viable GPU, it was also much less Apple than Qualcomm switching to Mali and then to reference ARM cores in general.
Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. A…
Isn't that what everybody doing Qualcomm, Samsung, huawei ..?
No. They have architectural licenses but they use ARM designs.
Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
#234I 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…
> While long-term this might end up being great for RISC-V... set everything back another 5+ years. Five years is no big deal. In fact there’s so much in the pipeline it’s likely little will be different For 3-5 years. The bigger problem is RISC-V is immature and to use ARM as an example will need another decade to get its act together (for which I have high hopes BTW). I agree with you that this will definitely be a…
> The bigger problem is RISC-V is immature and to use ARM as an example will need another decade to get its act together (for which I have high hopes BTW).
Do you think that RISC-V can overcome the inefficiencies discussed elsewhere in this thread with time? Specifically, can they improve the instruction set with more powerful addressing tools and reduce the number of instructions needed within loops?
Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an outsider: What is so much better about Infiniband compared to Ethernet?
Infiniband (IB) is not a network per se. It's a HBA. It can run TCP/IP but it's not the main application. Every infiniband adapter is self-aware & topology aware. They know where the other nodes are so, they can directly talk with each other, regardless of the topology (network is mapped, managed and maintained by a daemon called subnet-manager which can either run on switches or a dedicated server). This hardware an…
I'm just picturing something like Superman's crystal cave https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c9/d5/a4/c9d5a448c3c0eb98014e8be0d... with a bunch of computer modules plugged into an Infiniband connection system. It could be a collection of manycore ARM processor modules as well as Nvidia GPU and AI modules. You just keep plugging more of them in to build up your home supercomputer.
Then you use your Neuralink brain-computer interface (communicating with the home supercomputer cluster with an ultra-compact WiGig module) to "program" it by talking to an AI avatar that pops up in the middle of your living room (or whatever simulation you are replacing it with currently). The cluster runs the AI and the simulation.
Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Silicon Beach. I live in one that claims the title. I suspect there are many.
Me too. But I moved here from the Silicon Prairie!
Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, you are correct. This is what Nvidia was looking for since out of the big 3 US semiconductor manufacturers, it doesn't have its own IP on CPUs. Now it will soon be able to control ARM to its advantage against the competition. This will indeed push the urgency for RISC-V to be worth looking at in the next few years to be used by hardware vendors soon. But it will be a long wait. As for the UK now realiz…
> This is what Nvidia was looking for since out of the big 3 US semiconductor manufacturers, it doesn't have its own IP on CPUs. Now it will soon be able to control ARM to its advantage against the competition. In all fairness, consider the market from Nvidia's perspective: they've spent a few decades being a stone's throw from Intel eating them. They started as one of many add-on card manufacturers and have turned i…
Very well put
The biggest thing if you have been in prolonged vicious competition, is to Control Your Own Destiny and leave the basket of crabs behind
For Nvidia this is a MASSIVE win
Softbank are @#$@#$ idiots for selling ARM
Right when ARM is finally taking over the world
For what?
So they can fund the next bunch of charlatans - add more disasters like WeWork and Uber?
Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
#238Earlier 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…
> The theory is that clusters form around “anchor tenants” Yes. Largest technology hub in Europe sits in Eindhoven (Veldhoven), Netherlands where you have a technical university, but the real anchor was Philips who were headquartered there. Eindhoven is home to ASML and Signify (formerly Philips Lighting) among others.
ASML is also a Philips spun-off
Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imgtech/PowerVR was successful in the mobile market until Apple stopped buying their GPUs. Now they have practically no mobile customers though they're still reasonably successful in the automotive market.
PowerVR died when Mali became a viable GPU, it was also much less Apple than Qualcomm switching to Mali and then to reference ARM cores in general.
That was the gist of my comment. Nvidia could have easily been PowerVR, if Intel had shown earlier interest (~00s) in developing a serious graphics product.
As it was, it seems they made the Microsoft/Internet and Microsoft/Mobile mistake and saw market evolution only as a threat to their existing portfolio, rather than as an opportunity.
Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a premature judgement. If NVIDIA treats ARM poorly, that benefits alternative ISAs and may ultimately undermine NVIDIAs investment. If NVIDIA treats ARM well, then that benefits the platform as a whole. The reality is going to be somewhere in the middle. Market equilibrium does not imply maximum benefit for any one interest group. "Consumers" or "end-users" are often conflated with "society".
Looking through the doomsayers in this thread, this is the result I believe to be most likely. If ARM goes belly up through gross mismanagement, then the laurels will be taken up by someone else. I think another aspect to consider is the perpetual license agreements ARM holds with several other businesses. I think this may muzzle Nvidia to some extent.
ARM also has well-funded competition in many spaces in the form of Intel and AMD. And to a lesser extent in Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
And while people may grouse about many things, chiefly paying a perceived Nvidia tax, I don't think anyone would accuse Nvidia of being strategically incompetent.
The more likely negative outcome seems to be that Nvidia would steer future ARM development so that their CPU+GPU solutions are more performant than anything anyone else can afford to produce.
Which seems like a negative... but far from the worst negative.
TBH, I think ARM's non-GPU business isn't interesting enough to Nvidia to screw with.