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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

#241

Post by rrss »

bayindirh wrote: post #217
john_miller wrote: post #216

Earlier 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…

FWIW, Ethernet supports RDMA also, via RoCE.

> A to B latency is around 2-5 ns (nanoseconds).

What are A and B? and where did you get these numbers? HCA latency is more like ~500 ns.

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

#242

Post by rapnie »

SSLy wrote: post #238
rapnie wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It was a joint-venture between Philips and ASMI.

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

#243

Post by dogma1138 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #239
dogma1138 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure that's correct, one of the main reasons why NVIDIA succeeded is that they actually pushed technology and they always seem to have a much longer term vision than for the next 1-2 iterations.

I'm also not sure if you are suggesting NVIDIA made the same mistake as Microsoft regarding mobile, but them buying ARM is anything but that.

Them buying ARM is a way for them to offer a fully vertically integrated solution for the enterprise, pushing their existing initiatives such as NVDLA (https://github.com/nvdla/) being able to exert more control over the future of ARM architectures and designs for specific fields especially automotive as well as potentially getting their graphics and compute IP into billions of devices.

Anyone who thinks NVIDIA is buying ARM to simply trash it or to mess up with their competition is wrong, I'm not saying NVIDIA would necessarily be successful but most of the so called competitors that people are point at aren't their competitors at all.

NVIDIA is also buying a lot of talent with this acquisition, specifically the likes of ARM Austin which were responsible for the A76-78 cores.

NVIDIA + ARM + Mellanox has the potential to be a player on an unprecedented level for the hyperscaler and HPC markets, especially if the likes of Apple and Amazon (and to lesser extend Cloudflare etc.) do a lot of the heavy lifting for them. Apple going with ARM is probably the best thing NVIDIA could've asked for.

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

#244

Post by mthoms »

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.

"Silicon Valley North" checking in.

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

#245

Post by dippersauce »

It simply wouldn’t make sense for NVidia to maliciously impose upon ARM after acquisition, as many of the commenters are concerned. I’m not saying they won’t, but because the present situation would limit any efforts to do so long enough that it would be futile.Consider the perpetual license agreements ARM holds with companies like Apple. These companies are best positioned to resist meddling with ARM. As an example Apple will forever have access to the ARM ISA, so NVidia can’t simply stop them from using existing designs. The processors Apple uses are all custom designs anyway. If future designs were purposely kneecapped, they could just improve their currently licensed designs until a suitable alternative is produced. Hindering future processor designs won’t hurt the biggest players in the short term, and in the long term it will only drive them to the competition. NVidia could take the approach of slowly drifting new designs to greater integration with their own GPUs in such a way that alternatives would be displaced - either by favor of NVidia GPUs or by the difficulty in using alternatives. This would be obvious though, and would again drive their users away. NVidia hasn’t had great success like they have had with GPUs in any other market. I see this as an opportunity to diversify and secure their future, and they want to take it.

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

#246

Post by ethbr0 »

dogma1138 wrote: post #243
ethbr0 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure that's correct, one of the main reasons why NVIDIA succeeded is that they actually pushed technology and they always seem to have a much longer term vision than for the next 1-2 iterations. I'm also not sure if you are suggesting NVIDIA made the same mistake as Microsoft regarding mobile, but them buying ARM is anything but that. Them buying ARM is a way for them to offer a fully vertically integrated so…

Intel was the intended antecedent for "they". I should have been clearer.

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

#247

Post by freeone3000 »

saagarjha wrote: post #189
freeone3000 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the ISA is simple, the perf/watt is way better, and we're reaching the point where architecture-specific native code is not explicitly sought out by most users, so we can actually change processors.

Most users however do depend quite a bit on the performance of a small section of architecture-specific code.

(I'm going to exclude Linux in the below, because it's an odd duck where users/distributors can reasonably be expected to recompile every program they use for a new architecture.)

Sure! But that code is generally core OS code written by a small number of people and deployed widely. If Apple or Microsoft or Google decided that OpenPOWER was the way to go, we'd be able to switch over at least some use cases. ALL of the above have current Arm offerings. Arm has reached "good enough" performance - the snapdragon 855 is as fast as a i5-8630U, and uses half the power.

The primary barrier to processor migration is compatibility with user-mode programs. Since the vast majority of programs are now using primarily ILs, such as JS or C#, once the runtimes are ported (and they have been), there's not a lot of lasting incompatibility since programs bind to APIs, not ISAs. Apps for Work (CAD, Photoshop, dev tools) are traditionally the last to port, but there has been no better time to switch architectures than now, and it's only getting easier.

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

#248

Post by dralley »

baybal2 wrote: post #75
bartread wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You're blaming Nvidia. You should be blaming SoftBank and Masayoshi Son: bunch of fucking hucksters misleading people and making bad investments. You shouldn't be blaming bad investors. They pay for their decisions with their, or more often somebody's else, money. Blame the collective ownership of means of production, which in form of public companies have dominated the Western world for the last 30+ years. When pe…

...What?

Vision Fund isn't "public", and most of the companies they invest in aren't "public".

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

#249

Post by gumby »

andybak wrote: post #79
pm90 wrote: post #59

Earlier 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.

I love that name because of course all beaches are by definition made of...silicon!

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

#250

Post by jka »

adrian_b wrote: post #229
jka wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any benchmarks (in terms of code size, runtime performance, energy effiency, ...) available for OpenPOWER vs RISC-V? (and if not, what would be some of the metrics to objectively compare the architectures?)

It is very difficult to make a non-biased comparison between different ISAs. If you just compile some benchmark programs for 2 different architectures and you look at the program sizes and the execution times, the differences might happen to be determined mostly by the quality of the compilers, not by the ISAs, in which case you could reach a wrong conclusion. Many years ago, on one occasion I have spent many months…

Thanks for the perspective and GMPbench reference. I'm sure you're correct that RISC-V has a lot of optimization work to do both at the compiler and chip implementation levels.

I'm curious whether vector operation support in RISC-V might also make up for any apparent shortcomings in raw arithmetic throughput - I guess a lot of it will depend on the types of workloads involved.

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