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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RISC-V still seems too ad-hoc to me, and really new. Hard to say where it'd go for now. I know momentum is currently towards ARM over POWER, but... OpenPOWER is certainly a thing, and has IBM / Red Hat support. IBM may be expensive, but they already were proven "fair partners" in the OpenPOWER initiative and largely supportive of OSS / Free Software.

I would love OpenPOWER to succeed. I just don't see the 48 pin QFP version that costs I don't see OpenPOWER going there, but I can easily see RISC-V going there. So, for the moment, that is the horse I'm betting on.

the war is over. Arm has won. That dominance will take a long time to fade. AWS and Apple's future is Arm.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#402
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It'd have been reasonable to block sales to non eu parties for national security reasons. Now arm is yet another US company.

Isn’t the UK leaving the EU?

That just means that their home/core market got smaller, so they should have protected ARM to stay inside E̶U̶ the UK, then.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that if Apple felt that Nvidia would limit them, they could have outbid them for ARM! So I think you are correct.

I doubt Apple is dumb enough not to have basically a perpetual license for ARM.

ARM was launched as a joint venture between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI. I believe that since day 0 Apple had perpetual access to the IP.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#405
post #361

Doesn’t this need regulatory approval from the USA and Japan? (Not that the USA would look a gift horse in the mouth, of course.)

There is a note at the end of the article: "The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals for the U.K., China, the European Union and the United States. Completion of the transaction is expected to take place in approximately 18 months." Hopefully, the EU does its job, laughs at this and tells Nvidia to either go home or forces them to FRAND licensi…

> forces them to FRAND licensing of ARM IP

FRAND licensing is worthless, if Qualcomm taught us anything.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#406
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With proper profiling (say, reservoir sampling of instructions causing pipeline stalls), and dynamic recompilation/reoptimization like IBM's project DAISY / HP's Dynamo, you may get performance near a modern out-of-order desktop processor at the power budget of a modern in-order low-power chip. You get instructions scheduled based on actual dynamically measured usage patterns, but you don't pay for dedicated circuits…

But once you do that, then you hardware optimize the interpreter, and then its no longer called a "dynamic recompiler", but instead a "frontend to the microcode". :-)

No doubt there is still room for a power-hungry out-of-order speed demon of an implementation, but you need to leave the door open for something with approximately the TDP of a very-low-power in-order-processor with performance closer to an out-of-order machine.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were two separate IoT business units: Platform ( https://pelion.com ) and Data ( https://www.treasuredata.com/ ). The Platform unit fits the Segars post-acquisition comment about end-to-end IoT software architecture, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24465005 > One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make commitments to the UK government over Arm’s future in Britain, where opposition politicians…

The UK government never learns. Kraft made similar promises when buying Cadbury regarding jobs,but quietly reneged on them over time. The Kraft CEO was asked to show up before an UK parliament committee, but of course declined, and that was the end of the story.

Except the Cadbury-Kraft debacle led to major reforms in how the UK regulates foreign takeovers.

In the case of Arm, the guarantees provided back in 2016 were legally binding, which is why we’re here, four years and another acquisition later, with Nvidia now eager to demonstrate it is standing by those commitments.

Maybe in this particular instance they did learn something?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#410
This it terrible news for the FLOSS community.

Nvidia has consistently for many years refused to properly support Linux and other open source OSs.

Heck, Wayland compositors just say "if you're using nvidia then don't even try to use our software" since they're fed up of Nvidia's lack of collaboration.

I really hope ARM doesn't go the same way. :(

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