Earlier quoted context omitted.
Want to be nerdy and use powers-of-ten? Fine by me! But then please go all the way: $4E10!!!
Perhaps the parent prefers engineering notation, which uses exponents that are a multiple of three?
Got me.
Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
421–430 of 784 posts
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#422Softbank paid $32B for ARM in 2016. A 25% gain over a horizon of four years is not bad for your average investment -- but this isn't an average investment. First, compared to the SP500, this underperforms over the same horizon (even compared to end of 2019 rather than the inflated prices right now). Second, ARM's sector (semiconductors) has performed far, far better in that time. The PHOX (Philadelphia Semiconductor…
There's also a fundamental threat to ARM in the raise of RISC-V.
RISC-V is only a tiiny player in the low end embedded space (there are only a few parts actually available with that instruction set) and no competition at all at the high end.
Maybe in a decade or so it may be more relevant but not today. Calling this a "fundamental threat" is a tad exaggerated.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It absolutely outrages me. I've posted elsewhere on the thread about this, but I want to do something to prevent this sort of thing in future. Setting up a think tank seems like a viable idea. See my other response in the thread if you are interested and want to get in contact.
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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#424This isn't going to do good things for anyone who doesn't own a lot of Nvidia stock. This is going to do especially bad things for anyone who needs to buy a cell phone or the SoC that powers one. There's no real alternative to ARM-based phone SoCs. Given Nvidia's business practices, any manufacturer who doesn't already have a perpetual ARM license should expect to have to pay a lot more money into Jensen Huang's reti…
Android worked on x86 and MIPS in the past, it could presumably be ported to work with RISC-V
You would first need an actual working RISC-V silicon that it would be worth porting to. Not the essentially demo chips with poor performance that are around now.
RISV-V is a lot of talk and hype but the actual silicon that you could buy and implement into a product is hard to come by. With the exception of a few small microcontroller efforts (GigaDevice, Sipeed).
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#425I see this going a few ways for different players: The perpetual architecture license folks that make their own cores like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Fujitsu (I think they needed this for the A64FX, right?) will be fine, and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there. Apple especially will be fine as they can get code into LLVM for whatever "Apple Silicon" evolves into over time…
> nVidia could cut them off from any new designs
Why would they do that anyway? The downsides are obvious (immediate loss of revenue), the risks are huge (antitrust litigation, big boost to RiscV or even Mips), the possible benefits are nebulous.
Those who are most obviously at risk are designers of mobile GPUs (Broadcom, PowerVR ...).
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
They should learn to prevent the sale, period. Promises to retain some jobs (for ever? What happens if profits decline? What happens if the core tech is sold and ARM becomes a shell? Do the rules still apply?) address a tiny fraction of the problems presented by the sale of one of our core national tech companies.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
They should learn to prevent the sale, period. Promises to retain some jobs (for ever? What happens if profits decline? What happens if the core tech is sold and ARM becomes a shell? Do the rules still apply?) address a tiny fraction of the problems presented by the sale of one of our core national tech companies.
I would have liked to see ARM remain owned in the UK. I think it's proven itself capable of innovation and organic growth on its own.
But how can we evaluate the whether that will continue?
What if ARM is not sold, and then (for whatever reason) stagnates, doesn't innovate, gets overtaken in some way, and enters gradual decline?
Perhaps that's unlikely, but prevent the sale, period is feels too absolute.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
Qualcomm hasn't used an in-house core design since 2015 with the original Kryo. Everything Kryo 2xx and newer are based on Cortex.
That was a really sad time honestly. QCOMM went from leading the pack to basically using reference designs (which they still arrogantly brand as Kryo despite essentially being a tweak of a reference design. It all happened because Apple came out with the first 64-bit design, and QCOMM wasn't ready. Rather than deliver 32-bit for 1 more year, they used an off the shelf ARM 64-bit design (A57) in their SoC called the S…
From what I gathered, they made at least _some_ risky architecture choices in their custom architecture that turned out not to be sustainable over the next generations. Also note that their Cortex core is indeed customized to a significant extent.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#429No one has seemed to notice the following two things: "To pave the way for the deal, SoftBank reversed an earlier decision to strip out an internet-of-things business from Arm and transfer it to a new company under its control. That would have stripped Arm of what was meant to be the high-growth engine that would power it into a 5G-connected future. One person said that SoftBank made the decision because it would hav…
It is not "free", it means current shareholders of Nvidia are paying for the remaining money. Their stock is diluted on fresh issue of shares.[1]
The $12B comes from Nvidia the company, the remaining money comes from Nvidia's shareholders directly.
[1] Only if the valuation of ARM is "worth it" the fresh issue of shares will not cost the current shareholders anything. This is rarely the case , if Nvida overvalued(or less likely undervalued) the deal then current shareholders are giving more than they got for it.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#430It's so amazing Apple didn't win this M&A race.
Apple isn't interested in selling tech licences to other companies - they want to own their core technologies so they can sell products to consumers. And, as an original member of the Arm consortium, they have a perpetual licence to the Arm IP (I have no inside knowledge about that, just many people who know more than me have said it)