They blatantly ought to have done this for the original sale. Better late than never, I suppose.
They were too scared of looking 'closed for business' in the middle of the disaster that was/is Brexit.
You might be right here.
Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
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Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#62“On national security grounds”...? Why would NVidia, a US corp, be more of a security problem than a Japanese one? If it’s just a matter of commercial overreliance on a single supplier, I find the “National security” bit to be somewhat specious.
Because the nature of this acquisition is completely different. SoftBank left Arm mostly alone; i.e. brand survived, all offices survived, etc. If this deal goes through, Arm will get fully integrated into Nvidia. There won't be an "Arm" anymore.
Is that how it would be? So, like AMD and ATi? Damn, that's kind of sad.
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#63They blatantly ought to have done this for the original sale. Better late than never, I suppose.
They were too scared of looking 'closed for business' in the middle of the disaster that was/is Brexit.
Brexit only fully happened a few months ago, so it is hardly related to this. Any considerations w.r.t. looking 'open for business' would certainly still apply. But sure, make everything about Brexit, why not.
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#64Can anyone more knowledge than me on these matters explain what this means as far as what the UK can and might do? Also, what has the UK done historically when it has invoked powers set out by this Act?
It appears that at the moment all this means is there will be an investigation and a report. Presumably, any action taken to block the sale will have to wait until after that.
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
You apparently double-posted? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26862687
Yeah. Looks like that. :)
Somehow, tokyojoe, I find it hard to picture you, as a former semiconductor executive, making two new accounts on HN to post the same thing twice. It's just not the kind of thing I imagine former semiconductor executives spend their days at.
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#66I've been struggling to understand why Nvidia's takeover of Arm might be a UK national security issue (the competition case is quite clear but separate). I'm guessing though that Arm collaborates with UK intelligence agencies and that that collaboration might be jeopardised with the Nvidia takeover (in a way that it was not with the Softbank takeover). Does anyone have any further insights?
You think espionnage, I think a key IP asset. ARM is a piece of infrastructure now, and dangerous in the hands of NVidia for other reasons than spying. Mostly economical. And yes, that's also national security.
All the more reason to dump funding into RISC-V and drop ARM. CPU architectures and instruction sets shouldn't be in the private hands.
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#67Is it possible that Apple is calling their chips Apple Silicon for reasons other than marketing? Since Apple now plans to design and manufacture chips for all their products it’s also possible Apple comes up with an ARM compatible instruction set rather than ARM instruction set to avoid any issues with ARM being part of such takeovers. Just a wild theory since no one has yet (probably legal reasons) done a deep dive into the M1 processor.
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand objecting, but for security reasons? A better argument would be that Nvidia gains serious power over companies who are currently ARM customer and Nvidia competitors. Perhaps the UK want to be able to use ARM designs for domestic chips in the future, without being dependent on an American company, but yeah, then they should have objected when a Japanese company bought ARM as well.
> but for security reasons? Seems to be the strongest/easiest route to go to justify blocking it. The whole national security angle and all. > then they should have objected when a Japanese company bought ARM as well I have to imagine this was a bit of sleeping at the wheel. I'm not sure though.
Perhaps more that times have changed. We used to have a strong commitment to the neoliberal ideal of a separation between state and business. The experience of nationalisation had also not been good (think Austen and BT). That’s changed and we are now in the world of “entrepreneurial states” for better or worse.
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#69In totally unreleated news negotiations between NVidia and the PMs wife to buy a small shed for £100m have fallen through...
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the point of being able to design CPUs if we can't make them? We certainly don't have defence independence at all. I'm not sure about the second point but it seems premised on withholding IP from US which seems unlikely. Much more likely that there is intense collaboration between say GCHQ and Arm (maybe both ways -> GCHQ gets to understand modern CPU security issues from Arm and Arm benefits from GCHQ input o…
We get our panties in a bunch (and I do too) about the real high end fabs for CPUs, but push-come-to-shove there _are_ fabs in the UK. Infineon (German owned) and Nexperia (Dutch owned) both own fabrication plants in the UK, so it's possible to scale that up if we were at war, the knowledge is here.
Fair comment but no one is suggesting that we'll lose access to CPU designs that work on older nodes so the point still doesn't really stack up.