There's a forecast question on Foretell (a crowd forecasting site run by a think tank at Georgetown) about the likelihood of a successful acquisition if anyone is interested. Current crowd consensus is 41% likelihood, down 2% in the last day: https://www.cset-foretell.com/questions/102-will-nvidia-acqu...
Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
171–180 of 217 posts
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
They absolutely have people signing up, none of it has been publicly announced (that I've seen) but we already know they were doing custom designs for Facebook/Amazon/MS so they would be logical first-takers.
None of those are OXMs and are the end customer. That is totally different than what your original assertion was.
So tell me what an OXM is? Because Amazon sells outpost, an appliance, to end users.
And Annapurna (owned by Amazon) sells CPUs to all sorts of vendors, including Ubiquiti and Synology.
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. It just means Nvidia need to give some kickbacks to the fantastically corrupt ruling party. Really hard to see this as anything other than a shakedown attempt by people who don’t understand that you can’t keep an ip licensing company inside national borders for long.
You may be right about the reason. Or maybe it’s something to do with positioning between US and EU. The correct move would be to nationalise ARM and build a fab, but the Tories are very unlikely to do that.
Because even if it was successful from a national security standpoint (semicon independence) it would look like a total boondoggle. It would cost billions of government money, and then overrun those billions in cost. Chips would still be slower than their competitors, and the new British fabbed chips would be even slower. No matter which party pulled the trigger, the other would ruthlessly tear the project down in the eyes of the public as corrupt and expensive, terrible for the environment, huge water and land usage, etc.
I'm not trying to say that ARM is incompetent, but it takes years for an institution to learn how to do this. ARM doesn't currently operate fabs.
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you're thirsty, you buy from the person selling water. I don't think you'll find a lot of love lost between the OXMs and nvidia. I'm sure they would love more competitors in the space. We have people licensing Arm and building interesting CPUs (Ampere). I'm not sure that the NVIDIA acquisition would be good for the market or for Arm.
You haven't explained why Intel is entering the licensing business. If vendors have no desire to get their licensing from a company that competes in the space, there should be no demand for licensing from Intel, all of those OXMs should be going to ARM.
The thing about Nvidia is they have spent a lot of money creating a kind of chip+ecosystem situation that is unique and superior to all that's out there. And they charge a gruesome premium on that and use product and license differentiation to extract the maximum in each submarket. It's logical and perhaps necessary strategy to get a return on their huge investment. But it is just as logical that everyone hates them. This is what successful investment leading to a unique technology leading to a monopoly position looks like.
Intel once was in a similar position to Nvidia and everyone hated them then. The failure of their last few generation has meant they don't have as strong a monopoly position and so have to start taking a more conciliatory position with the market. I don't know if they're succeeding here but it's obvious they've been "humbled".
Now, maybe Nvidia will treat ARM completely differently than it's GPUs. But companies tend to have single cultures and so it's easy to imagine Nvidia squeezing dimes from other ARM customers, where ARM has been at the opposite side of the market, reasonably priced, good-enough tech. Charging a high premium on your capital investment works for a market leader, that uses the money for more investment. But for a market followers, the same strategy results in market share shrinking 'till the whole thing dies (not that this isn't a way to make money but when the thing dies, some people are unhappy).
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
The companies that directly compete with Nvidia (AMD & Intel) are not ARM customers. ARM's biggest customers are mobile phones, which could benefit from an Nvidia GPU
Couldn't be further from the truth. All Arm SOC manufacturers are competitors of Nvidia.
ARM is used across a huge array of end market segments. Granted, none are as big as mobile, but they’re important nonetheless. To say that all ARM SoC vendors are competitors is therefore not strictly true.
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t think that’s right. Flogging something means to sell it, usually in a careless kind of manner.
This thread is the first time I've ever heard of 'flogging' meaning selling something off hurriedly. The predominant way I've seen it used is to refer to administering punishment via whipping.
That is indeed the meaning of the verb "to flog". Like you would to a horse in the 17th century, to make it go faster. "Flogging off" goods to make them move faster is a relatively simple leap (and universal British slang).
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would we knowingly allow Rolls-Royce Jet Engines to be flogged off? Not quite a flogging off, but the MiG 15 engine was a copy of the Rolls Royce Nene engine which a soviet trade delegation won in a bet on a game of billiards.
Wait, what ?
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Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#178An interesting side aspect, assuming this is final: Before the Arm acquisition materialized, Nvidia was quite present in the RISC-V space. All current Nvidia cards have at least one RISC-V chip on it. So while their intended high performance use cases are not feasible yet, this could lead to Nvidia focusing on RISC-V again the medium term, which would definitely be beneficial. Of course Nvidia can still pursue ARM ba…
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Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually I don't think espionage primarily - more cyber defense against bad actors both state and private.
How about more basic things: From now on, every ARM processor costs $40 per chip to license. Except, of course, those made by NVidia. or From now on, all improvements to the reference ARM architecture will only be available in NVidia chips for the first two years. Afterwards they'll be available for licensing at the current costs. Those are monopoly issues. And now a national security issue: From now on, $RANDOM_EURO…
Which is why there are distinct competition investigations going on in UK, EU and elsewhere.
I think you're overdoing the last point: there is lots of key technology licensed from US firms and no-one in the UK thinks that this is a major national security issue.
Much more likely that there is a specific issue that UK government has identified that poses a realistic problem for UK security services.
Re: Proposed acquisition of ARM Limited by NVIDIA: public interest intervention
#180Times like this I lament what Inmos could of been had the UK not just chucked it away as it did.
Inmos has directly and indirectly led to many British companies, including Graphcore:
https://www.economist.com/britain/2011/08/06/how-the-west-wa...
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/graphcore-ai-intelligence-pr...