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SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

reuters.com

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Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#141

Post by ZetaZero »

ksec wrote: post #64

It sort of make sense for Nvidia's shareholders. The initial offering for ARM was only worth $38.5bn, which was already expensive due to SoftBank initial purchase price and not wanting for a loss. But at Nvidia's peak this deal was worth " $87bn ". For a company that makes less than $2B in revenue and at best ~$300M in Operating Income. Remember this isn't something you can buy and milk the crap out of other market p…

Disclosures: I've closely followed Nvidia for 15+ years, and own stock.

I feel Jensen and Nvidia still, very strongly, wanted to do the deal. The deal increased in value to $87bn only because NVDA's stock price increased that much. The real costs to Nvidia did not increase.

ARM is a legitimate competitor to x86, which Nvidia wanted to control.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#142

Post by baq »

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #92
PedroBatista wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The printer will start to run out of paper in a few months. The companies that have their own invoice printer will “win”, the others will suffer.

It's been months for years

pay attention. it's already started.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#143

Post by Wronnay »

ant6n wrote: post #93
ksec wrote: post #64

It sort of make sense for Nvidia's shareholders. The initial offering for ARM was only worth $38.5bn, which was already expensive due to SoftBank initial purchase price and not wanting for a loss. But at Nvidia's peak this deal was worth " $87bn ". For a company that makes less than $2B in revenue and at best ~$300M in Operating Income. Remember this isn't something you can buy and milk the crap out of other market p…

But Intel has a P/E of 9.91, they must be teetering on the brink of bankruptcy!

It's really funny how the market thinks that Intel isn't in the game anymore.

They may not be as energy efficient as M1 or ARM chips but they certainly show that they are still a competition and invest a lot of money to improve their performance.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#144

Post by rswail »

brokencode wrote: post #122
ignoramous wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provided the ARM juggernaut is expected to streamroll Intel's business in the coming decade, this acquisition does make sense for Intel... this could be their Facebook+WhatsApp moment.

If Nvidia was blocked from acquiring ARM, then I certainly think that Intel would be blocked as well. Plus, Intel does not need to actually acquire ARM to start making ARM processors. For example, Apple has done just fine licensing ARM IP just like everybody else.

To be clear, Apple is not licensing ARM IP "just like everybody else". They have a very different relationship, being a founding shareholder, and then acquiring an "Architecture License" from ARM after also acquiring PA Semi according to Wikipedia.

So Apple Silicon is not the same as someone else licensing ARM IP.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#145

Post by tcmart14 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #101
jason0597 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RISC-V was designed to to be a teaching ISP Do you have a source for this? RISC-V always seemed like it was a production ISA from the get-go

"RISC-V is a new instruction set architecture (ISA) designed to support computer architecture research and education." "Provide a realistic but open ISA that captures important details of commercial generalpurpose ISA designs and that is suitable for direct hardware implementation." "Be simple to subset for educational purposes and to reduce complexity of bringing up new implementations." https://www2.eecs.berkeley.e…

I can't remember if I heard it in a Jim Keller interview or somewhere else, but I think students also helped initially design the ISA for RISC-V also.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#146

Post by Symmetry »

NortySpock wrote: post #9

Why will ARM succeed where MIPS faded into obscurity? (Well, relative obscurity. I see they are still used in media devices and cheap routers.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_Technologies

Arm was one of the CISCiest of the RISC processors at a happy medium in instruction complexity that gave them all the simplicity of regular sized instructions while still getting the job done in fewer instructions than a more ideological RISC ISA.

Some in depth look at various features here:

https://userpages.umbc.edu/~vijay/mashey.on.risc.html

Also, getting the job done with fewer instructions meant requiring less RAM in embedded roles where it thrived before entering the market from below in classic disruptive innovation style, the same way that x86 entered the server market. The other RISCs were mostly high end workstation or server chips suffering from low volumes. I actually ported some software from an SGI MIPS box to x86/Linux once. It was a nice system and I see why people liked it but it just couldn't keep up.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#147

Post by tjoff »

als0 wrote: post #134
tjoff wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that stands out about ARM is that the user has less control of the hardware. The manufacturers try and succeed in keeping an extremely closed ecosystem. Why would you want that? The Intel+AMD duopoly seems like nirvana compared to the Ampere and M1. In fact, Ampere and M1 are a hint of the most dystopian future of computing I can imagine.

> In fact, Ampere and M1 are a hint of the most dystopian future of computing I can imagine. OK I'll bite. What aspect of Ampere is locked down? They are nothing like the bad closed-source hacks that we see in small development boards.

I apologize. I confused Ampere with Amazon's Graviton.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#148

Post by perfopt »

tjoff wrote: post #121
reilly3000 wrote: post #30

Soooo back on the LSE or? It was such a hot stock in 2014-15. Softbank kinda bought it at the peak. Still, Apple has proven ARM on the desktop is phenomenal, and Ampere has done the same in the datacenter. Both have swiftly made compiler support accelerate dramatically. I would love for my next desktop to be arm-based, and it would be great if it didn’t NEED to be a mac. Broad adoption of ARM would be a huge win for…

The thing that stands out about ARM is that the user has less control of the hardware. The manufacturers try and succeed in keeping an extremely closed ecosystem. Why would you want that? The Intel+AMD duopoly seems like nirvana compared to the Ampere and M1. In fact, Ampere and M1 are a hint of the most dystopian future of computing I can imagine.

This has nothing to do with ARM. Unlike the PC there is no standard for system architecture (including boards). ARM based designers like Qualcomm, NVIDIA etc can choose to have their own board and system architecture. For example, they can boot of any memory location or lock the user out of using an exception level like EL3/EL2 etc. That is why the ecosystem looks closed. Nothing stops a SoC designer from giving complete access to hardware.

BTW - any SoC designer that uses RISC-V can do the same.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#149

Post by mmastrac »

klelatti wrote: post #138
pm90 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be real. ARM got a chance because it excelled in a very specific use case: low power. Unless RISC-V differentiates itself in a significant way, it won’t replace ARM.

RISC-V seems to me to have two major opportunities. - Where a free ISA allows innovation and experimentation in a way that Arm would not permit. - Where companies can shave cents off mass market products due to lower licensing fees. Will RISC-V replace Arm in your smartphone though - seems like a big ask at the moment.

Google maintains two parallel Android platforms right now, so the idea of porting everything over to a third is not _too_ far off. There's a lot of effort in getting JIT up-to-speed on RISC, but most everything else is a recompile away.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#150

Post by andrepd »

tjoff wrote: post #121
reilly3000 wrote: post #30

Soooo back on the LSE or? It was such a hot stock in 2014-15. Softbank kinda bought it at the peak. Still, Apple has proven ARM on the desktop is phenomenal, and Ampere has done the same in the datacenter. Both have swiftly made compiler support accelerate dramatically. I would love for my next desktop to be arm-based, and it would be great if it didn’t NEED to be a mac. Broad adoption of ARM would be a huge win for…

The thing that stands out about ARM is that the user has less control of the hardware. The manufacturers try and succeed in keeping an extremely closed ecosystem. Why would you want that? The Intel+AMD duopoly seems like nirvana compared to the Ampere and M1. In fact, Ampere and M1 are a hint of the most dystopian future of computing I can imagine.

Can you elaborate? I don't understand what you mean.
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