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

The real cost to Nvidia is $87bn. Value is denominated in dollars, not nvidia stock.

In the server space, there is no good reason to do weird unusual things → even e.g. the "custom" AWS hardware is as standards-compliant as possible (if you look at the ACPI tables on an a1.metal instance, you'll only find an AMZNxxxx device for the PCIe host controller, and that's only because Synopsys Designware IP sucks^W has a stupid hardware bug related to filtering that requires a little workaround quirk)

> and are now a desktop enthusiast favorite as well. The i5/i7 class is outmatched in every metric ($/FLOP, W/$, and W/FLOP) by the Ryzen series.

maybe a couple years ago, at this point Intel is dominating the gaming market, competing in the productivity market despite having fewer cores (i.e. more potent cores), are at least matching Zen3 efficiency (except i9, but you said i5/i7) if not beating (particularly at lower power budgets due to infinity fabric overhead). Ryzen has absolutely lost favor with the enthusiast market due to the significant price increases (in some segments, a 50% increase over last generation) and the refusal to chop prices to remain competitive with intel (justified with "but they can make more money selling Epyc", which is great for them but it doesn't make their products competitive for me as a consumer either).

And AMD has completely abandoned the value market... i3 12100F is listed for $110 at Best Buy (iGPU version is $140), and Intel is in the process of rolling out Celerons for even cheaper rigs (will be nice for HTPC with that iGPU). AMD's cheapest processor has a $300 MSRP and they won't budge on pricing at all given their focus on the server market.

go look at a tech enthusiast forum and nobody is recommending Ryzen anymore. It's overpriced, it no longer has a performance or efficiency advantage (in fact it's rather flopped the other way), and AMD would rather address the server market instead.

this has really shifted in the last 6 months since Alder Lake launched, but really there was a significant niche for recommending 10-series as a budget option given the significant price advantage over AMD. The thing that changed with Alder Lake is that Intel moved back into the performance lead (and matched efficiency) and prices remained the same - leaving them both better and cheaper than AMD. Thing have changed, people don't recommend AMD anymore unless you have a very specific need (like you're buying a 5950X).

Also APUs in particular are rather a flop on desktop. AMD didn't even bother releasing a 7nm APU to the consumer market until... September last year? Up until then it was all 12nm quad-core garbage - and that's GloFo 12nm, so more like Intel 22nm. On top of that, the APUs also had reduced IPC compared to the CPUs of their equivalent architecture (due to less cache). All of the hype around Ryzen was around the non-APU enthusiast chips with no onboard graphics, the APUs were never popular in the desktop segment.

The APUs are nice if you are building a SFF rig with no discrete GPU... but they have a lot of compromises - reduced IPC, PCIe 3.0, and up until September they didn't have any that weren't limited to PCIe 3.0x8 (5000G series moves this to 3.0x16). They have no HDMI 2.1 support, no HDMI VRR support, no AV1 support, and the worst hardware encoder (i.e. Teams videoconferencing quality/etc) on the market. If you really want a gaming-focused SFF rig with iGPU only, they are the best available, but they were never popular, and AMD never really pushed them the way they did the enthusiast chips.

(HEDT is another segment that's been abandoned... AMD still has not released Zen3 processors, it's been 16 months now, and who knows whether AMD will try the same "release it for pro but not for consumer" crap again like they did with the APUs.)

> no clue if there's a project to reimplement that

There was! And it even booted Linux in some capacity: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

> every chip is very different from one another

Eh, the usual embedded SoCs are not that different from each other — ARM GIC, ARM timer, lots of Synopsys Designware crap for SDMMC/XHCI/PCIe/etc.

For many SoCs it's totally feasible to make standards-compliant firmware, e.g. for the Rockchip RK3566 there is https://github.com/jaredmcneill/quartz64_uefi

And SoCs from the networking world (Marvell, NXP) are typically supported by upstream EDK2.

AMD is also moving towards proprietary interconnects for their add-on cards that provide higher performance links than their competitors are allowed to use. And they won't license them to their competitors of course - it's a "set bonus" if you buy all AMD. It's funny because people were panicking about Intel doing exactly that, and when AMD does it, crickets.

They also have moved to locking their CPUs to the motherboards, to restrict second-hand sales of surplus CPUs/etc. So far it's only locked to the brand, so you can put it in any Dell system but only a dell system, but it's still sufficient to cause a huge amount of headaches for the surplus sector. I was looking at some cheap Epyc 7402Ps on ebay until I saw... "locked to dell, only runs on Dell". Welp. And the other cheap listing, is that one locked too? Who knows, and that's the point AMD is going for, they just have to inject enough uncertainty to change consumer behavior. Most people aren't going to be willing to trace the provenance of a used CPU, they will just pay 20% more for a new one. A limited number will be sold as complete systems, but as the market shrinks and people stop considering secondhand purchases, eventually they will just be thrown in the trash. Mission accomplished.

And that's coming for consumer CPUs too. It's already here for AMD's "ryzen pro" desktop line, it won't be long until it hits walmart prebuilts too.