201–210 of 243 posts
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The real cost to Nvidia is $87bn. Value is denominated in dollars, not nvidia stock.
If the value is denominated in dollars, why did the acquisition price go up from 40B to $87B as the price of the stock rose? From the source: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for... "The number of NVIDIA shares to be issued at closing is 44.3 million" [this is the pre-split amount]
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Money? like Samsung selling their chips to Apple. Nvidia have a lot of proprietary stuff which allows them to get away even with inferior hardware. Nvidia will prob lose the AI datacenter market anyways, customs asics will just use RISC-V if Nvidia try to stop them.
Nvidia doesn't care about secondary money. They're all about integrating stuff and denying others to do so. Nvidia is a castle because of the moats they've built. Not because they're leaps and bounds ahead in terms of silicon and technical wizardry. They shunned OpenCL, they'll probably shun Vulkan for GPGPU and make sure that people are locked to CUDA and its ecosystem. They have no intention to play fair. We're goi…
this comment is factually untrue and anyone can check it for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#Conformant_products
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan#Intel,_Nvidia_and_AMD
it would be absolutely insane not to support either of those features. An absolute shit-ton of games use Vulkan these days, there is zero chance of that being deprecated in any timespan not measured in decades. Everyone is still supporting OpenGL after all, and that's like what, an early 90s API?
there is a larger point to be made here about some of the reflexively negative responses people have when the N-word is brought up. There are certainly criticisms you can make of NVIDIA, but people have this intense and reflexively negative emotional response that tends to slide these discussions into flamewar territory.
I know I'm about to hear about how Linus gave them the finger (cause he's a totally balanced and wholesome person), but providing a closed-source linux driver and not supporting wayland (which I think they did eventually anyway?) aren't the end of the world like people make them out to be. Pick the product that fits your needs, if not move on, you don't need to become emotionally attached and you can keep your positions fact-based.
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Didn't work that well for Cloudflare, Github, Coinbase.
Can you elaborate? All three seem to have done well.
Cloudflare reached 212 in November. Now it's down to 109.
Gitlab reached 125 in November. Now down to 73.
Coinbase was at 342 in November. Now it's 203.
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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.
Apple may have been a founding member, but they don’t own ARM, and I’m assuming that ARM still wants to make a profit off of its licenses to Apple.
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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.
>The deal increased in value to $87bn only because NVDA’s stock price increased that much. I get what you’re saying, but in practice, NVDA was essentially issuing x shares to buy ARM. They could do the same thing, sell them, and keep the cash. The rising stock price very much did raise the “real” cost to NVDA, it just wasn’t a simple cash charge. Put alternatively, NVDA basically said to ARM “you’re worth x% of our c…
That said, Nvidia was still trying hard to make the deal work, even at that price. Jensen strongly believed the deal would be worth many multiples of the acquisition cost.
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I didn't like much this but having ARM in the hands of financial institution which doesn't have any motivation to invest in the technology doesn't seem any better (and probably doesnt understand/doesnt care about it). In the other hand, Nvidia have a good track record creating good products.
> Nvidia have a good track record creating good products. What incentive would Nvidia have to develop new ARM features that would assist competitors in competing with them? The Fujitsu's A64FX Processor for example somewhat competes with Nvidia datacenter GPUs. What incentive would Nvidia have to continue to develop the Arm Scalable Vector Extension? The only good thing from this sale would be the pivot to RISC-V.
> The Fujitsu's A64FX Processor for example somewhat competes with Nvidia datacenter GPUs. What incentive would Nvidia have to continue to develop the Arm Scalable Vector Extension?
"the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
the more R&D that goes into the ARM ecosystem, the tougher things get for x86. At the end of the day, all that R&D spending is making NVIDIA's position stronger, it's a force multiplier for their own efforts.
I fundamentally don't understand why anyone would think the ARM acquisition was about anything other than making Jensen kingmaker over one of the two most important processor IPs in the world - and he gains absolutely nothing by becoming king and then slaying all his subjects. That would be an amazingly shortsighted decision from one of the most far-sighted tech CEOs in the business.
Selling some more Tegras is peanuts in comparison and that bump would never last in the long term. The money is in Qualcomm and Fujitsu and IBM's R&D budgets working in synergy with your own, and in the ability to leverage the ARM licensing model to push CUDA into the last places it hasn't reached.
The fact that NVIDIA was even making this offer at all pretty much means they were looking at loosening up their IP licensing IMO. As a black box, sure, but I don't see a world in which NVIDIA would buy ARM and either not license GeForce as the graphics IP, or would choose not to license ARM at all ("selling a few more Tegras is not worth $40b"). If you accept those two givens, then NVIDIA would have had to provide GeForce IP as a black-box SIP license.
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You seem to be knowledgeable about this, so I wanted to ask - is ARM more efficient (perf/watt) than Risk-V? (I know there are lots of factors like frequencies/voltages etc but keeping everything else constant)
That is really a loaded question. ARM bigLITTLE exists to address different efficiencies that are exploited in different runtime states. Is big better than LITTLE? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If there is no definitive answer within the heterogenous cores of a single ARM implementation, then how can it be compared to RISC-V?
For the same sized single-core chip (x mm squared), running at the same voltage and same clock speed, on the same manufacturing process node, is there a (significant) difference between ARM and Risk-V?
(I'm assuming that core size, voltages and frequencies are the biggest differences between the big and LITTLE cores. And yes of course this is a funky theoretical question so a theoretical answer is perfectly fine :)
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.
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…
You analysis is right on, and I agree with it. I predict however, the IPO will be an enormous success. Predict a valuation in the $40bn to $45bn with tops of $50bn....lets revisit this thread then ;-) Those facts will: - Disprove once more that story of the market efficiency/price discovery bullshit, will also confirm that: - Benjamin Graham, Value Investing and Warren Buffet strategies were made for other times. The…
> Reflexivity theory states that investors don't base their decisions on reality, but rather on their perceptions of reality instead.
Meme stocks, Covid crash, Tesla stock, the SP500 for the last decade, NFTs. None of it is priced correctly because humans are at heart greedy, fearful, irrational. I think the trick is to figure out how to use that to make money.
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Nvidia doesn't care about secondary money. They're all about integrating stuff and denying others to do so. Nvidia is a castle because of the moats they've built. Not because they're leaps and bounds ahead in terms of silicon and technical wizardry. They shunned OpenCL, they'll probably shun Vulkan for GPGPU and make sure that people are locked to CUDA and its ecosystem. They have no intention to play fair. We're goi…
> They shunned OpenCL, they'll probably shun Vulkan for GPGPU this comment is factually untrue and anyone can check it for themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#Conformant_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan#Intel,_Nvidia_and_AMD it would be absolutely insane not to support either of those features. An absolute shit-ton of games use Vulkan these days, there is zero chance of that being deprecated…
I agree that it's my mistake, however there was a gap between this support periods and levels, and I've been burned by nVidia's own driver on an nVidia 800 series card. It's not out of spite or prejudice. I stand corrected, but my experience also stands. Also nVidia's practices for treating technologies they don't like is still valid.
Also, being compatible doesn't mean that these technologies are first class citizens on the driver/hardware level, and they may not be allowed to use the card up to its full potential.
> it would be absolutely insane not to support either of those features. An absolute shit-ton of games use Vulkan these days, there is zero chance of that being deprecated in any timespan not measured in decades. Everyone is still supporting OpenGL after all, and that's like what, an early 90s API?
There's support and there's support. I'm not talking about games and graphics stuff. I was doing some research about nVidia's "Vulkan Compute" support, and seen this:
"Vulkan compute on AMD and Intel might be okay but we already know of ways Nvidia puts the clamp on Vulkan compute (doesn't make use of multiple DMAs for transfer) and given their history with OpenCL and the vested interest they have in developers preferring CUDA, they're really not to be trusted." [0][1]
The guy writing seems to know what he's talking about (reading about the history gives a lot of nice low level details about how these things work), and this is what I was exactly saying about "Ditching Vulkan Compute in favor of CUDA, like OpenCL". "Yeah, it's supported, but it might not be fast, sorry."
> there is a larger point to be made here about some of the reflexively negative responses people have when the N-word is brought up. There are certainly criticisms you can make of NVIDIA, but people have this intense and reflexively negative emotional response that tends to slide these discussions into flamewar territory.
I'm personally no fan of flamewars. I also don't like to disseminate wrong information knowingly (see above). Also, I work in a HPC center where we use nVidia hardware, and personally develop scientific software. So, I'm not distant to either tiers of nVidia hardware. So, maybe not having prejudice about people one's replying to the first time is a good thing, no?
> I know I'm about to hear about how Linus gave them the finger (cause he's a totally balanced and wholesome person)...
No, you're not.
TL;DR: You can't write multi-vendor, GPU acceleration code which uses every card to its highest potential, even if there's standards. You need to write at least two copies of the code, one being CUDA. Why? nVidia doesn't like other technologies to work as fast on their cards. That's it.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/vulkan/comments/jwhnfe/comment/gcq5...