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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#101

Post by mhh__ »

enragedcacti wrote: post #75
ibains wrote: post #50

I love this, I was amongst early engineers on CUDA (compilers). NVIDIA was so well run, but boxed into a smaller graphics card market - ATI and it were forced into low margins since they were made replaceable by OpenGL and DirectX standards. For the standard fans - they resulted a wealth transfer from NVIDIA to Apple etc. and reduced capital available for R&D. NVIDIA was constantly attacked by a much bigger Intel (wh…

Nvidia might have been an underdog once, but they are now the world's largest chipmaker, even surpassing Intel. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/312528-nvidia-overtake...

And Intel's revenue remains 700% larger than Nvidia's

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#102

Post by Aeolun »

therealmarv wrote: post #67
gautamcgoel wrote: post #20

This is awful . Out of all the big tech companies, Nvidia is probably least friendly to open source and cross-platform comparability. It seems to me that their goal is to monopolize AI hardware over the next 20 years, the same way Intel effectively monopolized cloud hardware over the last 20. Expect to see less choice in the chip market and more and more propietary software frameworks like CUDA. A sad day for CS and…

The problem is more that AMD is sleeping in regard of GPU AI and good software interfaces.

It is frankly amazing AMD can keep up at all.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#104

Post by paulmd »

rvz wrote: post #34

What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up. Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa. In 201…

love the armchair CEO perspectives that NVIDIA spent $40b only to flush the whole ARM ecosystem right down the drain, that's definitely a rational thing to do, right?

Jensen's not an idiot, how many OG 90s tech CEOs are still at the helm of the company they founded? Any severely negative moves towards their customers just drives them into RISC-V and they know that.

Yes, ARM customers will be paying more for their ARM IP. No, NVIDIA is not going to burn ARM to the ground.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#105

Post by dragontamer »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #77
dragontamer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RISC-V still seems too ad-hoc to me, and really new. Hard to say where it'd go for now. I know momentum is currently towards ARM over POWER, but... OpenPOWER is certainly a thing, and has IBM / Red Hat support. IBM may be expensive, but they already were proven "fair partners" in the OpenPOWER initiative and largely supportive of OSS / Free Software.

I would love OpenPOWER to succeed. I just don't see the 48 pin QFP version that costs I don't see OpenPOWER going there, but I can easily see RISC-V going there. So, for the moment, that is the horse I'm betting on.

Not quite 48-pin QFP chips, but 257-pin embedded is still smaller than Rasp. Pi. (Just searched what NXP's newest Power-chip is, and its a S32R274: 2MB 257-pin BGA. Definitely "embedded" size, but not as small as Cortex-M0)

To be honest, I don't think that NVidia/ARM will screw over their Cortex-M0 or Cortex-M0+ customers over. I'm more worried about the higher-end, whether or not NVidia will "play nice" with its bigger rivals (Apple, Intel, AMD) in the datacenter.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#106

Post by option »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #60
lostmsu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get this from? AFAIK GPT-3 (for example) was trained on a GPU cluster, not TPUs.

Experience, for one. TPUs are dominating MLPerf benchmarks. That kind of performance can't be dismissed so easily. GPT-2 was trained on TPUs. (There are explicit references to TPUs in the source code: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/0574c5708b094bfa0b0f6df... ) GPT-3 was trained on a GPU cluster probably because of Microsoft's billion-dollar Azure cloud credit investment, not because it was the best choice.

no they are not. Go read recent MLPerf results more carefully and not Google’s blogpost. NVIDIA won 8/8 benchmarks for publicly available SW/HW combo. Also 8/8 on per chip performance. Google did show better results with some “research” system which is not available to anyone other then them yet.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#107

Post by acomjean »

gumby wrote: post #81
Koshkin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next Apple machine I am going to buy will be using RISC-V cores.

Because of this transaction? I’m sure this deal will have absolutely no impact on apple’s deal with ARM. Apple could of course Afford to invest in RISC-V (and surely has played with it internally) but they have enough control of their future under the current arrangement that it will be a long long time before they feel any need to switch — 15 years at least.

Apple and Nvidia don't seem to see eye to eye. Nvidia doesn't support macs (CUDA support was pulled a year or two ago) and apples don't include Nvidia cards.

This could change.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#108

Post by Aeolun »

throwaway5792 wrote: post #46
rvz wrote: post #34

What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up. Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa. In 201…

Once they were sold to SoftBank ARM had no more control over its destiny. You're saying that they're repeating the pattern, but they had no choice in this today. This was SoftBank's decision as the owner of ARM.

Softbank has some losses of it’s own to make up, so that’s not very surprising.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#109

Post by mxcrossb »

zdw wrote: post #73

I see this going a few ways for different players: The perpetual architecture license folks that make their own cores like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Fujitsu (I think they needed this for the A64FX, right?) will be fine, and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there. Apple especially will be fine as they can get code into LLVM for whatever "Apple Silicon" evolves into over time…

It seems to me that if Apple felt that Nvidia would limit them, they could have outbid them for ARM! So I think you are correct.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#110

Post by reader_mode »

burnte wrote: post #93
therealmarv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is more that AMD is sleeping in regard of GPU AI and good software interfaces.

Hardly sleeping, they have a fraction of the revenue and profit of NVidia and Intel. Revenue was half of Nvidia, profit was 5% of NVidia. Intel is even bigger. They only have so much in the way of R&D money.

Seeing their market performance I have no doubt they could get capital for R&D
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