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Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

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Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#141

Post by klelatti »

young_unixer wrote: post #131
stragies wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RISC-V sounds like a good idea, but (imo) could lead to a situation, where all/many device manufacturers make custom processors based of the liberally licensed code-base. At first, this sounds great, "Yah, no more reliance on Intel/ARM/, no more ME/Trustzone". But then you realize, that although you, the user/buyer, can build/run some custom code on there, you'll never be able to tell for sure, if you did not get a v…

RISC-V allows companies to make closed systems, but it also allows them to make open systems, which wasn't viable before. Most people will keep using closed systems because they don't care about computer architecture, but us hackers will finally have a chance at having a (small) portion of the market. A small industry of open hardware.

If your device isn't hackable then it's not because of ARM imposed limitations - it's because of decisions made by the device maufacturer and there is no reason why that would change if they were using RISC-V instead.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#142

Post by the-dude »

foota wrote: post #21
QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #17

Seems like alarmist FUD to me. While I agree that having Arm owned by any one of its major customers creates some potential conflicts of interests, I think the notion that NVIDIA or any other company would start to drive licensees away with draconian terms/costs with some poor business planning pretty silly. The more interesting question to me is what would any single (major customer of Arm) company gain from owning…

The most cynical view would be that they could not reup licenses for competitors.

Wouldn't they be forced into RAND?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#143

Post by qubex »

stingraycharles wrote: post #121
pmontra wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the EU antitrust look into that too or is this going to be out of their jurisdiction after Brexit?

I believe as long as ARM sells their hardware in the EU, they are able to look into antitrust issues.

Not that I disagree with you, but ARM doesn’t sell hardware—they sell licenses to designs of the aforesaid. Nonetheless, don’t forget that nVidia, insofar as it sells hardware in the EU, would definitely be within the scope of local anti-trust authorities.

I don’t see this being much liked by those authorities, either. nVidia is clearly interested in doing this deal because it will give them competitive advantages, and it’s pretty clear by their behaviour versus other firms (including Apple!) that they have so much of that already that they don’t have to “play nice”. Giving them further purview to do as they please is basically what anti-trust is designed to prevent, whether you focus on industry relations or the ascendant on consumers.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#144

Post by qubex »

OJFord wrote: post #133
xdavidliu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was expecting you to make another one, but "nails on a chalkboard" seems to be the correct usage. Am just ever so slightly disappointed.

Meh, 'I could care less'. ...I can barely bring myself to type and submit that...

I’m (half-)British and I consider “could care less” a hideous American corruption. Recently I successfully argued my case with an American friend, not coincidentally a physicist, by analogy to zero-point energy.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#145

Post by AsyncAwait »

mud_dauber wrote: post #14
awalton wrote: post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

They have made it even more difficult for open-source to be able to reverse engineer their drivers with signed firmware blobs, push their own solution on Wayland, (ELStreams), over everyone else adopting GBM etc. - in short they refuse to cooperate in an official capacity.

Both Intel and AMD do have an official FLOSS Linux driver and regularly work with the wider community.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#146

Post by tossaway69 »

stragies wrote: post #138
young_unixer wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RISC-V allows companies to make closed systems, but it also allows them to make open systems, which wasn't viable before. Most people will keep using closed systems because they don't care about computer architecture, but us hackers will finally have a chance at having a (small) portion of the market. A small industry of open hardware.

> RISC-V allows companies to make closed systems, but it also allows them to make open systems True, but can you recall any moment in history, where market forces did not actually make producing "open" devices unprofitable? So, (imo) in theory, you are right, but in practice, (successful) companies will use the technology to create "even more closed" system, and worse: Make systems, where the user can't even tell, if…

mandatory for whom?

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#147

Post by AsyncAwait »

numakerg wrote: post #22
mud_dauber wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

I recall the GeForce Partner Program raised some controversy, although I couldn't say whether or it was bad or good or why. There's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers. Supposedly this is because they throttle workstation GPUs to create a market for higher-end versions while reducing the manufacturing diversity, but I haven't heard a definitive source for this.

> I recall the GeForce Partner Program raised some controversy, although I couldn't say whether or it was bad or good or why.

It was about NVidia wanting to make it so their 3rd party GPU partners, (EVGA, Asus etc.), could only sell their popular GPU brands with NVIDIA in them, so for AMD they'd have to come up with something customers are entirely unfamiliar with.

> here's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers.

It's not just that. AMD didn't open-source their original Linux driver, presumably there could have been some 3rd party licensing issues, but they wrote a new one that is open-source.

NVIDIA doesn't even let others write an open-source driver for them, they make it purposely difficult to reverse-engineer, sign their firmware that they only release with a massive delay and generally refuse to cooperate.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#148

Post by feanaro »

stragies wrote: post #122
nojvek wrote: post #119

Could someone explain me what the huge deal about ARM is since they only licence but don’t actual fab the chips but intel, Apple and nvidia do. Also what’s the difference between ARM and RISC-V. Why chose one over the other ?

RISC-V sounds like a good idea, but (imo) could lead to a situation, where all/many device manufacturers make custom processors based of the liberally licensed code-base. At first, this sounds great, "Yah, no more reliance on Intel/ARM/, no more ME/Trustzone". But then you realize, that although you, the user/buyer, can build/run some custom code on there, you'll never be able to tell for sure, if you did not get a v…

> But then you realize, that although you, the user/buyer, can build/run some custom code on there, you'll never be able to tell for sure, if you did not get a version/series with a gimped HWRND, or other (security-reducing) goodies. Targeted attacks will become very easy for anybody, who can pressure companies/engineers into adding something for (a subset of) the customers, or can reroute/intercept device shipments to you.

I fail to see how this is different from today's situation. What's stopping targetted attacks via custom modifications of ARM or x86 chips?

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#149

Post by dannyw »

slimsag wrote: post #132
jraph wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Asus Zenfone 2, released 5 years ago, ran on x86 (Intel Atom) [1]. I know someone who was still using it this year Eventually switched but the phone still works. So, to the question: > Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM? Well, technically, yes ;-) This does not change anything to your point though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_ZenFone#Second_generation...

I used the ZenFone 2 for about a year ~3.5 years ago; it worked surprisingly well. It was impressive that it really "just worked" like a normal ARM device. There were some annoying software aspects (the Play Store only allowed me to download x86 apps even though it could run ARM apps), and the device was 100% a battery hog - but cool tech. Surprised Intel gave up on that effort.

Intel gave up because Atom for smartphones were sold at a negative price after marketing incentives. They couldn’t even get volume from manufacturers when it costed less than zero; because no one wanted to invest upfront R&D costs.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#150

Post by simonh »

awalton wrote: post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

Apple’s ARM chips contain an awful lot of different components, some of which are highly customised. The neural engine stuff they use for image processing for example. The CPU cores are custom tuned, but I believe they are still 90% based on ARM CPU core designs. For example the Secure Enclave is actually an ARM developed CPU extension. Apple focuses their efforts vary specifically on areas that give them features that grant a competitive advantage. They don’t reimplement stuff for the sake of it. One of their big performance wins over other ARM licensees isn’t even really in the CPU, it’s the very well designed and generous cache memory systems.

Having said that, looking to the future I think Apple is clearly willing to pour more resources into their CPU programme than any of their competitors. This means the risk to them is probably a lot less than to say Qualcomm or Samsung as they have a much better capability to go their own way. As time goes on their designs will probably diverge more and more from main line ARM anyway.

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