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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#141

Post by make3 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #38
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…

AI training is moving away from CUDA and toward TPUs anyway. DGX clusters can't keep up.

this is just false

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#142

Post by darksaints »

dragontamer wrote: post #57
ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

And there you have it. Perhaps the greatest thing to happen to RISC-V since the invention of the FPGA :-). I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to. Regarding the federal investment in FOSS thread that was here perhaps CPU architecture would be a good candidate.

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.

OpenPOWER is pretty awesome but would be nowhere near as awesome as an OpenItanium. IMHO, Itanium was always mismarketed and misoptimized. It made a pretty good server processor, but not so good that enterprises were willing to migrate 40 year old software to run on it.

In mobile form, it would have made a large leap in both performance and battery life. And it would have been a fairly easy market to break into: the average life of a mobile device is a few years, not a few decades. Recompilation and redistribution of software is the status quo.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#143

Post by seizethegdgap »

bleepblorp wrote: post #94
bgorman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android worked on x86 and MIPS in the past, it could presumably be ported to work with RISC-V

Android still works on x86-64; indeed there are quite a few actively maintained x86-64 Android ports that are used, both on bare metal PCs and virtualized, for various purposes. The problem is that there are no x86 SoCs that are sufficiently power efficient to be battery-life competitive with ARM SoCs in phones.

Can confirm, just spun up Bliss OS on my Surface Book. Not at all the smoothest experience I've ever had using an Android tablet, but it's nice.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#144

Post by Hypx »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #72

I’m not convinced this is a death sentence for ARM. I doubt nVidia spent $40b on a company with the intention of killing it’s golden goose business model. The contractual agreements might change, but ARM wasn’t exactly giving their IP away for free before this move.

You know how the tobacco companies work?

From a purely capitalistic standpoint, it's fine to kill off some of your customer base if you make more money from the remainder. If it can work for tobacco, you believe that Nvidia is will to kill off some of its customers if they can get the remainder to pay more.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#145

Post by paulmd »

RubberShoes wrote: post #3

This is not good

It wouldn't have been good if any of the people who could actually afford to buy ARM did so.

Would you rather have TSMC in control of ARM? Maybe have access to new architectures bundled with a mandate that you have to build them on TSMC's processes?

How about Samsung? All of the fab ownership concerns of TSMC plus they also make basically any tech product you care to name, so all the integration concerns of NVIDIA.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Key-Apple-suppli...

Microsoft? Oracle? None of the companies who could have afforded to pay what Son wanted for Softbank were any better than NVIDIA.

There are a lot of good things that will come out of this as well. NVIDIA is a vibrant company compared to a lot of the others.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#146

Post by wmf »

paulmd wrote: post #113
boardwaalk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations say these types of things with every acquisition. It might be true initially and superficially, but that's all.

One of the (many) synergies in this acquisition is that it's also an acqui-hire for CPU development talent. NVIDIA's efforts in that area have not gone very smoothly. They aren't going to fire all the engineers they just bought.

A bigger concern is that they would hoard future cores and not license them.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#147

Post by jasoneckert »

Most tech acquisitions are fairly bland - they often maintain their separate ways for several years with a bit of integration. Others satisfy a political purpose or serve to stifle competition.

However, given the momentum of Nvidia these past several years alongside the massive adoption and evolution of ARM, this is probably going to be the most interesting acquisition to watch over the next few years.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#148

Post by mixmastamyk »

ianai wrote: post #135
QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVIDIA’s hardware works on x86, PowerPC, and ARM platforms. Many of their AI libraries/tools are in fact open source. They stand to be a force that could propel ARM’s strength in data center and desktop computing. For some reason you’re okay with the current x86 duopoly held by AMD and Intel, both who have their own destiny over CPUs and GPUs. The HN crowd is incredibly biased against certain companies. Why not look…

Yes I wonder the same thing about the sentiment against nvidia. It’s be helpful if there were some wiki about things they’ve killed or instances they’ve acted against foss systems.

Linus famously gave them the middle-finger.
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