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Anyone has a proper analysis on the ramifications of this acquisition for Apple's future in ARM?
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And Nvidia's GPUs now include the same type of hardware that TPUs have, so there's no reason to believe that TPUs will win out over GPUs.
The key difference between a TPU and a GPU is that a TPU has a CPU. It's an entire computer, not just a piece of hardware. Is nVidia moving in that direction?
I'm starting to feel like social media based on upvotes is a utter waste of time. Echo chambers and groupthink. People commenting on things they barely know anything about and getting validation from others who don't know anything. I'd rather pay for insightful commentary and discussion. I feel like reddit going downhill has pushed a new group of users to HN and it's sending it down the tube. Maybe it's time for me to stop participating and get back to work.
Talking points from the founders of Arm & Nvidia: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its-... > Huang told me that first thing that the combined company will do is to, “bring NVIDIA technology through Arm’s vast network.” So I’d expect NVIDIA GPU and NPU IP to become available quickly to smartphone, tablet, TV and automobile SoC providers as quickly as possible. > Arm CEO Simon Segars framed it we…
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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.
For operating income it's 25%, for net income it's 18%; not 5%.
Last four quarters operating income for AMD: $884 million
Last four quarters operating income for Nvidia: $3.5 billion
This speaks to the dramatic improvement in AMD's operating condition over the last several years. For contrast, in fiscal 2016 AMD's operating income was negative $382 million. Op income has increased by over 300% in just ~2 1/2 years. Increasingly AMD is no longer a profit lightweight.
"ARM was probably what sank MIPS" - saagarjha
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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
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.
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Consider one of NVidia's rivals: AMD, who uses an ARM chip in their EPYC line of chips as a security co-processor. Does anyone expect NVidia to "play fair" with such a rival? ARM as an independent company, has been profoundly "neutral", allowing many companies to benefit from the ARM instruction set. It has been run very well: slightly profitable and an incremental value to all parties involved (be you Apple's iPhone…
> Consider one of NVidia's rivals: AMD, who uses an ARM chip in their EPYC line of chips as a security co-processor. Does anyone expect NVidia to "play fair" with such a rival? Yes, absolutely. NVIDIA's not going to burn the ARM ecosystem to the ground. They just paid $40 billion for it. And they only had $11b of cash on hand, they really overpaid for it (because SoftBank desperately needed a big win to cover for the…
Or more recently, when Facebook bought Oculus for $2 Billion, did you expect Facebook to betraying the customer's trust and start pushing Facebook logins?
The Oculus / Facebook login thin just happened weeks ago. Companies betraying the promises they made to their core audience is like... bread-and-butter at this point (and seems to almost always happen after an acquisition play). We know Facebook's modus operandi, and even if its worse for Oculus, we know that Facebook will do what Facebook does.
Similarly, we know NVidia's modus operandi. NVidia is trying to make a datacenter play and create a vertical company for high-end supercomputers. Such a strategy means that NVidia will NOT play nice with their rivals: Intel or AMD. (And the Mellanox acquisition is just icing on the cake now).
NVidia will absolutely leverage ARM to gain dominance in the datacenter. That's the entire point of this purchase.
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There's a story about scorpions and swimming with one on your back. I'm sure you've heard of it before. Just because its necessary for the scorpion's survival doesn't mean it is safe to trust the scorpion.