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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

#161

Post by panpanna »

shrikant wrote: post #151
bobthepanda wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the EU did not have jurisdiction British authorities are not very keen on large mergers either. British resistance caused American Pfizer to walk away from a potential merger with British AstraZeneca.

I'm not sure how much sway British authorities would have, since ARM is now wholly owned by SoftBank?

In a merger of this scale all the big powers (US, EU, China, and I assume also UK now) have basically veto right.

There are countless examples where country 1 has stopped a merger between a company from country 2 and one from country 3.

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

#162

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

thayne wrote: post #115
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.

nVidia has a very long history of not getting along with Linux.

And now, hilariously enough, they have ended up with a lot of their growth coming from Linux-based systems.

To be fair, I recently bought a new Thinkpad, and with Ubuntu 20.04 and Nvidia CUDA just worked, with absolutely no tuning (I didn't even need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which I found pretty odd). So things seem to be improving, because there's money in it for Nvidia.

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

#163

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

guiriduro wrote: post #158

I would dearly love for the industry sh1tstorm that would happen if Huawei would buy ARM (please!) Would like to see Donny try to ban a Huawei ARM, or order Google to only supply to hot slow Intel Atom mobiles, with everyone of the asian makers walking away from the US market, while the world switches to an OSS Android fork. Although I still for the life of me can't understand why Miyoshi son is holding on to wework…

Because ARM is one of the few things he invested in that actually makes money.

It's a cash-crunch driven deal, nothing else.

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

#164

Post by panpanna »

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #29
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.

There was the apple gpu fiasco. Apple laptop GPUs were failing at an extraordinary rate in 2010-2011, and Apple were getting harangued in the media about it (which was justified). Apple eventually announced a program to cover replacement of the GPUs, but it was very delayed. I'm 100% convinced the delay was caused by Nvidia refusing to accept responsibility. When the program was released, in order to have the repair…

> I'm 100% convinced the delay was caused by Nvidia refusing to accept responsibility.

To be fair, the issue was mainly caused by Apples form-over-function thermal design.

To best of my knowledge, Nvidia GPUs works just fine in all other laptops.

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

#165

Post by MindTooth »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #72
Nitrolo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not doubting that this is the case, but what's the reason for nVidia wanting to restrict use in virtual machines?

Why does Intel cripple ECC and I/O virtualization [0] in high-end consumer desktop systems? Force people to buy Xeon, even if the performance is otherwise equivalent or higher for the use case. Why does Nvidia restrict virtualization? Force people to buy Quadro and Tesla. > nVidia FYI, a few years ago, nVidia has officially changed their name to "Nvidia"... [0] IOMMU is not only a virtualization feature, it's also an…

I believe it’s all caps.

http://international.download.nvidia.com/partnerforce-us/Bra...

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

#166

Post by rowanG077 »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #100
protomyth wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume they had protected themselves before the SoftBank purchase. Also, it's odd that they refer to the new stuff as Apple Silicon.

>Also, it's odd that they refer to the new stuff as Apple Silicon. Apple supposedly pays intel more for their CPUs than other OEM to avoid having their sticker on Macs; So I don't see this as odd, it's usual Apple branding tactic and from the looks of it(ARM being under threat of sale) it seems to be a wise decision as an average Apple customer wouldn't mind if it switches the architecture for its silicon.

I don't think Intel stickers are mandetory. Some other OEM don't have them either.

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

#167

Post by uep »

qubex wrote: post #144
OJFord wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I hear someone say it, I often respond that "I could care less, but only a little bit" to make the point about that phrase.

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

#168

Post by outsomnia »

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…

This is completely backwards.

See India's Shakti

https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/10/03/india-is-trying-to...

... where they will fab their own cpu chips for, eg, military use starting from inspectable, verifiable open source Risc-V HDL.

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

#169

Post by baybal2 »

panpanna wrote: post #160
justincormack wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were a few MIPS Android phones too.

MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets. Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former...

> MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets.

> Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former...

MIPS SoCs simply fell too much behind. They kept presence in the STB, and router boxes for some time, but even there they lost due to overall "deadness" of the entire ecosystem:

Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM

Want to not to have to support your own Linux fork? Go for ARM

Want more IP coming from a single vendor that just core, interrupt, controller, and DMA? Go for ARM

Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM

When MIPS understood that they are losing, they simply gave up on competing, and improving.

And in the end, the lunch went to MediaTek because it was the only SoC vendor that was ready to ship competitive SoCs with 4G baseband without rapacious licensing deals like Qualcomm do.

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

#170

Post by guiriduro »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #163
guiriduro wrote: post #158

I would dearly love for the industry sh1tstorm that would happen if Huawei would buy ARM (please!) Would like to see Donny try to ban a Huawei ARM, or order Google to only supply to hot slow Intel Atom mobiles, with everyone of the asian makers walking away from the US market, while the world switches to an OSS Android fork. Although I still for the life of me can't understand why Miyoshi son is holding on to wework…

Because ARM is one of the few things he invested in that actually makes money. It's a cash-crunch driven deal, nothing else.

Yep - I was always told, keep your dividend-paying winners, sell your losers.

Wework is definitely a loser, ARM is a winner - its completely upside down. If he wants cash, he should sell his trash. And avoid future losses by not buying trash in the first place.

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