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SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

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Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#161

Post by pjmlp »

stefan_ wrote: post #89
BluSyn wrote: post #3

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likel…

Why on earth would we want to converge on ARM? The first ARM architecture that was somewhat palatable was ARMv7, everything before that an unusable mess of different chips with vastly different capabilities. Their extensions are bad (read: subtly incompatible) late copies of what Intel and AMD are driving. Most of the innovation happens not at ARM, but their respective licensees. It took others inventing EFI to get s…

The Intel hate is so big that ARM fans don't acknowledge what they will lose in the process.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#162

Post by AmericanChopper »

landryraccoon wrote: post #131
cptskippy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember it being all that cutthroat tbh. 3dfx was arguably the only game in down and ATi was it's whipping boy. Matrox was over in the corner saying "look nah two monitors at once!" 3dfx stumbled right as nVidia dropped the GeForce and blew everything away. ATi became nVidia's whipping boy and Matrox just added the ability to drive more monitors. I mean aside from not knowing if Matrox is still around, not m…

You just described a space with 4 competitors fighting for the same market. How could it be anything other than cutthroat? GPUs are not the kind of space where it’s easy for new companies to enter. It very much was a winner takes all market.

> It very much was a winner takes all market.

Of course. The multi billion dollar market is just too small for more than one company. Nvidia is just biding it’s time on ~20% market share until it can put the finishing moves on the other 9 major vendors.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#164

Post by petre »

stefan_ wrote: post #89
BluSyn wrote: post #3

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likel…

Why on earth would we want to converge on ARM? The first ARM architecture that was somewhat palatable was ARMv7, everything before that an unusable mess of different chips with vastly different capabilities. Their extensions are bad (read: subtly incompatible) late copies of what Intel and AMD are driving. Most of the innovation happens not at ARM, but their respective licensees. It took others inventing EFI to get s…

I just wonder what implications is the Arm sale to Nvidia going to have on Apple, who is switching their MacOS hardware from Intel to Arm.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#165

Post by discodave »

bredren wrote: post #81
almost_usual wrote: post #19

The disaster that was WeWork could ruin ARM.

or: The disaster that was WeWork could accelerate the adoption of an open-sourced, royalty-free ISA.

An open source ISA isn't going to be any better than ARM if it's being sold to you by AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#166

Post by freeone3000 »

stefan_ wrote: post #89
BluSyn wrote: post #3

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likel…

Why on earth would we want to converge on ARM? The first ARM architecture that was somewhat palatable was ARMv7, everything before that an unusable mess of different chips with vastly different capabilities. Their extensions are bad (read: subtly incompatible) late copies of what Intel and AMD are driving. Most of the innovation happens not at ARM, but their respective licensees. It took others inventing EFI to get s…

Because the ISA is simple, the perf/watt is way better, and we're reaching the point where architecture-specific native code is not explicitly sought out by most users, so we can actually change processors.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#167

Post by adrian_b »

stefan_ wrote: post #89
BluSyn wrote: post #3

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likel…

Why on earth would we want to converge on ARM? The first ARM architecture that was somewhat palatable was ARMv7, everything before that an unusable mess of different chips with vastly different capabilities. Their extensions are bad (read: subtly incompatible) late copies of what Intel and AMD are driving. Most of the innovation happens not at ARM, but their respective licensees. It took others inventing EFI to get s…

I agree with what you said, but there is a reason for wanting to converge on ARM.

There exists no good alternative.

ARMv8.2 or newer is a very well designed ISA, while RISC-V is a very bad ISA and I would hate to be forced to use it.

OpenPOWER is a far better ISA than RISC-V, but unfortunately most developers do not have any experience with POWER and they have the wrong belief that POWER is some antique ISA while RISC-V must be some modern fashionable ISA. Therefore even if OpenPOWER is much better, it is less likely than RISC-V to be used as a replacement for ARM.

I and probably thousands of other engineers could design a much better ISA than RISC-V in a week of work, but no one of the creators of those thousands of new ISA variants would be able to convince all the other people to choose his/her variant over the others and start the significant amount of work needed for porting all the required software tools, e.g. LLVM and gcc.

So, if ARM would no longer be an acceptable choice, I do not see any hope that its replacement would not be greatly inferior.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#168

Post by robot »

BluSyn wrote: post #3

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likel…

RISC-V is pretty awesome as an ISA. Give it a few years and it can solve all of these problems.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#169

Post by robot »

adrian_b wrote: post #167
stefan_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth would we want to converge on ARM? The first ARM architecture that was somewhat palatable was ARMv7, everything before that an unusable mess of different chips with vastly different capabilities. Their extensions are bad (read: subtly incompatible) late copies of what Intel and AMD are driving. Most of the innovation happens not at ARM, but their respective licensees. It took others inventing EFI to get s…

I agree with what you said, but there is a reason for wanting to converge on ARM. There exists no good alternative. ARMv8.2 or newer is a very well designed ISA, while RISC-V is a very bad ISA and I would hate to be forced to use it. OpenPOWER is a far better ISA than RISC-V, but unfortunately most developers do not have any experience with POWER and they have the wrong belief that POWER is some antique ISA while RIS…

I am actually pretty curious to see a demo of features from you that backs up that RISC-V is bad and Open Power is much better.

What convinced me was how thin the RISC-V book[1] is, and I have seen both ARM and Intel reference manuals. For example the V extension removes need to specify data size, greatly reducing instructions needed.

I have no idea about Open Power btw.

[1] http://riscvbook.com/

P.S. I am hiring U.S. candidates for ARMv8, x86 roles: https://careers.vmware.com/main/jobs/R2009422?lang=en-us

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#170

Post by rbirkby »

mohankumar246 wrote: post #85

Along with cpu's ARM also makes mobile gpu ip (Mali), nvidia as well in their tegra. I would be surprised if this deal went through.

Mali was an ARM acquisition. It makes sense for NVidia to smash Mali and RTX together to allow Android manufacturers to compete against Apple.

Apple built their GPU studio from ex-Imagination staff and will introduce 3 GPUs over the next year: Sicilian, Tonga, Lifuka to support their mobile and desktop plans.

The question is whether ARM will sub license this combined GPU tech, or if it will be NVidia silicon only.

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