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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

#171

Post by Symmetry »

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…

It was reported that the problem was NVidia switching to lead free solder for their chip to motherboard connections but not also switching the potting material to one that had the same thermal expansion coefficient as the new solder.

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

#172

Post by glangdale »

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...

Both "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" make sense. If you emphasize the second word ("I could care less") and phrase it in a tentative tone of voice it conveys the meaning - i.e. it's possible that I could somehow care less, but it's a theoretical possibility only.

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

#173

Post by nabla9 »

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?

Antitrust regulators power is determined by the size of the market, not the location of the company HQ.

Antitrust regulators for big markets like the US, EU can effectively block mergers from any internationally operating company. Both AMD and Nvidia need access to EU - their customers certainly do.

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

#174

Post by tonyedgecombe »

rowanG077 wrote: post #166
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Apple did make a big thing of it when they switched to Intel.

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

#175

Post by OJFord »

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.

Yes so am I (person you're replying to) - fully - and also consider it both hideous and American.

I wouldn't call it a corruption though, because I've never actually heard it in Britain; just American film and television, and even on HN.

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

#176

Post by segfaultbuserr »

MindTooth wrote: post #165
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I stand corrected. I also found a clarification from Wikipedia on the situation.

> "From the mid 90s to early-mid 2000s, stylized as nVIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products. Now officially written as NVIDIA, and stylized in the logo as nVIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA".

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

#177

Post by mschuster91 »

panpanna wrote: post #164
9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. I had a laptop in 2010 that also suffered from this issue, and there were also PC GPUs affected.

Laptops were only affected en masse because they have far more heat-cool thermal cycles than the average desktop computer.

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

#178

Post by pjmlp »

stragies wrote: post #140
pjmlp wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my comment history you will see I am pretty much into commercial and dual licensing, so I do agree with your point, however kind of feels like the way copyleft licenses have been managed has brought us back to the commercial licenses with source code, just under a different name to make them more appealing to younger generations.

Hi, thanks for replying! > the way copyleft licenses have been managed has brought us back to the commercial licenses with source code, just under a different name to make them more appealing to younger generations. I think, I'm following along (&agree), but to be sure, could you perhaps elaborate a bit on that? (Also for other? readers)

Basically Linux kernel, GNU utilities and GCC are the only projects left with a copyleft license, almost everyone else migrated to non-copyleft licenses in the context of making money with some form of open source.

And not everything gets upstream, in name of keeping the main business at the company's soul, for example those optimizations used by clang on PS4? Sure all of those that don't reveal PS4 architecture features that could eventually be "misused".

The large majority of those business have moved into clang, thus reducing GCC usage to copyleft hardliners, Linux is visible on ChromeOS and Android but not on a context that it can fully profit from and then there is Fuchsia waiting on the backstage.

So in a couple of generations, when copyleft software is just a memory in digital books, we will have gone full circle to the days when buying developer software would entitle you to an extra floppy with a partial copy the source code.

The only difference is how that partial copy gets delivered, which will be just the upstream of non-copyleft software.

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

#179

Post by stragies »

outsomnia wrote: post #168
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…

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.

If you re-read my post, you'll see, that we are not contradicting each-other.

If you have the time/money/infrastructure/knowledge/trusted_personnel to design/make/test/etc entire processors, then now with RISC-V you can in theory make secure systems.

Also remember, that your effort needs to already start at the level of tool-chain, and other tooling, all the way down to the transistor. Otherwise you'll have a trust problem with regards to your compilers/synthesizers/etc.

But that is quite a high barrier for entry for anybody smaller than a decent sized country.

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

#180

Post by panpanna »

baybal2 wrote: post #169
panpanna wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually at that time MIPS suddenly came back to life and had a big push with improved designs and a few deals resulting in pretty decent MIPS socs. Performance was okay, battery life was good, and they were first to market with the latest Android release (I think it was 4.0 or 4.4).

But then everything suddenly stopped and they left the market altogether.

Edit: Regarding this:

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

One of the founders of OpenCores (RIP) told me that ARM lawyers contact him _within hours_ of someone pushing a design they dont like. While MIPS has a bad rep, ARM is probably more aggressive.

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