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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#171

Post by RantyDave »

wmf wrote: post #146
paulmd wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They might, just like Apple do. But then their forty billion dollar investment would stagnate and be eaten by riscv, which is probably what they are hoping to avoid.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#172

Post by gautamcgoel »

tony wrote: post #168
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…

Surprisingly - they have a working driver for FreeBSD. Never had an issue with it - and the performance is fantastic. As far back as early 2000's I remember installing proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux and playing UT2004. Maybe Nintendo/Sony uses Nvidia cards on their developer machines? I imagine FreeBSD drivers aren't simply altruism on their part. On the other hand, stagnation on other fronts: - Nouveau (tried r…

Is the FreeBDD driver open source? Also, somehow I was under the impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver. Is that correct?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#173

Post by nolaspring »

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #129
japgolly wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest concern is NVIDIA's stance against OSS.

Look at their AI/CUDA documentation and associated githubs. Many of their tools and libraries are open source. Tell me, what other AI platform works with x86 and PowerPC and ARM? Currently NVIDIA’s GPUs do.

I spent most of this afternoon tying to get cuda in docker to work on my Mac for a machine learning use case. It doesn’t. Because nvidia

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#174

Post by macintux »

dannyw wrote: post #158
mxcrossb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple would not get antitrust approval (iPhone maker controls all android chips????). So that’s why.

Were it a serious enough threat to their ARM license, they'd find a way to buy ARM and keep it independent.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#175

Post by AnthonyMouse »

zdw wrote: post #73

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…

> 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

There is one thing they would need to worry about though, which is that if the rest of the market moves to RISC-V or x64 or whatever else, it's not implausible that someone might at some point make a processor which is superior to the ones those companies make in-house. If it's the same architecture, you just buy them or license the design and put them in your devices. If it's not, you're stuck between suffering an architecture transition that your competitors have already put behind them or sticking with your uncompetitive in-house designs using the old architecture that nobody else wants anymore.

Their best move might be to forget about the architecture license and make the switch to something else with the rest of the market.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#176

Post by jml7c5 »

zmmmmm wrote: post #169

Many various reasons for this but one perspective I am curious about is how much this is actually a defensive move against Intel, because nVidia knows Intel is busy developing dedicated graphics via Xe, and if nVidia just allows that to continue they are going to find themselves simultaneously competing with and dependent on a vendor that owns the whole stack that their platform depends on. It is not a place I would…

How does AMD enter into this? Did you mean Nvidia?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#177

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #164
shaklee3 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A TPU is a chip you cannot program. It's purpose built and can't run the fraction of the type of workloads that a GPU can.

I don't know where all of this misinformation is coming from or why, but, as someone who has spent the last year programming TPUs to do all kinds of things that a GPU can't do, this isn't true. Are we going to simply say "Nu uh" at each other, or do you want to throw down some specific examples so I can show you how mistaken they are?

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#178

Post by kllrnohj »

zdw wrote: post #73

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…

Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek all currently just use off the shelf A5x & A7x cores in their SoCs. Unless that part of the company is losing money I don't expect nVidia to cut that off. Especially since that's likely a key part of why nVidia acquired ARM in the first place - I can't imagine they care about the Mali team(s) or IP.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#179

Post by nickik »

dmix wrote: post #131
saagarjha wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you'll be waiting for quite a long time, if not forever.

FWIW Apple isn't even listed on RISC-V's membership page: https://riscv.org/membership/members/ While some like Google and Alibaba are listed as platinum founding members.

I agree that Apple wont do RISC-V but you don't need to be a member to us it.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#180

Post by ethbr0 »

topspin wrote: post #154
walterbell wrote: post #33

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…

My instincts are telling me this is smoke and mirrors to rationalize a $40E9 deal. The only part of that that computes at all is the GPU integration, and that only works if NVIDIA doesn't terrorize Arm licencees. The rest is buzzwords.

Or Jensen believes that smart, convergent IoT is at a tipping point, and this is a bet on that.

Not all fashionable words are devoid of meaning.

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