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

bbc.com

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

#181

Post by rpastuszak »

MilnerRoute wrote: post #11

The Observer proposed an interesting solution last weekend: "The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors — some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers — to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry..." https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/08/10/0358216/should-t…

I feel like with the current political climate in the UK this solution is fairly unlikely to happen.

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

#182

Post by fock »

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #17

Seems like alarmist FUD to me. While I agree that having Arm owned by any one of its major customers creates some potential conflicts of interests, I think the notion that NVIDIA or any other company would start to drive licensees away with draconian terms/costs with some poor business planning pretty silly. The more interesting question to me is what would any single (major customer of Arm) company gain from owning…

nVidia already owns Mellanox which today seems very monopolistic for any HPC-interconnect. Them buying ARM means, they could just stop supporting everything else someday.

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

#183

Post by stragies »

tossaway69 wrote: post #146
stragies wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RISC-V allows companies to make closed systems, but it also allows them to make open systems True, but can you recall any moment in history, where market forces did not actually make producing "open" devices unprofitable? So, (imo) in theory, you are right, but in practice, (successful) companies will use the technology to create "even more closed" system, and worse: Make systems, where the user can't even tell, if…

mandatory for whom?

I don't know, where you live, but in most of the world, certification/signing/encryption of RF-capable Devices/Firmware has been established rule for decades, with a few exceptions for dev-boards. TPM, ME, SB, the_recent_grub_fixes,etc are all steps putting in place a pervasive infrastructure, that will enable truly draconian control over our computing devices for the key-holders.

And I have not reason not to believe, that somebody somewhere is waiting for a pre-text to implement full vertical stack control in law for his (region/country/domain). Perhaps "so that we can ensure, that the contact-tracing app gets installed everywhere, otherwise we'll all die!!11!". Or protecting us from Terrorism; that usually does the trick. This argument also works surprisingly well to argue against backdoor-less encryption protocols. See e.g. Australia (iirc)

Do you not perceive a similar evolution?

Note, TP,SB,ME could in theory be used to build "secure" systems, but currently they are (also) used to secure the PC against you, the buyer/user.

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

#184

Post by stragies »

pjmlp wrote: post #178
stragies wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feat…

O.K. so we see the same things.

I can't discern from your writing tone, if you think the above is desirable or a train_wreck_in_slow_motion coming.

I think, it's the latter, not necessarily by direct effect, but by all the bad behavior this will enable in corporations for generations to come.

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

#185

Post by jabirali »

MilnerRoute wrote: post #11

The Observer proposed an interesting solution last weekend: "The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors — some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers — to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry..." https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/08/10/0358216/should-t…

So basically an ARMsrace against Nvidia?

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

#186

Post by outsomnia »

stragies wrote: post #179
outsomnia wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> So, with RISC-V, you have even less assurance, that the processor IC really contains what you expect, and nothing more.

What you wrote, quoted above, has it completely backwards.

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

#187

Post by freemint »

mappu wrote: post #117
com2kid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internally we supported SH4 through CE7! Source: I maintained the compiler test infra for it.

SH4 is out of patent now - do you know if the J-Core can run CE7?

Unlikely, since the SoC is different.

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

#188

Post by Reason077 »

awalton wrote: post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

> "Apple ... could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice"

Could they really do this? Start making incompatible designs? I would have thought that Apple's ARM architecture license would include terms to preclude incompatible forks.

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

#189

Post by stragies »

outsomnia wrote: post #186
stragies wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> So, with RISC-V, you have even less assurance, that the processor IC really contains what you expect, and nothing more. What you wrote, quoted above, has it completely backwards.

If you haven't produced the processor, and the tooling, and the base components all by yourself?.

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

#190

Post by dcow »

chongli wrote: post #23
awalton wrote: post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. There's far too much at stake here. Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?

What’s at steak? Why is it too much?
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