181–190 of 268 posts
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This is a bit of an aside, but it never ceases to amaze me how many would be tech hubs try variations of Silicon Valley in their (maybe informal?) branding. Silicon hills, Silicon fern.. (I knew a couple more but I’m forgetting atm). It’s not like it’s the name which made it what it is.
An area in London was also amusingly called Silicon Roundabout.
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…
Nvidia isn’t likely to invest $40B and then do anything to damage ARMs licensing efforts. They are likely to look to find synergies so ARM can incorporate Nvidia technologies and Nvidia can better utilize ARM technologies.
This is a business that has no overlap over what NVIDIA does and maybe NVIDIA could spin off this part of ARM as a separate company, because I can hardly imagine the NVIDIA management focusing in this business, where they do not have any experience.
On the other hand, ARM Cortex-A CPUs are better than those designed by NVIDIA and they are used in products (e.g. by Qualcomm) that directly compete with NVIDIA products.
I cannot imagine that NVIDIA will continue to design better Cortex-A cores and then give them immediately to their competitors.
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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…
On reflection I'm a bit surprised that a consortium hasn't emerged to offer more for Arm given the concerns expressed here: - $40bn isn't a lot in aggregate for the companies that are heavily invested in the Arm ecosystem (Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon etc) - maybe even Intel would take a small stake! - The $40bn is partly in Nvidia's (arguably) inflated stock. Would cash be more attractive? - Could probably partly fund th…
I'm not seeing this in the article. How much of it is in Nvidia's arguably inflated stock?
Do Apple actually work with Arm currently or is all their Apple Silicon stuff completely on their own? I don’t actually understand the issue they have with Nvidia but they seem to have one.
As I understand it, Apple has a special perpetual license for the architecture thanks to it being one of the companies that founded ARM. This deal shouldn't have too much impact on Apple.
It is standard business offering from ARM.
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Duopolies everywhere.
It won't be a duopoly because nVidia doesn't make x86 hardware. Even if they did, there would be three contenders (AMD, Intel, nVidia). nVidia is becoming an AI/HPC behemoth. GPUs for Compute, ARM for feeding the GPUs, Infiniband for interconnect. All in a tightly integrated, closed package. This is a clear monopoly. They're light years ahead in terms of GPU development and Debugging tools when compared to AMD. CUDA…
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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…
Yeah there's a lot more fights NVidia has had. They spent a lot of time and money first building motherboard chipsets[1] with on-board GPUs for AMD CPUs only to have CMD buy ATI. Then they started a program to build their own x86 CPU[2] which Intel sued them over[3]. There was a counter suite, and the EU settlement around the same time and Intel ended up paying NVidia $1.5B3[3] which was often read a win for NVidia.…
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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…
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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.
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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.
Apple owns a perpetual ARMv8.2 license. And since they work closely with ARM on ARMv9 they might already have a license for that as well. Basically doesn't concern Apple at all.