191–200 of 217 posts
Is it possible that Apple is calling their chips Apple Silicon for reasons other than marketing? Since Apple now plans to design and manufacture chips for all their products it’s also possible Apple comes up with an ARM compatible instruction set rather than ARM instruction set to avoid any issues with ARM being part of such takeovers. Just a wild theory since no one has yet (probably legal reasons) done a deep dive…
ARM is a strategic company and unique in europe. it is UK crown jewel. Selling it to Nvidia is like USA selling Google to Huawei.
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> Would we knowingly allow Rolls-Royce Jet Engines to be flogged off? Not quite a flogging off, but the MiG 15 engine was a copy of the Rolls Royce Nene engine which a soviet trade delegation won in a bet on a game of billiards.
Wait, what ?
ARM deal has a condition: > The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals for the U.K., China, the European Union and the United States. Completion of the transaction is expected to take place in approximately 18 months. Any one of these 4 regulators can still stop the sale.
I'm confused why China get a say? ARM is UK, Softbank is Japan and Nvidia is US, why do the Chinese have a claim? Is it just because no one wants to upset them?
Nvidia don't want to buy a company if they can't sell to Chinese market.
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You may be right about the reason. Or maybe it’s something to do with positioning between US and EU. The correct move would be to nationalise ARM and build a fab, but the Tories are very unlikely to do that.
Because even if it was successful from a national security standpoint (semicon independence) it would look like a total boondoggle. It would cost billions of government money, and then overrun those billions in cost. Chips would still be slower than their competitors, and the new British fabbed chips would be even slower. No matter which party pulled the trigger, the other would ruthlessly tear the project down in th…
You're correct that neither main party would do this, partly because of the inadequacies of the liberal election cycle. Only direct worker democracy could reliably centrally plan for use rather than profit.
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> these companies will simply hollow ARM out (slash R&D, cut staff etc) to pump up the target’s value, before flogging it off or breaking it up. That's a very real concern with Softbank (and why I questioned why regulators were allowing the acquisition in the first place). I don't think you can be any further from the mark implying that's Nvidia's plan. Nvidia wants ARM to flourish, they would have no interest in kil…
ARM can't flourish under Nvidia, which customer would prefer to buy IP from a potential competitor rather than from a neutral provider. The ecosystem business model that defines Arm simply doesn't have any space for them being perceived as biased this way or that way.
Why?
> which customer would prefer to buy IP from a potential competitor rather than from a neutral provider.
The same customers that buy NVIDIA GPUs, NVIDIA interconnects, support NVIDIA's software, etc.
You seem to be suggesting that this "somehow" matters, but are not explaining "why" do you think this matters.
AFAICT if AMD wants to ship a data-center node, it needs Mellanox interconnect, and has to buy that from NVIDIA, pretty much in the same way that NVIDIA ships AMD CPUs with their DGX boxes.
There are dozens of thousands of pattents that all these companies need to buy from each other on a regular basis to function.
I don't see how this particular change makes the status quo worse.
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>ARM can't flourish under Nvidia, which vendor would prefer to buy IP from direct competitor rather than from a neutral provider. I would imagine plenty. Take a look at the list of vendors that sell Nvidia GPUs despite the fact that Nvidia sells directly into the market. >The ecosystem business model that defines Arm simply doesn't have any space for them being perceived as biased this way or that way. I don't know,…
When you're thirsty, you buy from the person selling water. I don't think you'll find a lot of love lost between the OXMs and nvidia. I'm sure they would love more competitors in the space. We have people licensing Arm and building interesting CPUs (Ampere). I'm not sure that the NVIDIA acquisition would be good for the market or for Arm.
> I'm not sure that the NVIDIA acquisition would be good for the market or for Arm.
NVIDIA works with Ampere and just started shipping server nodes with Ampere CPUs.
If that was bad for Ampere, they would not be working with NVIDIA on this.
Not that you are right/wrong (I don't know), but Ampere appears to be an example that shows the opposite of what you are trying to claim.
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ARM can't flourish under Nvidia, which customer would prefer to buy IP from a potential competitor rather than from a neutral provider. The ecosystem business model that defines Arm simply doesn't have any space for them being perceived as biased this way or that way.
Power consumption is a key application requirement for mobile. I don’t know that GPU’s are designed to run on the smell of an oil rag which the ARM processor cores do.
Not as low power as mobile phones, but not completely far away either.
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> but for security reasons? Seems to be the strongest/easiest route to go to justify blocking it. The whole national security angle and all. > then they should have objected when a Japanese company bought ARM as well I have to imagine this was a bit of sleeping at the wheel. I'm not sure though.
Perhaps more that times have changed. We used to have a strong commitment to the neoliberal ideal of a separation between state and business. The experience of nationalisation had also not been good (think Austen and BT). That’s changed and we are now in the world of “entrepreneurial states” for better or worse.
We've seen an enormous hollowing out of institutional competence since the rise of Free Trade At All Costs.
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The companies that directly compete with Nvidia (AMD & Intel) are not ARM customers. ARM's biggest customers are mobile phones, which could benefit from an Nvidia GPU
Qualcomm is a direct competitor of NVIDIA (e.g. for automotive and robotics) and an important ARM customer. Until now the competing products of NVIDIA and Qualcomm differed in NVIDIA having worse CPUs and better GPUs and Qualcomm having better (ARM-designed) CPUs and worse GPUs. I do not find it believable that in the future NVIDIA would ever provide Qualcomm with better CPUs than those of NVIDIA products. Given NVID…
ARM does not make CPUs (it makes CPU IP), Qualcomm does.
The fact that NVIDIA builds bad ARM CPUs does not change with the acquisition as far as I can tell.
For that NVIDIA would need to invest a lot of R&D into their CPU team, and again, if it does that, it can compete with Qualcomm, independently of whether the acquisition takes place.