Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA

cringely.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 37 posts

Re: Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA

#21

Post by joshu »

gvb wrote: post #14
lyime wrote: post #8

Intel will not buy Nvidia. More like Intel can't. The deal would never go through all the checks. Intel doesnt need Nvidia and Nvidia cannot make a CPU part. At-least not an x86 CPU part (licensing).

Setting aside the antitrust issues... Intel needs nVidia because it (arguably) cannot make a GPU part (the ones it has are slow, Larrabee is a bust). nVidia is (arguably) less dependent on Intel since it has standalone GPUs as well as low power integrated ARM+GPUs. This makes nVidia well positioned in the low power mobile world, a place where Intel just started to aspire to. In "An Inconvenient Truth: Intel Larrabee…

Didn't Intel sell the ARM division to Marvell or something?

Re: Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA

#22

Post by Keyframe »

lyime wrote: post #8

Intel will not buy Nvidia. More like Intel can't. The deal would never go through all the checks. Intel doesnt need Nvidia and Nvidia cannot make a CPU part. At-least not an x86 CPU part (licensing).

hm, intel tries hard to make a decent GPU for years now and fails miserably every time. AMD bought ATI, why intel shouldn't pass checks to buy nvidia then? Nvidia seems a bit lost in their direction and they are using TSMC's fabs, where they could use intels if there were an acquisition. Both companies have superb engineering talent. Also, there was always this feud between AMD/ATi vs intel/NVIDIA rigs amongst geeks, might be a consolidation on that turf also.

I like that idea.

Re: Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA

#24

Post by gvb »

joshu wrote: post #21
gvb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting aside the antitrust issues... Intel needs nVidia because it (arguably) cannot make a GPU part (the ones it has are slow, Larrabee is a bust). nVidia is (arguably) less dependent on Intel since it has standalone GPUs as well as low power integrated ARM+GPUs. This makes nVidia well positioned in the low power mobile world, a place where Intel just started to aspire to. In "An Inconvenient Truth: Intel Larrabee…

Didn't Intel sell the ARM division to Marvell or something?

Yes, there is irony in the world today. Intel acquired StrongARM (renamed XScale) with an ARM CPU license from DEC. IIRC, they had a development license which meant that they (now Marvell) could modify the instruction set.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale

So Intel had an unusually permissive license to a very popular, very low power CPU architecture and they sold it (June 2006). A few years later, they are struggling to recreate that low power capability in their x86 architecture.

Re: Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA

#27

Post by rfreytag »

kiujhygfvgbn wrote: post #20
rfreytag wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cringely called the HP-Compaq acquisition perfectly. He gets out there a ways but is not as wrong as often as he is really right in my experience.

Did he think it would be a good idea or not - I can't remember

I remember precisely - Cringely called it Carly Fiorina's attempt to "reset the shot clock" on her tenure at HP and that it would hurt HP. It went down exactly that way.

Re: Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA

#29

Post by blasdel »

gvb wrote: post #24
joshu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Intel sell the ARM division to Marvell or something?

Yes, there is irony in the world today. Intel acquired StrongARM (renamed XScale) with an ARM CPU license from DEC. IIRC, they had a development license which meant that they (now Marvell) could modify the instruction set. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale So Intel had an unusually permissive license to a very popular, very low power CPU architecture and they sold it (June 2006). A few years later, they are struggl…

You're right only in that they shouldn't have sold it -- they should have sat on it.

They can't let ARM or any non-x86 architecture win in a PC-replacement market.

Re: Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA

#30

Post by dnsworks »

eli wrote: post #13
sp332 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Cringely is generally untrustworthy.

Cringely means well, but he tends to get these sorts of hunches that don't necessarily have any basis in reality. From the article: " If this reads like a huge conspiracy theory that’s because it is. "

I am at a loss as to any predictions that Cringely has ever gotten right. In that regard, he is somewhat akin to the Amazing Criswell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Criswell)
Post reply on HN