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SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

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Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#211

Post by gridlockd »

gwd wrote: post #202
ethbr0 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what Nvidia was looking for since out of the big 3 US semiconductor manufacturers, it doesn't have its own IP on CPUs. Now it will soon be able to control ARM to its advantage against the competition. In all fairness, consider the market from Nvidia's perspective: they've spent a few decades being a stone's throw from Intel eating them. They started as one of many add-on card manufacturers and have turned i…

> Now, an opportunity to become a technical peer to Intel at the CPU level? To control their own destiny? > They'd be insane not to take this opportunity. It made financial sense for ARM's board to sell to SoftBank; it makes financial sense for SoftBank to sell to NVIDIA; it makes financial and strategic sense for NVIDIA to buy ARM; it makes financial and strategic sense for NVIDIA to radically change the way the ARM…

This is a premature judgement.

If NVIDIA treats ARM poorly, that benefits alternative ISAs and may ultimately undermine NVIDIAs investment. If NVIDIA treats ARM well, then that benefits the platform as a whole. The reality is going to be somewhere in the middle.

Market equilibrium does not imply maximum benefit for any one interest group. "Consumers" or "end-users" are often conflated with "society".

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#212

Post by the_other »

baybal2 wrote: post #75
bartread wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nope, now Nvidia is going to destroy that progress and set everything back another 5+ years. You're blaming Nvidia. You should be blaming SoftBank and Masayoshi Son: bunch of fucking hucksters misleading people and making bad investments. Now they need to sell ARM to fill some of the gaping void that has resulted. They couldn't care less who they sell to and what the outcome of that sale will be. I have nothing but…

> You're blaming Nvidia. You should be blaming SoftBank and Masayoshi Son: bunch of fucking hucksters misleading people and making bad investments. You shouldn't be blaming bad investors. They pay for their decisions with their, or more often somebody's else, money. Blame the collective ownership of means of production, which in form of public companies have dominated the Western world for the last 30+ years. When pe…

> You shouldn't be blaming bad investors. They pay for their decisions with their, or more often somebody's else, money.

> Blame the collective ownership of means of production, which in form of public companies have dominated the Western world for the last 30+ years.

Can you unpack these two points? I don’t understand. It sounds like you’re saying “don’t blame the owners (because investors ARE owners); blame the owners”.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#213

Post by microtonal »

phonon wrote: post #144
wyldfire wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATI/AMD remains nearly the only competitor nvidia has in the discrete GPU space. But we started out with 3dfx, S3, nvidia, ati.

PowerVR, Matrox, Trident, Bitboys Oy, 3Dlabs, Rendition, Intel740...

SiS also had 3D graphics chips. Tseng Labs was probably one of the earliest victims of the 3D GPUs wars, having developed but never completed the ET6300.

PowerVR still exists and is seems successful in the mobile market (having provided Apple's GPUs until A10).

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#214

Post by csdreamer7 »

alvern wrote: post #48

This makes sense. Most of the Jetson/Xavier/Nano boards already use a Carmel ARMv8 chip. I just hope this spurs more development in ARMv8. Currently the majority of ARM is ARMv7 (smartphones and Raspi).

Raspberry Pi 4 uses ARMv8 according to Wikipedia: the ARM Cortex-A72.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Processor

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#215

Post by fulafel »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #214
alvern wrote: post #48

This makes sense. Most of the Jetson/Xavier/Nano boards already use a Carmel ARMv8 chip. I just hope this spurs more development in ARMv8. Currently the majority of ARM is ARMv7 (smartphones and Raspi).

Raspberry Pi 4 uses ARMv8 according to Wikipedia: the ARM Cortex-A72. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Processor

Pi 3 and the V1.2 revision of the Pi 2 were ARMv8 too (Cortex-A53).

edit: also re smartphones, Android SoCs started to move to v8 CPU cores 5 years ago, in the Nexus 5X/Pixel 1 generation.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#216

Post by john_miller »

bayindirh wrote: post #47
season2episode3 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As an outsider: What is so much better about Infiniband compared to Ethernet?

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#217

Post by bayindirh »

john_miller wrote: post #216
bayindirh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As an outsider: What is so much better about Infiniband compared to Ethernet?

Infiniband (IB) is not a network per se. It's a HBA. It can run TCP/IP but it's not the main application.

Every infiniband adapter is self-aware & topology aware. They know where the other nodes are so, they can directly talk with each other, regardless of the topology (network is mapped, managed and maintained by a daemon called subnet-manager which can either run on switches or a dedicated server).

This hardware and software combo results in three things:

1. Memory to memory transfers: IB can transfer from RAM of a host to RAM of another host, directly with RDMA. This means, when you run MPI and send a message to other processes, it's magically beamed over there, direct to RAM of the target(s). IB is transparent to MPI via its libraries, so everything automagic and 100x faster.

2. Latency: A to B latency is around 2-5 ns (nanoseconds). This means, when running stuff like MPI, machines become one as much as they can be. Until ethernet assembles your one package, you're there; possibly finished your transfer and continuing to churn your code.

3. Speed: 40Gbps IB means 38+ Gbps real throughput. For every p2p connection if you're running through a cube topology core switch. 80Gbps means around 78 or so. So theoretical and maximum is not so distant from each other. In most cases, 100 means 100 sustained, 80 means 80 sustained and so on (you can attach storage devices to IB network and enjoy that speed and latency on your HPC compute nodes for files).

Moreover, with more modern cards and switching hardware, It hardware accelerates MPI operations (broadcast, atomics, summation, etc.) and has multi-context support for supporting multiple MPI processes without blocking each other as much as possible.

For HPC, it's a different universe of speed, latency and processing acceleration. Moreover, you can run TCP/IP over it but, we generally run another gigabit network for server management.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#219

Post by nl »

Impossible wrote: post #187
nl wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

FYI, Nintendo Switch is Tegra based as well. 61 million units isn't bad, and there are significantly more Tegras in use in Switch consoles than in Jetson boards or even Telsas (~1 million).

Yeah and a bunch of NVIDIA products too (the Shield, etc).

But it hasn't really seen the broad based success in mobiles they were hoping for, yet.

(By comparison, a midsize mobile company like Oppo sold 115M units in 2019)

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#220

Post by nl »

microtonal wrote: post #213
phonon wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerVR, Matrox, Trident, Bitboys Oy, 3Dlabs, Rendition, Intel740...

SiS also had 3D graphics chips. Tseng Labs was probably one of the earliest victims of the 3D GPUs wars, having developed but never completed the ET6300. PowerVR still exists and is seems successful in the mobile market (having provided Apple's GPUs until A10).

Oh wow I had a Tseng Labs T4000(?) on my second Linux computer! I forgot about them!
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