Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

nvidianews.nvidia.com

221–230 of 784 posts

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#221
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus famously gave them the middle-finger.

"linus went on a hyperbolic rant" isn't sufficient evidence for anything. linus is a hyperbolic jerk (as he admitted himself for a few months before resuming his hyperbolic ways) who is increasingly out of touch with anything outside the direct sphere of his projects. Like his misguided and completely unnecessary rants about ZFS or AVX. if there are technical merits to discuss you can post those instead of just appea…

A little defensive, no? I trust his judgement more than Mr. Random on the internets.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#222
post #73

I see this going a few ways for different players: The perpetual architecture license folks that make their own cores like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Fujitsu (I think they needed this for the A64FX, right?) will be fine, and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there. Apple especially will be fine as they can get code into LLVM for whatever "Apple Silicon" evolves into over time…

It seems to me that if Apple felt that Nvidia would limit them, they could have outbid them for ARM! So I think you are correct.

I doubt Apple is dumb enough not to have basically a perpetual license for ARM.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#223
post #65
post #28

The British should never have allowed foreign ownership of their core tech

Yes. It'd have been reasonable to block sales to non eu parties for national security reasons. Now arm is yet another US company.

Isn’t the UK leaving the EU?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html You mean this Weyland "support"?

"October 26, 2017" I'm not coming out and saying it's gotten significantly better, but that is a three year old article and Nvidia-wayland does work on KDE and Gnome.

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#225
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The HN crowd is incredibly biased against certain companies. No kidding, regarding the HN crowd. -- every time I post a comment criticizing Apple's monopoly and policies I get downvoted to oblivion, and I'd say that some of the things they do e.g. on the Apple store and proprietary hardware/software combinations are far more egregious than anything Nvidia has ever done. The HN algorithm basically encourages an echo…

Haven't looked at the rest of your posts, but if this gets flagged, it's probably from this: [Edit: I disagree with my past self of having put this comment here. This is something that if one feels that they notice, they should probably comment on. Leaving it here for clarity's sake] > The HN algorithm basically encourages an echo chamber of people who gang up and downvote/flag others who don't agree with the gang op…

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenPOWER is pretty awesome but would be nowhere near as awesome as an OpenItanium. IMHO, Itanium was always mismarketed and misoptimized. It made a pretty good server processor, but not so good that enterprises were willing to migrate 40 year old software to run on it. In mobile form, it would have made a large leap in both performance and battery life. And it would have been a fairly easy market to break into: the…

Itanuim deserved its fiery death and resurrection doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's a dead end architecture, and humanity gained (by freeing up valuable engineering power to other more useful endeavors) when it died.

Itanium was an excellent idea that needed investment in compilers. Nobody wanted to make that investment because speculative execution got them 80% of the way there without the investment in compilers. But as it turns out, speculative execution was a phenomenally bad idea, and patching its security vulnerabilities has set back processor performance to the point where VLIW seems like a good idea again. We should have made those compiler improvements decades ago.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#227
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good that they open sourced that stuff, but the main problem is that CUDA itself is closed source and vendor locked to nvidia's hardware.

It only makes sense to demand them to give this away for free if you consider them a hardware company and a hardware company only. Look at them as a solutions company and the first question to answer is: why is it fine for companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe etc and any other software company to profit from closed software yet a company should be ostracized for it as soon as hardware becomes part of the deal? Nvi…

Please don't misrepresent my statement, I haven't demanded they give anything away for free. If you're referring to the CUDA drivers, the binaries for those are already free with the hardware. And if AMD truly doesn't care about it then that's even more reason for them to open source it, because they can't really claim they're keeping it closed source to hamstring the competition anymore.

wrt Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, and the others: I've been asking them to open source key products every chance I get. Just so you know where I'm coming from.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#228
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly - they have a working driver for FreeBSD. Never had an issue with it - and the performance is fantastic. As far back as early 2000's I remember installing proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux and playing UT2004. Maybe Nintendo/Sony uses Nvidia cards on their developer machines? I imagine FreeBSD drivers aren't simply altruism on their part. On the other hand, stagnation on other fronts: - Nouveau (tried r…

Is the FreeBDD driver open source? Also, somehow I was under the impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver. Is that correct?

> impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver.

It's maintained while simultaneously not receiving any new features.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#229
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly - they have a working driver for FreeBSD. Never had an issue with it - and the performance is fantastic. As far back as early 2000's I remember installing proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux and playing UT2004. Maybe Nintendo/Sony uses Nvidia cards on their developer machines? I imagine FreeBSD drivers aren't simply altruism on their part. On the other hand, stagnation on other fronts: - Nouveau (tried r…

Not just developer machines e.g. the Nintendo Switch uses an Nvidia Tegra X1 and run FreeBSD. Lots of game consoles do, you don't have to worry about the GPL.

I thought the switch ran a modified form of android, but just looked it up and found this on the Switch Wikipedia page:

> Despite popular misconceptions to the contrary, Horizon [The switch software's codename] is not largely derived from FreeBSD code, nor from Android, although the software licence[7] and reverse engineering efforts[8][9] have revealed that Nintendo does use some code from both in some system services and drivers.

That being said, at least one of the Playstation's runs a modified form of FreeBSD.

Edit: add [The ... codename]

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#230
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Revenue was half of Nvidia, profit was 5% of NVidia. For operating income it's 25%, for net income it's 18%; not 5%. Last four quarters operating income for AMD: $884 million Last four quarters operating income for Nvidia: $3.5 billion This speaks to the dramatic improvement in AMD's operating condition over the last several years. For contrast, in fiscal 2016 AMD's operating income was negative $382 million. Op in…

I was using 2019 numbers rather than last 4 quarters. I also talked about revenue and profit, not operating anything. AMD 2019 Revenue: $6.73b [1] NVIDIA 2019 Revenue: $11.72b [2] Roughly half, as I said. AMD 2019 Profit (as earnings per share): $0.30 [1] NVIDIA 2019 Profit (as earnings per share): $6.63 [2] 4.52%, rounds to 5%, as I said. However, you still proved my point. Lightweight or not, they do not, and have…

> AMD 2019 Profit (as earnings per share): $0.30 [1] NVIDIA 2019 Profit (as earnings per share): $6.63 [2]

> 4.52%, rounds to 5%, as I said.

You're misunderstanding how to properly compare profitability between two companies.

If Company A has 1 billion shares outstanding and earns $0.10 per share, that's $100m in profit.

If Company B has 10 billion shares outstanding and earns $0.05 per share, that's $500m in profit.

Company A is not 100% larger on profit just because they earned more per share. It depends on how many shares you have outstanding, which is what you failed to account for.

AMD's profit was not close to 5% of Nvidia's in 2019. That is what you directly claimed (as you're saying you went by the last full fiscal year).

AMD had $341m in net income in their last full fiscal year. Nvidia had $2.8 billion in net income for their last full fiscal year. That's 12%, not 5%. And AMD's operating income was 22% of Nvidia for the last fiscal year.

The trailing four quarters and operating income, is the superior way to judge the present condition of the two companies, rather than using the prior fiscal year. Especially given the rapid ongoing improvement in AMD's business. Regardless, even going by the last full fiscal year, your 5% figure is still wrong by a large amount.

Operating income is a key measure of profitability and it's a far better manner of gauging business profitability than net income at this point. That's because the modern net income numbers are partially useless as they will include such things as asset gains/losses during the quarter. If you want to read up more on it, Warren Buffett has pointed out the absurdity of this approach on numerous occasions (if Berkshire's portfolio goes up a lot, they have to report that as net income, even though it wasn't a real profit generation event).

I didn't say anything refuting your revenue figures, because I wasn't refuting them. I'm not sure why you mention that.

Post reply on HN