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

Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

nvidianews.nvidia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 784 posts

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#241

Post by dheera »

Shared404 wrote: post #219
dheera wrote: 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…

I think it depends on how you criticize them. I've criticized:

- The idea that we can trust Apple with privacy, when their OS isn't open source

- The idea that the Apple Store is doing good things in the disguise of privacy when they actually play corporate favoritism and unfairly monopolize the app market

- The idea that a PIN has enough entropy to be a good measure of security

- Right to repair, soldered-to-motherboard SSDs

- The environmental waste associated with the lack of upgradability

- Price gouging on upgrades ($400 for +512GB, anyone? When I can get 4TB on Amazon for $500?) and lack of user upgradability

I've been downvoted to hell for speaking the above. There are a bunch of brainwashed Apple worshippers lurking around here who don't accept any criticism of the holy.

I totally welcome engaging in an intelligent discussion about any of the above, but downvotes and flagging (in most cases without any response) doesn't accomplish any of that, and serves just to amplify the fanboy echo chamber.

Also, I don't think criticizing HN's algorithm or design should warrant being flagged or downvoted, either. Downvoting should be reserved for trolling, not intelligent protest. I'm also of the opinion that downvotes shouldn't be used for well-written disagreement, as that creates an echo chamber and suppresses non-majority opinions.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#242

Post by systemvoltage »

scarface74 wrote: post #222
mxcrossb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would also agree, the thing is - businesses breakup and come together all the time. If it makes sense and both parties can agree despite of past disagrements and lawsuits, they will partner.

Just because Apple and nVidia has bad relationship at the moment regarding their GPUs is probably orthogonal to what they'll do with this new branch of nVidia, that is ARM.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#243

Post by Blammar »

No one has seemed to notice the following two things:

"To pave the way for the deal, SoftBank reversed an earlier decision to strip out an internet-of-things business from Arm and transfer it to a new company under its control. That would have stripped Arm of what was meant to be the high-growth engine that would power it into a 5G-connected future. One person said that SoftBank made the decision because it would have put it in conflict with commitments made to the U.K. over Arm, which were agreed at the time of the 2016 deal to appease the government." (from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/nvidia-reportedly-to... )

and

"The transaction does not include Arm’s IoT Services Group." (nvidia news.)

which appear to contradict each other.

I'm not sure about the significance of this. I would have guessed Nvidia would have wanted the IoT group to remain.

Also, to first order, when a company issues stock to purchase another corporation, that cost is essentially "free" since the value of the corporation increases.

In other words, Nvidia is essentially paying $12 billion in cash for ARM up front, and that's all. (The extra $5B in cash or stock depends on financial performance of ARM, and thus is a second-order effect.)

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#244

Post by sillysaurusx »

sorenbouma wrote: post #215
sillysaurusx wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where all of this misinformation is coming from or why, but, as someone who has spent the last year programming TPUs to do all kinds of things that a GPU can't do, this isn't true. Are we going to simply say "Nu uh" at each other, or do you want to throw down some specific examples so I can show you how mistaken they are?

I'm a TPU user and I'd be interested to see a specific example of something that can be done on TPU but not GPU. Perhaps I'm just not experienced enough with the programming model, but I've found them to be strictly less flexible/more tricky than GPUs, especially for things like conditional execution, multiple graphs, variable size inputs and custom ops.

Sure! I'd love to chat TPUs. There's a #tpu discord channel on the MLPerf discord: https://github.com/shawwn/tpunicorn#ml-community

The central reason that TPUs feel less flexible is Google's awful mistake in encouraging everyone to use TPUEstimator as the One True API For Doing TPU Programming. Getting off that API was the single biggest boost to my TPU skills.

You can see an example of how to do that here: https://github.com/shawwn/ml-notes/blob/master/train_runner.... This is a repo that can train GPT-2 1.5B at 10 examples/sec on a TPUv3-8 (aka around 10k tokens/sec).

Happy to answer any specific questions or peek at codebases you're hoping to run on TPUs.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#245

Post by systemvoltage »

ethbr0 wrote: post #180
topspin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My instincts are telling me this is smoke and mirrors to rationalize a $40E9 deal. The only part of that that computes at all is the GPU integration, and that only works if NVIDIA doesn't terrorize Arm licencees. The rest is buzzwords.

Or Jensen believes that smart, convergent IoT is at a tipping point, and this is a bet on that. Not all fashionable words are devoid of meaning.

Makes sense. IoT was a buzzword in 2013. It is now a mature ecosystem and we've gotten a good taste and smell for it. Its on its way towards the plateau of productivity on the Gartner curve if I were to guess.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#246

Post by CountSessine »

endgame wrote: post #161
LanternLight83 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are good points on both sides; as a Linux user, I feel the effects of their proprietary drivers and uncooperative approach, while I can also appreciate that they've managed to work with the Gnome and KDE project to have some support under Wayland, and the contributions they've made to the machine learning communities. Ad a whole, I do think that the former outweighs the latter, and loath the acquisition, but do…

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

The funny thing about GBM vs EGLStreams, though, based on everything I’ve read online, is that there’s broad agreement that EGLStreams is the technically superior approach - and that the reason it’s been rejected by the Linux graphics devs is GBM, while inferior, has broad hardware vendor support. Apparently very few GPU vendors outside the big 3 had decent EGl implementations.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#247

Post by millstone »

mxcrossb wrote: post #109
zdw wrote: 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 think Apple is not committed to ARM at all. Bitcode, Rosetta 2, "Apple Silicon" - it all suggests they want to keep ISA flexibility.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#248

Post by dragontamer »

darksaints wrote: post #226
drivebycomment wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

NVidia Volta: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06826.pdf

Each machine instruction on NVidia Volta has the following information:

* Reuse Flags

* Wait Barrier Mask

* Read/Write barrier index (6-bit bitmask)

* Read Dependency barriers

* Stall Cycles (4-bit)

* Yield Flag (1-bit software hint: NVidia CU will select new warp, load-balancing the SMT resources of the compute unit)

Itanium's idea of VLIW was commingled with other ideas; in particular, the idea of a compiler static-scheduler to minimize hardware work at runtime.

To my eyes: the benefits of Itanium are implemented in NVidia's GPUs. The compiler for NVidia's compiler-scheduling flags has been made and is proven effective.

Itanium itself: the crazy "bundling" of instructions and such, seems too complex. The explicit bitmasks / barriers of NVidia Volta seems more straightforward and clear in describing the dependency graph of code (and therefore: the potential parallelism).

----------

Clearly, static-compilers marking what is, and what isn't, parallelizable, is useful. NVidia Volta+ architectures have proven this. Furthermore, compilers that can emit such information already exist. I do await the day when other architectures wake up to this fact.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#249

Post by throwaway2048 »

magic_quotes wrote: post #228
gautamcgoel wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Note this includes support for newer cards, so its only a matter of time before FreeBSD support is EOL'd

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#250

Post by whatshisface »

paulmd wrote: post #128
dragontamer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider one of NVidia's rivals: AMD, who uses an ARM chip in their EPYC line of chips as a security co-processor. Does anyone expect NVidia to "play fair" with such a rival? ARM as an independent company, has been profoundly "neutral", allowing many companies to benefit from the ARM instruction set. It has been run very well: slightly profitable and an incremental value to all parties involved (be you Apple's iPhone…

> Consider one of NVidia's rivals: AMD, who uses an ARM chip in their EPYC line of chips as a security co-processor. Does anyone expect NVidia to "play fair" with such a rival? Yes, absolutely. NVIDIA's not going to burn the ARM ecosystem to the ground. They just paid $40 billion for it. And they only had $11b of cash on hand, they really overpaid for it (because SoftBank desperately needed a big win to cover for the…

Why does SoftBank's desperation make NVIDIA pay too much?
Post reply on HN