SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by klelatti » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

dippersauce wrote: post #245

It simply wouldn’t make sense for NVidia to maliciously impose upon ARM after acquisition, as many of the commenters are concerned. I’m not saying they won’t, but because the present situation would limit any efforts to do so long enough that it would be futile.Consider the perpetual license agreements ARM holds with companies like Apple. These companies are best positioned to resist meddling with ARM. As an example…

It's not just about Apple. Suppose you're an SoC designer without an architecture license who makes SoCs that successfully compete with say Tegra. Maybe you have a license to use Cortex A77. Lets assume that A78 is the successor to A77.

- Will Nvidia sell you a license to A78 to enable you to continue to compete with Tegra or are you stuck on A77? - If you can't get a license to A78 where do you turn? RISC-V? Possibly but will you still have a business by the time a competitive RISC-V design emerges from somewhere?

The point is that Nvidia might play fair but the temptation to hinder those who compete directly with its own SoCs - where it will make a lot more money - will be great, and who will stop them if they do?

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

#252

Post by valuearb » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

manquer wrote: post #120

valuearb wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no strategic fit for ARM at Apple. They have a perpetual license already and design their own chips. They don’t need the customer and antitrust headaches to pay over 10x revenues for the ARM licensing business.

I am not sure any antitrust concerns would remotely be applicable in the case of an apple buy.there is no overlap of ARM biz to apple. Same as google or MS buying phone manufacturers and shutting down/selling parts they don't like. Apple could shutdown the licensing just to keep competitors behind, if they did that it would set back all their android competitors by 5-10 years atleast and potentially fragment the chip…

Their competitors already have their licenses. They’d continue to develop newer versions, and Apple couldn’t stop them. Some fragmentation would occur (though they’d probably create an industry group to coordinate).

So Apple would create minimal disruption and a huge antitrust case that they would lose. Why do you think Apple would be this dumb?

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

#253

Post by ZitchDog » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

switch11 wrote: post #237

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…

Very well put The biggest thing if you have been in prolonged vicious competition, is to Control Your Own Destiny and leave the basket of crabs behind For Nvidia this is a MASSIVE win Softbank are @#$@#$ idiots for selling ARM Right when ARM is finally taking over the world For what? So they can fund the next bunch of charlatans - add more disasters like WeWork and Uber?

Softbank probably has a bunch of NVIDIA options that it needs to be worth money

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

#254

Post by philistine » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

Apple is famous for compiling all its OSes to different architectures. We saw it with the quick switch to Intel and this upcoming switch to ARM. I’m convinced someone somewhere at Apple is firing off an email asking: "hey, are we compiling our stack on RISC-V?"

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

#255

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #162

landryraccoon wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described a space with 4 competitors fighting for the same market. How could it be anything other than cutthroat? GPUs are not the kind of space where it’s easy for new companies to enter. It very much was a winner takes all market.

> It very much was a winner takes all market. Of course. The multi billion dollar market is just too small for more than one company. Nvidia is just biding it’s time on ~20% market share until it can put the finishing moves on the other 9 major vendors.

[deleted]

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

#256

Post by Symmetry » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 8:17 PM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #59

gumby wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory is that clusters form around “anchor tenants”; Cambridge has the University (and its excellent CS departments), ARM and some others, and is close to he largest capital marketplaces in the world, grandiosely bundled into a so-called “silicon fen”. So school leavers can get jobs, network, start companies, develop other tech in a virtuous circle. Well that’s the theory; nobody has actually been able to reprod…

This is a bit of an aside, but it never ceases to amaze me how many would be tech hubs try variations of Silicon Valley in their (maybe informal?) branding. Silicon hills, Silicon fern.. (I knew a couple more but I’m forgetting atm). It’s not like it’s the name which made it what it is.

I've heard people at the wafer manufacturing facilities in South Portland, Maine refer to that little cluster as "Silicon Tundra" but I don't think anybody from outside there calls them that.

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

#257

Post by Symmetry » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 8:27 PM UTC

acidbaseextract wrote: post #183

adrian_b wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you said, but there is a reason for wanting to converge on ARM. There exists no good alternative. ARMv8.2 or newer is a very well designed ISA, while RISC-V is a very bad ISA and I would hate to be forced to use it. OpenPOWER is a far better ISA than RISC-V, but unfortunately most developers do not have any experience with POWER and they have the wrong belief that POWER is some antique ISA while RIS…

Why is RISC-V bad? You spend paragraphs ripping on it without actually explaining why it's bad.

There's a old Usenet post I really like comparing different RISC and CISC architectures from way back.

https://userpages.umbc.edu/~vijay/mashey.on.risc.html

If you look at things here in 2020 it looks like it was essentially the RISCiest of the CISC architectures, x86, and the CISCiest of the RISC architectures, ARM that succeeded in the modern day while architectures more tied to an ideological camp like Alpha or SPARC or VAX have all died out in our current era. That makes me think that another very ideologically RISC architectures like RISC-V will, at the very least, have a tough row to hoe in getting widespread commercial acceptance.

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

#258

Post by jayd16 » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

klelatti wrote: post #77

01100011 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, everything Nvidia is evil. We're supposed to be hating on them, right? Can I get my upvotes for perpetuating the hive mind now? Seriously. I'm excited to see ARM owned by a hardware centric company. That said, I really don't expect this to have much impact in the near term. Licenses are already in place. China will probably spin competing chips based on their own ISA before too long(5-10 years). I'm frankly inter…

Why would you be excited? Nvidia can (and do) build their own ARM ISA CPU's offer them in the market so we already have access to Nvidia's take on the architecture. Do they have established expertise in ISA design or microcontrollers? Maybe I'm missing something?

Like I said, maybe there's room for GPU improvements in the ARM designs. Seems like nVidia could do something like pack in hardware DLSS. They license out their GPU designs so its not far fetched that their GPU features make their way into mobile ARM chip designs. The Tegra was a bit power hungry but maybe having control of the full stack can alleviate that.

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

#259

Post by neltnerb » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

pbronez wrote: post #234

gumby wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While long-term this might end up being great for RISC-V... set everything back another 5+ years. Five years is no big deal. In fact there’s so much in the pipeline it’s likely little will be different For 3-5 years. The bigger problem is RISC-V is immature and to use ARM as an example will need another decade to get its act together (for which I have high hopes BTW). I agree with you that this will definitely be a…

> The bigger problem is RISC-V is immature and to use ARM as an example will need another decade to get its act together (for which I have high hopes BTW). Do you think that RISC-V can overcome the inefficiencies discussed elsewhere in this thread with time? Specifically, can they improve the instruction set with more powerful addressing tools and reduce the number of instructions needed within loops?

Isn't the only reason it couldn't be improved the threat of other companies with patents? I thought that was usually the underlying culprit for missing capability.

I wonder what the best ISA we could create would be in a universe where there were no rent-seekers looking to recoup their R&D investment by limiting what a new ISA could contain.

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

#260

Post by saagarjha » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

freeone3000 wrote: post #247

saagarjha wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most users however do depend quite a bit on the performance of a small section of architecture-specific code.

(I'm going to exclude Linux in the below, because it's an odd duck where users/distributors can reasonably be expected to recompile every program they use for a new architecture.) Sure! But that code is generally core OS code written by a small number of people and deployed widely. If Apple or Microsoft or Google decided that OpenPOWER was the way to go, we'd be able to switch over at least some use cases. ALL of the…

As someone going through a processor migration right, now, the core OS is actually not that hard to move. But even once you change all the language runtimes, there's a fair bit of proprietary software (including games) that are unlikely to move quickly.