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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#271

Post by zmmmmm »

jml7c5 wrote: post #176
zmmmmm wrote: post #169

Many various reasons for this but one perspective I am curious about is how much this is actually a defensive move against Intel, because nVidia knows Intel is busy developing dedicated graphics via Xe, and if nVidia just allows that to continue they are going to find themselves simultaneously competing with and dependent on a vendor that owns the whole stack that their platform depends on. It is not a place I would…

How does AMD enter into this? Did you mean Nvidia?

ouch I wrote a whole comment and systematically replaced Nvidia with AMD ... kind of impressive.

Thanks!

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#272

Post by cycloptic »

01100011 wrote: post #235
paxys wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just starting to feel that now?

I know, right? It's finally hitting me. I am realizing how much of an asshole I've become thanks to the validation of a handful of strangers on the internet. I have caught myself commenting on things I have only cursory knowledge of and being justified by the likes of strangers. I actually believed that the online communities I participated in actually represented the world at large. I'm not quite ready to end my par…

It is best to limit your exposure to these type of sites. There was a post yesterday about Wikipedia being an addictive MMORPG. Well, so are Hacker news, twitter, reddit, and so on...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#273

Post by walterbell »

Blammar wrote: post #243

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 hav…

There were two separate IoT business units: Platform (https://pelion.com) and Data (https://www.treasuredata.com/). The Platform unit fits the Segars post-acquisition comment about end-to-end IoT software architecture, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24465005

> One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make commitments to the UK government over Arm’s future in Britain, where opposition politicians have recently insisted that any potential deal must safeguard British jobs.

So the deal has already been influenced by one regulator. That should encourage other regulators.

> SoftBank will remain committed to Arm’s long-term success through its ownership stake in NVIDIA, expected to be under 10 percent.

Why is this stake necessary?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#274

Post by na85 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #77
dragontamer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RISC-V still seems too ad-hoc to me, and really new. Hard to say where it'd go for now. I know momentum is currently towards ARM over POWER, but... OpenPOWER is certainly a thing, and has IBM / Red Hat support. IBM may be expensive, but they already were proven "fair partners" in the OpenPOWER initiative and largely supportive of OSS / Free Software.

I would love OpenPOWER to succeed. I just don't see the 48 pin QFP version that costs I don't see OpenPOWER going there, but I can easily see RISC-V going there. So, for the moment, that is the horse I'm betting on.

I miss DIP chips that would fit on breadboards. I don't have steady enough hands to solder QFP onto a PCB, and I'm too cheap to buy an oven :(

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#275

Post by [deleted] »

Shared404 wrote: post #252
dheera wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-motherb…

> I've been downvoted to hell for speaking the above. Fair enough. I don't think I've ever mentioned Apple by name, just participated in threads about them and commented on how I disagree about how they do some things. I also went and reread some of my comments, and realized I haven't criticized Apple as much here as I'd originally thought. Apparently I mostly stick to that in meatspace. > There are a bunch of brainw…

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#276

Post by ddevault »

CountSessine wrote: post #246
endgame wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not true. EGLStreams would be better suited to Nvidia's proprietary driver design, but it's technically inferior. This is the "broad agreement". No one but Nvidia wants EGLStreams, or we would have implemented it in other drivers.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#277

Post by CameronNemo »

joshvm wrote: post #120
baybal2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bye bye ARM Mali =(

Is the situation better with Mali? This seems something that might actually improve with Nvidia. I was under the impression that ARM GPUs are currently heavily locked down anyway (in terms of open source drivers). Nvidia would presumably still be locked down, but maybe we'd have more uniform cross platform interfaces like CUDA.

Tegra open source support is great and actually supported by NVIDIA. Probably the best ARM GPU option for open source drivers.

Mali support is done by outside groups (not ARM). Midgard and Bifrost models are well supported (anything that starts with a T or G, respectively). Support for older models is a little worse, but better than some other GPUs.

Adreno support is done by outside groups (not Qualcomm) and is lagging behind new GPUs that come out considerably.

PowerVR GPUs (Imagination) have terrible open source support.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#278

Post by sib »

askvictor wrote: post #96
gumby wrote: post #92

Amidst all the hand-wringing: RISC-V is at least a decade away (at current pace + ARM’s own example). But what if Google bought AMD and put TPUs on the die?

Because so many of Google's acquisitions have ended up doing well...

Android, YouTube, Google Maps, DoubleClick, Applied Semantics (became AdSense), DeepMind, Urchin, ITA Software, etc.

I think Google has done ok.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#279

Post by kabacha »

dannyw wrote: post #158
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.

Apple would not get antitrust approval (iPhone maker controls all android chips????). So that’s why.

Exactly, Apple is already straddling the line (and imho way past it) on anti-comp laws.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#280

Post by kllrnohj »

wyldfire wrote: post #263
kllrnohj wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek all currently just use off the shelf A5x & A7x cores in their SoCs. Unless that part of the company is losing money I don't expect nVidia to cut that off. Especially since that's likely a key part of why nVidia acquired ARM in the first place - I can't imagine they care about the Mali team(s) or IP.

Qualcomm used to design their own cores up until the last generation or two, but you're right they use the reference designs now. EDIT: correction, make that the last generation or four (oops, time flies)

Qualcomm hasn't used an in-house core design since 2015 with the original Kryo. Everything Kryo 2xx and newer are based on Cortex.
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