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Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

bbc.com

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Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#281

Post by valuearb »

kybernetikos wrote: post #273
valuearb wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valid for what reason? There is no evidence ARM would be anymore successful under UK control then nVidias, in fact the opposite maybe true. The history of government owned businesses, esp. in UK is desultory.

According to the article, at least Herman Hauser believes that ARM will likely do poorly under nVidias control. I think the idea is that nvidia is a particularly bad owner considering arm's buisness model (for a similar reason that having Nokia as the main Symbian participant was a bad idea), rather than that the UK would exert beneficial influence. Indeed, the suggestion is that the UK government invests as part of…

How would the UK governments influence be beneficial in any way? The governments influence will be the agenda of individual politicians, who know nothing of chip design or care about it.

In the US that’s the type of thinking that’s given us the SLS, an $20B launch system that will cost more than twenty times as much as commercial alternatives, and is required by law to use obsolete 50 year old components from key congressional districts.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#282

Post by valuearb »

klelatti wrote: post #253
valuearb wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valid for what reason? There is no evidence ARM would be anymore successful under UK control then nVidias, in fact the opposite maybe true. The history of government owned businesses, esp. in UK is desultory.

Because Nvidia will find a way to use ARM to strongly favour its own SoCs at the expense of everyone else’s - that’s why it would pay $32bn. That’s not good for ARM or the UK (or for everyone else for that matter).

NVidia isn’t going to intentionally destroy a $32B acquisition to throw that money down the drain. They are likely to fully support every customer, to protect their investment, and fund it do new things strategically important to NVidia.

If the UK owns ARM, over time every investment decision they made will be required to benefit the party in charge, it’s supporters and their districts. That will certainly destroy ARM.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#283

Post by segfaultbuserr »

znpy wrote: post #212
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You nailed it. Nvidia's refusal on releasing sufficient technical information and noncooperation with the FOSS community is already self-evident on multiple platforms. Need to play the "Blob" song by OpenBSD. https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39 > Blob was popular at school he was helpful too / He could get your motor runnin' / with a drop of goo / He was givin' it away never charged a dime / But by the time he gra…

did you really spam the whole song here ?

No. This is not the whole song, the whole song is longer than that.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#284

Post by zokula »

panpanna wrote: post #164
9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was the apple gpu fiasco. Apple laptop GPUs were failing at an extraordinary rate in 2010-2011, and Apple were getting harangued in the media about it (which was justified). Apple eventually announced a program to cover replacement of the GPUs, but it was very delayed. I'm 100% convinced the delay was caused by Nvidia refusing to accept responsibility. When the program was released, in order to have the repair…

> I'm 100% convinced the delay was caused by Nvidia refusing to accept responsibility. To be fair, the issue was mainly caused by Apples form-over-function thermal design. To best of my knowledge, Nvidia GPUs works just fine in all other laptops.

> To best of my knowledge, Nvidia GPUs works just fine in all other laptops.

Nvidia bumpgate says hello.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#285

Post by omikun »

simonh wrote: post #150
awalton wrote: post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

Apple’s ARM chips contain an awful lot of different components, some of which are highly customised. The neural engine stuff they use for image processing for example. The CPU cores are custom tuned, but I believe they are still 90% based on ARM CPU core designs. For example the Secure Enclave is actually an ARM developed CPU extension. Apple focuses their efforts vary specifically on areas that give them features th…

Apple licenses the isa only. They implement their own micro architecture.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#286

Post by klelatti »

valuearb wrote: post #282
klelatti wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Nvidia will find a way to use ARM to strongly favour its own SoCs at the expense of everyone else’s - that’s why it would pay $32bn. That’s not good for ARM or the UK (or for everyone else for that matter).

NVidia isn’t going to intentionally destroy a $32B acquisition to throw that money down the drain. They are likely to fully support every customer, to protect their investment, and fund it do new things strategically important to NVidia. If the UK owns ARM, over time every investment decision they made will be required to benefit the party in charge, it’s supporters and their districts. That will certainly destroy AR…

So they invest in Tegra say, turn Tegra into a hugely profitable success story (which would be great) and then the next moment turn to Tegra's biggest competitor who is also using ARM. Will Nvidia owned ARM provide 'full support' to that customer or will they tip the playing field to favour their own products? We would just have to trust Jensun and his successors. I'd rather not have to rely on their sense of fairness.

I don't like state ownership either. No one is suggesting that UK govt should buy ARM outright - just that it takes a stake alongside other long term investors so that ARM can remain independent.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#287

Post by klelatti »

klelatti wrote: post #286
valuearb wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVidia isn’t going to intentionally destroy a $32B acquisition to throw that money down the drain. They are likely to fully support every customer, to protect their investment, and fund it do new things strategically important to NVidia. If the UK owns ARM, over time every investment decision they made will be required to benefit the party in charge, it’s supporters and their districts. That will certainly destroy AR…

So they invest in Tegra say, turn Tegra into a hugely profitable success story (which would be great) and then the next moment turn to Tegra's biggest competitor who is also using ARM. Will Nvidia owned ARM provide 'full support' to that customer or will they tip the playing field to favour their own products? We would just have to trust Jensun and his successors. I'd rather not have to rely on their sense of fairnes…

On reflection Nvidia actually have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to favour their own products in this scenario.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#288

Post by kybernetikos »

valuearb wrote: post #281
kybernetikos wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article, at least Herman Hauser believes that ARM will likely do poorly under nVidias control. I think the idea is that nvidia is a particularly bad owner considering arm's buisness model (for a similar reason that having Nokia as the main Symbian participant was a bad idea), rather than that the UK would exert beneficial influence. Indeed, the suggestion is that the UK government invests as part of…

How would the UK governments influence be beneficial in any way? The governments influence will be the agenda of individual politicians, who know nothing of chip design or care about it. In the US that’s the type of thinking that’s given us the SLS, an $20B launch system that will cost more than twenty times as much as commercial alternatives, and is required by law to use obsolete 50 year old components from key con…

I think you're agreeing with me. The suggestion is not that the UK government will exert any influence over them at all, just as the Norweigan sovereign wealth fund doesn't exert management control over the 1.3% of global equities it owns.

The point made in the article is that that absence of influence will be better than the negative influence that nvidia would apply.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#289

Post by axaxs »

Someone wrote: post #129
duskwuff wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're underestimating the number of ARM microcontrollers in deeply embedded devices. For example, most hard disks and SSDs have at least one ARM core -- and often several -- running the device. They're also quite common in peripherals, like keyboards and mice. The firmware for these devices is often either a realtime embedded OS (like FreeRTOS), or is entirely bespoke. It's virtually never open-source. Even if you'r…

Indeed. https://www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/record-numbers-arm-b... : “Arm silicon partners shipped a record 6.4 billion Arm-based chips in the fourth quarter of 2019” Compare that with https://www.slashgear.com/the-2019-global-smartphone-sales-t... , which says about 1,5 billion smartphones were sold in the four quarters of 2019 . Also, Android, I think, by now is an edge case of open source. The kernel is, but…

I'll just reply once here. Thanks for the source. Keep in mind each cell phone can/does have multiple ARM chips, which I attribute still to 'Linux', maybe that's not fair.

I tried to get real stats and didn't get far. The most I could find was that ARM was actually declining somewhat in embedded, and that embedded was less than half of revenues. Also, that ARM had 90 percent of the 'phone/tablet/laptop' market, but nothing amounting to close to a majority anywhere else.

I think I was incorrect saying that it isn't close, it likely is. I still think more go to supporting a Linux device than not, but am happy to be proven wrong if such data exists.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#290

Post by ris »

shaklee3 wrote: post #226
ris wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are both things that are unlikely to ever be able to run on anything other than nvidia hardware. It's hardly a mark in their favour over abusive lock-in practices.

Well, of course. They're written in cuda. Why would Nvidia try to write it in a language like opencl that even AMD is moving away from, and instead making fft/blas library calls? At least the source code is there if you wanted to port it.

I think it's very clear that I wasn't commenting on what framework they choose to write their projects in, and you're rather deliberately missing my point.
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