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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#281

Post by exikyut »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #11
easton wrote: post #4

Could Apple hypothetically use their perpetual license to ARM to license the ISA to other manufacturers if they so desired? (not that they do now, but it could be a saving grace if Nvidia assimilated ARM fully).

I'm pretty sure they can't, but I also think there's no way in hell they'd do it if they could. It's not in Apple's DNA. Better for them if no one else has access to the instruction set. I bet they'd make a completely custom ISA if they could. Heck, maybe they plan to some day, and that's why they're calling the new Mac processors "Apple Silicon".

Thinking about that though, from a technical perspective keeping the name but changing the function would only produce bad PR.

- "We changed from the 68K to PPC" "Agh!...fine"

- "We changed from PPC to x86" "What, again?"

- "We changed from x86 to Apple Silicon" "...oooo...kay..."

- "We changed from Apple Silicon to, uh, Apple Silicon - like it's still called Apple Silicon, but the architecture is different" "What's an architecture?" "The CPU ISA." "The CPU is a what?"

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#282

Post by xbmcuser »

walterbell wrote: post #273
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…

Are they getting 10% of nvidia or keeping 10% of Arm

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#283

Post by nl »

Just noting that Apple doesn't have a perpetual license, they have an architecture license[1], including for 64bit parts[2].

This allows them to design their own cores using the Arm instruction set[3] and presumably includes perpetual IP licenses for Arm IP used while the license is in effect. New Arm IP doesn't seem to be included, since existing 32bit Arm licensees had to upgrade to a 64bit license[2].

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-h...

[2] https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#284

Post by sillysaurusx »

shaklee3 wrote: post #255
sillysaurusx wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one TensorFlow is not a generic framework like cuda is, so you lose a whole bunch of the configurability you have with cuda Why make generalizations like this? It's not true, and we've devolved back into the "nu uh" we originally started with. This is trivial to do on a GPU, and is built into the library Yes, I'm sure there are hardwired operations that are trivial to do on GPUs. That's not exactly a +1 in favor…

I gave you an example of something you can't do, which is an overlap-save FFT, and you ignored that completely. Please implement it, or show me any example of someone implementing any custom FFT that's not a simple, standard, batched FFT. I'll take any example of implementing any type of signal processing pipeline on TPU, such as a 5G radio. Your last sentence is pretty funny: a GPU can't do certain workloads because…

Which part of this can't be done on TPUs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlap%E2%80%93save_method#Ps... As far as I can tell, all of those operations can be done on TPUs. In fact, I linked to the operation list that shows they can be.

You'll need to link me to some specific implementation that you want me to port over, not just namedrop some random algorithm. Got a link to a github?

If your point is "There isn't a preexisting operation for overlap-save FFT" then... yes, sure, that's true. There's also not a preexisting operation for any of the hundreds of other algorithms that you'd like to do with signal processing. But they can all be implemented efficiently.

Yet it remains a fact that TPU cannot do certain workloads without offloading to the CPU (making it orders of magnitude slower), and that's somehow okay?

I think this is the crux of the issue: you're saying X can't be done, I'm saying X can be done, so please link to a specific code example. Emphasis on "specific" and "code".

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#285

Post by walterbell »

xbmcuser wrote: post #282
walterbell wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are they getting 10% of nvidia or keeping 10% of Arm

10% of Arm division of Nvidia, https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its-....

> Softbank ownership: Will keep 10% stake in new entity

That would mean Nvidia acquired 90% of Arm for $40B, i.e. Arm was valued at $44B.

Is Softbank invested in Arm licensees, who may benefit from Softbank influence? Alternately, which Arm licensees would bid in a future auction of Softbank's 10% stake of Nvidia's Arm division?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#286

Post by jonhohle »

kabacha wrote: post #279
dannyw wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is their monopoly or which of their competitors are they colluding with?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#287

Post by anarazel »

darksaints wrote: post #142
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.

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…

IMO VLIW is an absurdly bad choice for a general purpose processor. It requires baking in a huge amount of low level micro-architectural details into the compiler / generated code. Which obviously leads to problems with choosing what hardware generation to optimize for / not being able to generate good code for future architectures.

And the compiler doesn't even come close to having as much information as the CPU has. Which basically means that most of the VLIW stuff just ends up needing to be broken up inside the CPU for good performance.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#288

Post by ncmncm »

systemvoltage wrote: post #245
ethbr0 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The sole meaning of the "Gartner Curve" is the amount of money available to be spent on hype, that Gartner can hope to get. It has the most tenuous imaginable relationship with the market for actual, you know, products.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#290

Post by hyperpallium2 »

edge-AI!

They're also building an ARM supercomputer at Cambridge, but server-ARM doesn't sound like a focus.

I'm just hoping for some updated mobile Nvidia GPUs... and maybe the rumoured 4K Nintendo Switch.

They say they won't muck it up, and it seems sensible to keep it profitable:

> As part of NVIDIA, Arm will continue to operate its open-licensing model while maintaining the global customer neutrality that has been foundational to its success, with 180 billion chips shipped to-date by its licensees.

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