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

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

#291

Post by OJFord »

zimpenfish wrote: post #271
xdavidliu wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the point: "I could care less" is grammatically correct, but the meaning is not what was intended. If I had a cup and wanted to tell you there's no more beer in the cup, I wouldn't say "there's beer in the cup", even though the sentence "there's beer in the cup" would be accepted by professional linguists.

> That's not the point: "I could care less" is grammatically correct, but the meaning is not what was intended. The intended meaning is obvious. There's plenty of colloquial phrases which say one thing but mean another: "I could murder him", for example, doesn't literally mean that. That is how language works. And, if you saying "there's beer in the cup" was understood by everyone as meaning "there's no more beer in…

By analogy to vectors though, 'I could murder him' is directionally correct but magnitudinally wrong. Whereas 'I could care less' (as used) is directionally wrong - no you couldn't, your point is how little/not at all you care, so stop talking about the existence of an amount that you do care!

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

#292

Post by shaklee3 »

ris wrote: post #290
shaklee3 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> These are both things that are unlikely to ever be able to run on anything other than nvidia hardware.

I think it's very clear that the framework was important here. Because you were pointing out that they don't open source much, I pointed out that they do, then you nitpicked by saying it's cuda.

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

#293

Post by coldtea »

valuearb wrote: post #250
coldtea wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. Yeah, so? If the 21st century taught us anything, is that protectionism makes sense for many products/services (not that big countries really forgot it - they only "forgot" it when for the time that their products was the only game in town).

The 21st century has taught us that free trade makes the most sense.

Not really. Except if one confuses free trade and protection with planned vs market economy (which is a different distinction).

The big powers that profited most in the 20th century, weren't following free trade - they were colonial and post-colonial overlords, enforcing their trade deals and terms on lesser countries.

Free trade was OK for those big countries like the US, UK, France, Germany, etc they were running the shots, and were net top exporters themselvess...

And even at that, they themselves could not care less about "free trade" doctrines. Sponsoring your own country industries, using your political force to get global deals, subsidies, etc, were OK for the mid-20th/early 21st century, when they had done it.

When that changed, and their trade partners got increasingly bigger, "free trade" got too much for them and pressured their partners countries (like with the Plaza Accord).

Now that the US can't do the same to China (due to its sheer size and power), old globalization and free trade flag-bearers discovered suddenly that free trade might not be the "be all end all".

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

#294

Post by thayne »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #162
thayne wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nVidia has a very long history of not getting along with Linux.

And now, hilariously enough, they have ended up with a lot of their growth coming from Linux-based systems. To be fair, I recently bought a new Thinkpad, and with Ubuntu 20.04 and Nvidia CUDA just worked, with absolutely no tuning (I didn't even need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which I found pretty odd). So things seem to be improving, because there's money in it for Nvidia.

The Nouveau drivers have a throttled clock speed due to firmware signatures. And the proprietary drivers are complete mess on wayland, where most compositors and other GPU drivers use GBM, but Nvidia did their own thing and used EGLStreams. Maybe someday in the future the situation will improve, but historically, it hasn't been good.

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

#295

Post by valuearb »

kybernetikos wrote: post #288
valuearb wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no such thing as absence of influence. Government funding always comes with political influence, and almost always negative.

Norwegian sovereign fund is an investment fund that holds a tiny fraction of each public companies stock in its fund. For the UK to engineer a purchase of ARM would require raising $32B, offering to kick in 1.3% would go nowhere. Anyone with 99% of $32B doesn’t need the UK.

An alternate deal is only possible if the UK offered to kick in a large part, probably at least $10B, and taking a large minority stake. At that level they’d have to have significant influence, or the politicians who engineer it will get run right out of office. What if the new owner moves R&D from the UK?

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

#296

Post by valuearb »

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…

ARM isn’t independent if the UK takes a stake. It’s beholden to those politicians, and those politicians are beholden to their key supporters.

NVidia will be contractually obligated to support ARM customers. If over time they do a poor job, they just flushed $32B down the drain.this is an imaginary problem that requires zero preemptive government action. It’s like trying to stop someone from buying an expensive car they can afford on the unsupported theory they won’t take care of it.

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

#297

Post by cpgxiii »

pjmlp wrote: post #107
johnklos wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVIDIA can compete based on the superior performance of their products, but that's not enough. They try to attempt lock-in by encouraging software writers to use CUDA and not use OpenCL. In many projects that support both, OpenCL and CUDA often give similar performance, and in some, OpenCL is faster than CUDA. So CUDA isn't about getting more performance - it's about excluding everything non-NVIDIA. I suspect that NV…

They don't need to do any lock-in when the choice is between plain old C with printf like debugging, and a set of programming languages able to target PTX, with out of the box support for C, C++, Fortran and several managed languages, and nice graphical debugging tools. C++ support only came to OpenCL after it was clear to Khronos that it was time to move beyond C only vision of the world, yet almost no one bothered…

The problem with OpenCL, just like OpenGL, is that it relies on vendor support for essentially the full stack. That means if a single vendor doesn't support the feature, it's basically impossible to ship any code that uses that feature to arbitrary users. Nvidia lagging behind in its support for OpenCL 2.x was probably not explicitly stated as "let's sabotage this competing open standard by dragging our feet" but that was the result. AMD and Intel both put together OpenCL 2.x support, so clearly Nvidia could have finished their incomplete support but didn't.

The fundamental failing Khronos made was repeating the GLSL mistake and not specifying a compiled IR that would decouple OpenCL kernel code from program execution. This was clearly known to be a mistake at the time, given ample evidence from CUDA and HLSL that an IR was possible and could greatly improve the developer experience.

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

#298

Post by simonh »

omikun wrote: post #285
simonh wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple has an architecture license from ARM, which allows them to design their own cores yes, but also includes all the benefits of all the lower tiers including rights to all the ARM designs.

This would have to be the case, because Apple still uses many of their earlier ARM designs in products, which we know used ARM designed cores and would definitely require core design licenses.

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

#299

Post by kybernetikos »

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…

> NVidia isn’t going to intentionally destroy a $32B acquisition to throw that money down the drain.

It's not just an assumption that they will manage their investment poorly (although that wouldn't surprise me), it's what the likely behaviours of other market participants would be if a key supplier was controlled by a competitor.

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

#300

Post by bemmu »

tinktank wrote: post #43

Surely a sale would be allowed if regulatory compliance compliance is met? I was part of a private semiconductor company bought by a public American company and the buying company had to convince the US gov they would not turn the product line into a captive portal. I expect it's the same here?

Btw. I'm still curious about your fiction writing side gig. Post an update about that again some time?
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