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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

#31

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

chongli wrote: post #23
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…

I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. There's far too much at stake here. Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?

I think there’s some MIPS and SH-3/SH-4 smartphones from the early 2000s still around.

I had an SH-3 PDA in 2001, but Microsoft dropped support for SH-3 and MIPS in Windows CE by the time “Windows Smartphone 2002” came out (my 2002 HTC Canary runs ARM, IIRC) so it’d have to be a non-CE platform. What did the Palm Handspring use?

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

#32

Post by johnklos »

mud_dauber wrote: post #14
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…

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

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 NVIDIA's gameplaying is what led to Apple deciding to not use NVIDIA in any Macs for the last several years.

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

#33

Post by frandroid »

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 won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves

Their new notebooks are still moving to an ARM-based CPU... Even if they enhanced the ARM design they still have an ARM licence.

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

#34

Post by axaxs »

I for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV.

That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at the spec level, we'd have real competition again from Samsung, Mediatek, and potentially others.

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

#36

Post by m4rtink »

axaxs wrote: post #34

I for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV. That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at t…

Even with the potential for some positive outcomes I'm not sure it's worth the potential disruption.

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

#37

Post by jcheng »

01100011 wrote: post #3

Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. "most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia" Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).

Tegra (as found in Nintendo Switch). Have they given up on that line of SoCs?

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

#38

Post by enos_feedler »

H8crilA wrote: post #18

NVIDIA's stock is so massively pumped up. They will simply make an all-stock offer that's pretty much impossible to refuse and that will be the end of it (most likely).

This is why I think it is likely to happen too. NVDA needs to replace the pumped value with real value and this is a great way to do it.

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

#39

Post by 2mylesaway »

Competition breeds innovation they never should have sold in the first place. If an investment firm won't hold them they should start an IPO instead of seeking value validation from contending clients and players in the hardware industry.

I'm tired of the tech industry's standard duopolies. ARM breaks that trend by licensing to Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, MediaTek, & others; surrendering independence today could hurt the future of tomorrow.

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

#40

Post by geerlingguy »

xdavidliu wrote: post #25
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 won't be phased Nit: fazed, not phased.

Unless we're in the Star Trek universe...
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