Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by vageli » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #267

vageli wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Antitrust regulators power is determined by the size of the market, not the location of the company HQ. > Antitrust regulators for big markets like the US, EU can effectively block mergers from any internationally operating company. Both AMD and Nvidia need access to EU - their customers certainly do. They could block the merger and if the companies decided to go ahead with it anyway, the EU would ban imports. But,…

> and if the companies decided to go ahead with it anyway This has never happened, because the profit loss from both parties from losing access to a market with 400M+ people has always made investors blanche.

What I mean is, in what practical way could the EU ban ARM/Nvidia from their market, considering these manufacturers' chips are in many devices? Would that mean devices with those components would also be banned?

What I'm trying to get at is, with a sufficiently large merger, the emerging company may produce products so ubiquitous that it would be impractical to bar them from your economy, due to the widespread use of their products and their integration into other products.

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

#302

Post by Someone » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

axaxs wrote: post #289

Someone wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

I don’t have those numbers, but would guess that, the smaller the ARM CPU, the more of them are sold.

Also, the more are sold, the more hardware costs become important relatively to development costs, making Linux a poorer choice than smaller OSes or even bare metal.

(And the smallest really are small. https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/processors/cortex-m/co... tells me you can get a 0.0066 mm² 32-bit CPU. That one doesn’t have a MMU)

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

#303

Post by andoriyu » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

tasty_freeze wrote: post #272

asddubs wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's a pretty meaningless number without further context

The person I replied to said nvidia doesn't contribute much to open source. I pointed at their github repositories. If you care about the context, it is there, and there is no risk of me summarizing it unfairly.

Having some of your code in github isn't contributing to open source.

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

#304

Post by com2kid » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #45

com2kid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internally we supported SH4 through CE7! Source: I maintained the compiler test infra for it.

I salute you sir! What’s the current roadmap for CE? I saw there’s a new CE environment in Win10 IoT, but it feels like too-little-too-late to save the myriad of embedded enterprise CE systems.

> What’s the current roadmap for CE?

No clue sorry! I left many many years ago.

CE7 was incredibly good, the minimum image size we had it running on was ~20MB on disk.

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

#305

Post by xdavidliu » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

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…

> And, if you saying "there's beer in the cup" was understood by everyone as meaning "there's no more beer in the cup", professional linguists and dictionaries would be A-OK with that interpretation.

The fact that "I could care less" is now clearly understood is not intentional. It's an adaptation to a mistake. It's similar to how people say "irregardless", which is clearly an error. It's unambiguous, and everyone knows what you mean. It's still a mistake, and using "regardless" is strictly better.

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

#306

Post by zimpenfish » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

xdavidliu wrote: post #305

zimpenfish wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> And, if you saying "there's beer in the cup" was understood by everyone as meaning "there's no more beer in the cup", professional linguists and dictionaries would be A-OK with that interpretation. The fact that "I could care less" is now clearly understood is not intentional. It's an adaptation to a mistake. It's similar to how people say "irregardless", which is clearly an error. It's unambiguous, and everyone kn…

> is not intentional. It's an adaptation to a mistake.

Yes, that's what language is. Will you be complaining about "apron" as an adaptation to a mistake?

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/how-a-na...

> It's similar to how people say "irregardless", which is clearly an error.

It's an error that's been being made since 1795, though, and people have been understanding it which pretty much qualifies it as being incorporated into the language.

(I should note that I am strongly descriptivist and think that prescriptivists are silly people.)

> using "regardless" is strictly better.

I think "regardless" is better, yes, because it's a lot easier to say but that's just my opinion, not a Gilt Edged Rule Of English.

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

#307

Post by DaiPlusPlus » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 1:23 AM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #304

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I salute you sir! What’s the current roadmap for CE? I saw there’s a new CE environment in Win10 IoT, but it feels like too-little-too-late to save the myriad of embedded enterprise CE systems.

> What’s the current roadmap for CE? No clue sorry! I left many many years ago. CE7 was incredibly good, the minimum image size we had it running on was ~20MB on disk.

I saw the WPF-esque XAML demos for CE7 - I was really impressed and also hopeful that it would lead to smooth fluid UIs in embedded devices like car infotainment systems and home thermostats.

Oh how naive I was!

(I assume the push for WPF-like XAML in CE7 was because at the time (2011-2012?) there was still hope of a CE7-based Windows Mobile competing with iOS and Android, and Microsoft realized the mistake of not modernizing CE's UI system at-all between 2002 and 2012? Windows Mobile 6.5 was a hideous eyesore (and all the pretty home-screen functionality was literally just skin-deep).

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

#308

Post by mycall » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 5:20 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #298

omikun wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All this seems fitting since they are an ARM founder.

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

#309

Post by mycall » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #149

slimsag wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used the ZenFone 2 for about a year ~3.5 years ago; it worked surprisingly well. It was impressive that it really "just worked" like a normal ARM device. There were some annoying software aspects (the Play Store only allowed me to download x86 apps even though it could run ARM apps), and the device was 100% a battery hog - but cool tech. Surprised Intel gave up on that effort.

Intel gave up because Atom for smartphones were sold at a negative price after marketing incentives. They couldn’t even get volume from manufacturers when it costed less than zero; because no one wanted to invest upfront R&D costs.

Intel should have made their own phones.

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

#310

Post by ksec » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 12:52 PM UTC

Nexxxeh wrote: post #76

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #17

Seems like alarmist FUD to me. While I agree that having Arm owned by any one of its major customers creates some potential conflicts of interests, I think the notion that NVIDIA or any other company would start to drive licensees away with draconian terms/costs with some poor business planning pretty silly. The more interesting question to me is what would any single (major customer of Arm) company gain from owning…

If they are buying the perpetual license and hiring the ARM expertise anyway, why not just get the company, which also includes giving nVidia majority control of the ARM roadmap as well. You get the people who literally wrote the book on modern ARM, you get all the IP which builds up the patent chest (improving chances of counter-suit and cross-licensing in the event of patent infringement issues), you don't need to…

> If they are buying the perpetual license and hiring the ARM expertise anyway, why not just get the company, which also includes giving nVidia majority control of the ARM roadmap as well.

Because the perpetual license is much much cheaper than $32B.