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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#371

Post by rhn_mk1 »

CameronNemo wrote: post #277
joshvm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the situation better with Mali? This seems something that might actually improve with Nvidia. I was under the impression that ARM GPUs are currently heavily locked down anyway (in terms of open source drivers). Nvidia would presumably still be locked down, but maybe we'd have more uniform cross platform interfaces like CUDA.

Tegra open source support is great and actually supported by NVIDIA. Probably the best ARM GPU option for open source drivers. Mali support is done by outside groups (not ARM). Midgard and Bifrost models are well supported (anything that starts with a T or G, respectively). Support for older models is a little worse, but better than some other GPUs. Adreno support is done by outside groups (not Qualcomm) and is laggi…

Tegra the chipset is supported by Nvidia, but even then they are not a paragon of cooperation with the Linux community. They have their own non-mainlined driver, while the mainlined one (tegra) is done by someone else.

They did contribute somewhat to the "tegra" driver at least.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#372

Post by javajosh »

moonchild wrote: post #366
dragontamer wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VLIW was the best implementation (20 years ago) of instruction level parallelism. But what have we learned in these past 20 years? * Computers will continue to become more parallel -- AMD Zen2 has 10 execution pipelines, supporting 4-way decode and 6-uop / clock tick dispatch per core, with somewhere close to 200 registers for renaming / reordering instructions. Future processors will be bigger and more parallel, Ice…

Have you seen the mill cpu?

Has anyone?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#373

Post by ckastner »

Softbank paid $32B for ARM in 2016.

A 25% gain over a horizon of four years is not bad for your average investment -- but this isn't an average investment.

First, compared to the SP500, this underperforms over the same horizon (even compared to end of 2019 rather than the inflated prices right now).

Second, ARM's sector (semiconductors) has performed far, far better in that time. The PHOX (Philadelphia Semiconductor Index) doubled in the same time period.

And looking at AMD and NVIDIA, it feels as if ARM would have been in a position to benefit from the surrounding euphoria.

On the other hand, unless I'm misremembering, ARM back then was already considered massively overvalued precisely because it was such a prime takeover target, so perhaps its the $32B that are throwing me off here.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#374

Post by jabl »

darksaints wrote: post #226
drivebycomment wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Itanuim deserved its fiery death and resurrection doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's a dead end architecture, and humanity gained (by freeing up valuable engineering power to other more useful endeavors) when it died.

Itanium was an excellent idea that needed investment in compilers. Nobody wanted to make that investment because speculative execution got them 80% of the way there without the investment in compilers. But as it turns out, speculative execution was a phenomenally bad idea, and patching its security vulnerabilities has set back processor performance to the point where VLIW seems like a good idea again. We should have…

> Itanium was an excellent idea that needed investment in compilers.

ISTR that Intel & HP spent well over a $billion on VLIW compiler R&D, with crickets to show for it all.

How much are you suggesting should be spent this time for a markedly different result?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#375

Post by emn13 »

millstone wrote: post #247
mxcrossb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that if Apple felt that Nvidia would limit them, they could have outbid them for ARM! So I think you are correct.

I think Apple is not committed to ARM at all. Bitcode, Rosetta 2, "Apple Silicon" - it all suggests they want to keep ISA flexibility.

Wow, but that cost - it's not a small thing to transition ISA, and don't forget that this transition is one of the simpler ones (more registers, fairly few devices). The risks of transitioning everything away from arm would be much greater.

I guess they have some ISA flexibility (which is remarkable). But not much; each transition was still a very special set of circumstances and a huge hurdle, I'm sure.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#376

Post by headmelted »

millstone wrote: post #247
mxcrossb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that if Apple felt that Nvidia would limit them, they could have outbid them for ARM! So I think you are correct.

I think Apple is not committed to ARM at all. Bitcode, Rosetta 2, "Apple Silicon" - it all suggests they want to keep ISA flexibility.

Exactly. Apple’s strategy here is very clear:

Offer customers iOS apps and games on the next MacBook as a straight swap for Boot Camp and Parallels. Once they’ve moved everyone over to their own chips and brought back Rosetta and U/Bs they’re essentially free to replace whatever they like at the architecture level.

In their reveal I noticed that they only mentioned ARM binaries running in virtual environments. It makes sense if you don’t want to commit to supporting GNU tools natively on your devices (as it would mean sticking with an established ISA)

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#377

Post by yreg »

ckastner wrote: post #373

Softbank paid $32B for ARM in 2016. A 25% gain over a horizon of four years is not bad for your average investment -- but this isn't an average investment. First, compared to the SP500, this underperforms over the same horizon (even compared to end of 2019 rather than the inflated prices right now). Second, ARM's sector (semiconductors) has performed far, far better in that time. The PHOX (Philadelphia Semiconductor…

It vastly overperforms the Softbank ventures we usually hear about (excluding BABA).

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#378

Post by jabl »

dragontamer wrote: post #303
anarazel wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

VLIW was the best implementation (20 years ago) of instruction level parallelism. But what have we learned in these past 20 years? * Computers will continue to become more parallel -- AMD Zen2 has 10 execution pipelines, supporting 4-way decode and 6-uop / clock tick dispatch per core, with somewhere close to 200 registers for renaming / reordering instructions. Future processors will be bigger and more parallel, Ice…

I agree there is merit in the idea of encoding instruction dependencies in the ISA. There have been a number of research projects in this area, e.g. wavescalar, EDGE/TRIPS, etc.

It's not only about reducing the need for figuring out dependencies at runtime, but you could also partly reduce the need for the (power hungry and hard to scale!) register file to communicate between instructions.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#379

Post by m0zg »

On the one hand, this is bad news - I would prefer ARM to remain independent. But on the other, from a purely selfish standpoint, NVIDIA will likely lean on Apple pretty hard to get its GPUs into Apple devices again, which bodes well for GPGPU and deep learning applications.

Apple is probably putting together a RISC-V hardware group as we speak. The Jobs ethos will not allow them to depend this heavily on somebody else for such a critical technology.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#380

Post by jabl »

Ecco wrote: post #322
topspin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My instincts are telling me this is smoke and mirrors to rationalize a $40E9 deal. The only part of that that computes at all is the GPU integration, and that only works if NVIDIA doesn't terrorize Arm licencees. The rest is buzzwords.

Want to be nerdy and use powers-of-ten? Fine by me! But then please go all the way: $4E10!!!

Perhaps the parent prefers engineering notation, which uses exponents that are a multiple of three?
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