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SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

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Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#41
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(Well, relative obscurity. I see they are still used in media devices and cheap routers.) It's actually gone; MIPS owners have abandoned MIPS to focus on RISC-V.

Kind of a shame because MIPS is one of the more approachable ISAs if you want to learn assembly

RISC-V was designed to to be a teaching ISP. A minimal RISC-V is not so different from MISP. I don't think you lose much.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#42
Hopefully it will end back on the LSE, there was much lamenting here in the UK when SoftBank acquired them. They are one of the UKs biggest tech success, one of our few “unicorns”. For them to be be back on the LSE it would be a good signal of strength in UK tech.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some lobbying going on behind the scenes from the UK government to try and ensure it happens. Some strategic tax brakes or regional investment.

With the governments (somewhat controversial) investment in OneWeb last year they have shown they have a uk tech strategy. Although I think that was Dominic Cummings doing and he’s well out of the picture.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#43

Why will ARM succeed where MIPS faded into obscurity? (Well, relative obscurity. I see they are still used in media devices and cheap routers.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_Technologies

> Why will ARM succeed where MIPS faded into obscurity?

Because for the mass consumer market needing decent compute power, there is only ARM and x86-64 left, everything else has gone downhill in actual usage - and ARM is way easier to implement with a lot more vendors available than the x86-64 world which is basically Intel vs AMD.

The only competition that remains is Loongson for Chinese government purposes, but no one outside of China and maybe Russia will touch that stuff voluntarily.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#44

> before March 2023. Why does it take so long? I would be pretty surprised if they aren't already operating with audited GAAP financials, etc etc. Or is the extended date a hedge against market conditions, to avoid having to announce a delay.

An IPO takes a really long time to initiate, draft, and conclude -- from legal due diligences, to investment banking drafts or market scouting, and securing early buyers. Investment banks kind of bid on the right to do the IPO for instance, each offering their own kind of package for ARM to go with.

M&A departments in New York or London must have been (or still be) pulling all-nighters.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more money from different market segments. This is the cultural difference between ARM and Nvidia. ARM does care enough about their IP that you'll need to pay them for ARM's effort to develop their IP, but beyond that they will not restrict you unless it'll put ARM into legal trouble (basically export restrictions). Hey, you could get everything now with…

Imo the poor state of the GPU market competition-wise is the only way NVidia is able to get away with this, otherwise competitors would just eat their lunch by doing exactly the same thing without the arbitrary market segmentation.

NVidia are legitimately good at what they do, it's not like Oracle where all the money comes from milking the licensing arrangements.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#46
post #2

Good, we need more players, not less.

I didn't like much this but having ARM in the hands of financial institution which doesn't have any motivation to invest in the technology doesn't seem any better (and probably doesnt understand/doesnt care about it). In the other hand, Nvidia have a good track record creating good products.

Well money speaks, who would own them? The ones actually are willing to pay the price.

It is not other people's say unfortunately.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more money from different market segments. This is the cultural difference between ARM and Nvidia. ARM does care enough about their IP that you'll need to pay them for ARM's effort to develop their IP, but beyond that they will not restrict you unless it'll put ARM into legal trouble (basically export restrictions). Hey, you could get everything now with…

That is good for Samsung/Qualcomm/Mediatek/Apple, but let's be honest, it is a failure as a business. Despite of being used on pretty much 100% of all smartphones' SoC, they barely make any money. Also, their designs are lagging behind, M1 and probably Nuvia are example of that.

I think their designs are meant to be lagging, M1 isn't "just better" it's a lot more about media encoding and packing more types of cores together, which while innovative is not what ARM should be doing.

ARM makes prototype designs that you can extend, M1 is an absolute success of that model.

Regardless: you say they've failed as a business, your metric is how much they earn from being nearly everywhere.

I would pointedly disagree: they're everywhere, that's success, they're everywhere and profitable. There's absolutely no need to rent seek... this is unsustainable capitalist thinking.

They're able to innovate and turn a profit with their "modest" income, why do you need them to do more than that? How do you know they would do better with more money?

Intel (yes, apple to oranges) has many orders of magnitude more money, but most of it goes into bureaucracies.

See also: Microsoft, Oracle

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nvidia have a good track record creating good products. What incentive would Nvidia have to develop new ARM features that would assist competitors in competing with them? The Fujitsu's A64FX Processor for example somewhat competes with Nvidia datacenter GPUs. What incentive would Nvidia have to continue to develop the Arm Scalable Vector Extension? The only good thing from this sale would be the pivot to RISC-V.

Money? like Samsung selling their chips to Apple. Nvidia have a lot of proprietary stuff which allows them to get away even with inferior hardware. Nvidia will prob lose the AI datacenter market anyways, customs asics will just use RISC-V if Nvidia try to stop them.

Nvidia doesn't care about secondary money. They're all about integrating stuff and denying others to do so.

Nvidia is a castle because of the moats they've built. Not because they're leaps and bounds ahead in terms of silicon and technical wizardry. They shunned OpenCL, they'll probably shun Vulkan for GPGPU and make sure that people are locked to CUDA and its ecosystem. They have no intention to play fair.

We're going to see how Mellanox will evolve under their command.

Re: SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO

#50
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(Well, relative obscurity. I see they are still used in media devices and cheap routers.) It's actually gone; MIPS owners have abandoned MIPS to focus on RISC-V.

Kind of a shame because MIPS is one of the more approachable ISAs if you want to learn assembly

Once you actually look, you'll likely be surprised by how much RISC-V resembles MIPS.
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