411–420 of 784 posts
The British should never have allowed foreign ownership of their core tech
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).
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There were two separate IoT business units: Platform ( https://pelion.com ) and Data ( https://www.treasuredata.com/ ). The Platform unit fits the Segars post-acquisition comment about end-to-end IoT software architecture, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24465005 > One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make commitments to the UK government over Arm’s future in Britain, where opposition politicians…
The UK government never learns. Kraft made similar promises when buying Cadbury regarding jobs,but quietly reneged on them over time. The Kraft CEO was asked to show up before an UK parliament committee, but of course declined, and that was the end of the story.
This it terrible news for the FLOSS community. Nvidia has consistently for many years refused to properly support Linux and other open source OSs. Heck, Wayland compositors just say "if you're using nvidia then don't even try to use our software" since they're fed up of Nvidia's lack of collaboration. I really hope ARM doesn't go the same way. :(
Whether or not some SoC (e.g. in a phone) is going to be supported by Linux doesn't depend on ARM but on the manufacturer of the given chip. That won't change in any way.
ARM maintains the GCC toolchain for the ARM architecture but that is unlikely to go anywhere (and even if it did, it is open source and anyone else can take it over).
The much bigger problem is that Nvidia could now start putting squeeze on chip makers who license the ARM IP for their own business reasons - Nvidia makes its own ARM-based ICs (e.g. the Jetson, Tegra) and it is hard to imagine that they will not try to use their position to stiffle the competition (e.g. from Qualcomm or Samsung).
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The UK government never learns. Kraft made similar promises when buying Cadbury regarding jobs,but quietly reneged on them over time. The Kraft CEO was asked to show up before an UK parliament committee, but of course declined, and that was the end of the story.
It absolutely outrages me. I've posted elsewhere on the thread about this, but I want to do something to prevent this sort of thing in future. Setting up a think tank seems like a viable idea. See my other response in the thread if you are interested and want to get in contact.
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You know how the tobacco companies work? From a purely capitalistic standpoint, it's fine to kill off some of your customer base if you make more money from the remainder. If it can work for tobacco, you believe that Nvidia is will to kill off some of its customers if they can get the remainder to pay more.
Unless they are putting explosives in the chips the customers will be free to go elsewhere
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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…
I think your conflating OoO and speculative execution. It was OoO which the itanium architects (apparently) didn't think would work as well as it did. OoO and being able to build wide superscaler machines, which could dynamically determine instruction dependency chains is what killed EPIC. Speculative execution is something you would want to do with the itanium as well, otherwise the machine is going to be stalling a…
questionably from the beginning
I wonder which cloud provider is the first to offer this in a coherent way.
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I would love OpenPOWER to succeed. I just don't see the 48 pin QFP version that costs I don't see OpenPOWER going there, but I can easily see RISC-V going there. So, for the moment, that is the horse I'm betting on.
I miss DIP chips that would fit on breadboards. I don't have steady enough hands to solder QFP onto a PCB, and I'm too cheap to buy an oven :(
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It absolutely outrages me. I've posted elsewhere on the thread about this, but I want to do something to prevent this sort of thing in future. Setting up a think tank seems like a viable idea. See my other response in the thread if you are interested and want to get in contact.
Get the deals in writing, with explicit liabilities if contract is broken. There, I fixed it.
Talking points from the founders of Arm & Nvidia: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its-... > Huang told me that first thing that the combined company will do is to, “bring NVIDIA technology through Arm’s vast network.” So I’d expect NVIDIA GPU and NPU IP to become available quickly to smartphone, tablet, TV and automobile SoC providers as quickly as possible. > Arm CEO Simon Segars framed it we…
Bye bye ARM Mali =(