Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

nvidianews.nvidia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 784 posts

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#431

Post by ImprobableTruth »

p1necone wrote: post #291
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Nvidia have a habit of killing acquisitions? I'm only familiar with their graphics business, but as far as I can see the only culture going on there is excellence.

NVIDIAs whole schtick is making a bunch of interesting software and arbitrarily locking it to their own hardware. Doesn't seem compatible with being the steward for what has up until now been a relatively open CPU architecture.

arbitrarily? Nvidia invests a lot in software R&D, why should they just give it away to their competitor AMD who basically invest nothing in comparison?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#432

Post by [deleted] »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #410

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. :(

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#433

Post by oxfordmale »

djmobley wrote: post #407
oxfordmale wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except the Cadbury-Kraft debacle led to major reforms in how the UK regulates foreign takeovers. In the case of Arm, the guarantees provided back in 2016 were legally binding, which is why we’re here, four years and another acquisition later, with Nvidia now eager to demonstrate it is standing by those commitments. Maybe in this particular instance they did learn something?

Nvidia could still asset strip ARM, and then let ARM decline organically with redundancies justified by the decrease in revenue.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#434

Post by bencollier49 »

tomalpha wrote: post #427
bencollier49 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should learn to prevent the sale, period. Promises to retain some jobs (for ever? What happens if profits decline? What happens if the core tech is sold and ARM becomes a shell? Do the rules still apply?) address a tiny fraction of the problems presented by the sale of one of our core national tech companies.

I would have liked to see ARM remain owned in the UK. I think it's proven itself capable of innovation and organic growth on its own. But how can we evaluate the whether that will continue? What if ARM is not sold, and then (for whatever reason) stagnates, doesn't innovate, gets overtaken in some way, and enters gradual decline? Perhaps that's unlikely, but prevent the sale, period is feels too absolute.

That feels like giving up, to me. We should have the confidence that British industry can development and flourish on its own merits without being sold off to foreign interests.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#435

Post by kabacha »

janoc wrote: post #422
lrem wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a fundamental threat to ARM in the raise of RISC-V.

RISC-V is only a tiiny player in the low end embedded space (there are only a few parts actually available with that instruction set) and no competition at all at the high end. Maybe in a decade or so it may be more relevant but not today. Calling this a "fundamental threat" is a tad exaggerated.

Where are people getting the "decade" number from? Looks demand for RISC-V just went up significantly and it's not like it's broken or not-existing, RISC-V "just worked" a year ago already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19118642

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#436

Post by branko_d »

dragontamer wrote: post #305
darksaints wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional compiler techniques may have struggled with maintaining code for different architectures, but a lot has changed in the last 15 years. The rise of widely used IR languages has led to compilers that support dozens of architectures and hundreds of instruction sets. And they are getting better all the time. The compiler has nearly all of the information that the CPU has, and it has orders of magnitude more. A…

> At best, your CPU can think a couple dozen cycles ahead of what it is currently executing. The 200-sized reorder buffer says otherwise. Loads/stores can be reordered for 200+ different concurrent objects on modern Intel skylake (2015 through 2020) CPUs. And its about to get a bump to 300+ sized reorder buffers in Icelake. Modern CPUs are designed to "think ahead" almost the entirety of DDR4 RAM Latency, allowing re…

Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge "call rax"?

Morpheus: No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't need "call rax".

---

Compiler has access to optimizations that are at the higher level of abstraction than what CPU can do. For example, the compiler can eliminate the call completely (i.e. inline the function), or convert a dynamic dispatch into static (if it can prove that an object will always have a specific type at the call site), or decide where to favor small code over fast code (via profile-guided optimization), or even switch from non-optimized code (but with short start-up time) to optimized code mid-execution (tiered compilation in JITs), move computation outside loops (if it can prove that the result is the same in all iterations), and many other things...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#437

Post by jonhohle »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #389
jonhohle wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is their monopoly or which of their competitors are they colluding with?

Neither of those are required to violate anti-trust laws.

Such as? https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#438

Post by haten »

manquer wrote: post #429
Blammar wrote: post #243

No one has seemed to notice the following two things: "To pave the way for the deal, SoftBank reversed an earlier decision to strip out an internet-of-things business from Arm and transfer it to a new company under its control. That would have stripped Arm of what was meant to be the high-growth engine that would power it into a 5G-connected future. One person said that SoftBank made the decision because it would hav…

It is not "free", it means current shareholders of Nvidia are paying for the remaining money. Their stock is diluted on fresh issue of shares.[1] The $12B comes from Nvidia the company, the remaining money comes from Nvidia's shareholders directly. [1] Only if the valuation of ARM is "worth it" the fresh issue of shares will not cost the current shareholders anything. This is rarely the case , if Nvida overvalued(or…

Yes

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#439

Post by rocqua »

inlined wrote: post #394
smabie wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rare for the acquiring companies stock to not decline, regardless of whether the market thinks they overpaid.

I worked at Parse when it was bought by Facebook. The day the news broke, Facebook’s market cap grew by multiples of the acquisition price. I remember being gobsmacked that Facebook effectively got paid to buy us.

Unless Facebook itself actually issued stock at the new price, Facebook did not get paid. It were the Facebook shareholders that got paid.

Really, it shows that the market valued Parse much more than the cash it cost Facebook. If Parse was bought with stock instead of cash, that's almost cooler. Since it allowed Parse to capture more of the surplus value they created. (Since the stock price popped).

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#440

Post by rocqua »

emn13 wrote: post #375
millstone wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At the low-level driver interface, transitioning ISA is a big deal. But I would guess that, at higher levels, most of the work is just changing the target of your compiler?

As in, most of the work occurs in the low-level parts of the Operating system. After that the OS should abstract the differences away from User-space.

Post reply on HN