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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#471

Post by yvdriess »

fluffything wrote: post #453
andy_ppp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what everyone thinks will happen is a pretend open ARM architecture and Nvidia CPUs dominating. Nvidia isn’t going to license the best GPU features they start adding. It’s an excellent deal for NVIDIA of course, I’m certain they intend to make the chips they produce much faster than the ones they license (if they even ever release another open design) to the point where buying CPUs from Nvidia might be they only…

That's not what everyone thinks. NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own ARM CPUs with an unlimited ARM license. ARM doesn't give NVIDIA a world-class CPU team like apple's, amazon's or fujitsu. ARM own cores are "meh" at best. Buying such a team, would also have been much cheaper than 40b$. Mobile ARM chips are meh, but nvidia doesn't have GPUs for that segment, and their current architectures pr…

> NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own ARM CPUs with an unlimited ARM license.

Famously, the Tegra SoCs, as used in the Nintendo Switch.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#472

Post by lrem »

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.

But you don't buy a company for tens of billions ignoring anything that's not relevant today. You pay basing on what you predict the company will earn between today and liquidation. When Softbank originally bought ARM, no competition was on the radar. Now there is some. Hence, valuation drops.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#473

Post by nautilus12 »

walterbell wrote: post #273
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…

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…

Does this mean they are or aren't buying treasure data? What would happen if not?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#474

Post by formerly_proven »

darksaints wrote: post #302
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…

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…

> The compiler has nearly all of the information that the CPU has, and it has orders of magnitude more.

The CPU has something the compiler can never have.

Runtime information.

That's why VLIW works great for DSP which is 99.9 % fixed access patterns, while being bad for general purpose code.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#475

Post by ksec »

klelatti wrote: post #381
kllrnohj wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek all currently just use off the shelf A5x & A7x cores in their SoCs. Unless that part of the company is losing money I don't expect nVidia to cut that off. Especially since that's likely a key part of why nVidia acquired ARM in the first place - I can't imagine they care about the Mali team(s) or IP.

What happens if/when Nvidia launches SoCs that compete with Qualcomm and MediaTek. Will it continue to offer the latest cores to competitors when it will make a lot more money on its own SoCs? This is the reason for the widepsread concern about Nvidia owning Arm.

Mediatek are in the lower end market, something Nvidia's culture doesn't like competing in. Qualcomm holds the key to Modem. Which means Nvidia competing with Qualcomm wont work that well. Not to mention they have already tried that with Icera and generally speaking Mobile Phone SoC are low margin business. ( Comparatively Speaking )

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#477

Post by ksec »

soapdog wrote: post #404
scarface74 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt Apple is dumb enough not to have basically a perpetual license for ARM.

ARM was launched as a joint venture between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI. I believe that since day 0 Apple had perpetual access to the IP.

They sold all of the ARM shares in mid 90s to prevent themselves from going bankruptcy.

Not to mention starting a JV has nothing to do with perpetual IP access. You will still have to pay for it.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#478

Post by ksec »

TomVDB wrote: post #194
gumby wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because Nvidia screwed apple (from Apple’s POV) years ago with some bad GPUs to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts. I don’t know the internal details of course just the public ones so can’t say if Apple is being petty or if Nvidia burned the bridge while the problem was unfolding. Given that the CEO was the supply chain guy at the time I suspect the latter, as I’d imagine he’d be mo…

> ... to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts. I've seen this argument made before. It would be a valid point if Apple stopped using Nvidia GPUs in 2008 (they did), and then never used them again. And yet, 4 years later, they used Nvidia GPUs on the 2012 MacBook Retina 15" on which I'm typing this.

And the 2012 GeForce GPU had GPU panic issues and let say higher chances of GPU failures.

And then that was that. We haven't seen Nvidia GPU again.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#479

Post by lumberingjack »

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?

Sounds like with all those new regulations it will be a limiting factor for new jobs not going to set up my company there if I got to jump through hoops like that.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#480

Post by andy_ppp »

fluffything wrote: post #453
andy_ppp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what everyone thinks will happen is a pretend open ARM architecture and Nvidia CPUs dominating. Nvidia isn’t going to license the best GPU features they start adding. It’s an excellent deal for NVIDIA of course, I’m certain they intend to make the chips they produce much faster than the ones they license (if they even ever release another open design) to the point where buying CPUs from Nvidia might be they only…

That's not what everyone thinks. NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own ARM CPUs with an unlimited ARM license. ARM doesn't give NVIDIA a world-class CPU team like apple's, amazon's or fujitsu. ARM own cores are "meh" at best. Buying such a team, would also have been much cheaper than 40b$. Mobile ARM chips are meh, but nvidia doesn't have GPUs for that segment, and their current architectures pr…

It’s a bad buy unless they plan to use this to leverage a better position. Your argument is that ARM is essentially worthless to NVIDIA or at least extremely high $40bn bet. I guess only time will tell but I think NVIDIA intend to make their money back on this purchase and that won’t be through the current licensing model (as your own figures show).
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