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Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

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Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#51

Post by scarface74 »

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #29
mud_dauber wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

There was the apple gpu fiasco. Apple laptop GPUs were failing at an extraordinary rate in 2010-2011, and Apple were getting harangued in the media about it (which was justified). Apple eventually announced a program to cover replacement of the GPUs, but it was very delayed. I'm 100% convinced the delay was caused by Nvidia refusing to accept responsibility. When the program was released, in order to have the repair…

Don't get me wrong, it makes sense to use diagnostics to verify hardware issues, but they aren't the only tool you can use. I'm convinced Nvidia only would reimburse apple for computers that had a recorded failure of this specific test.

In 2010, Apple wasn’t exactly a beleaguered company. It wasn’t like NVidia not reimbursing Apple would break the bank. Apple should have repaired it just to protect its reputation.

Jobs himself was famous for saying to high level employees that at a certain level of authority, you don’t get to make excuses.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#52

Post by awalton »

zaphirplane wrote: post #42
awalton wrote: post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

Wouldnt there be IP that Apple needs if they go their own way There was something about how qualcomm Bundles ip licensing with hardware purchases

Apple just spent a billion dollars buying Intel's wireless modem business. If there's still a hardware reliance on Qualcomm, it's certainly coming to a quick end.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#53

Post by mjcohen »

tinktank wrote: post #43

Surely a sale would be allowed if regulatory compliance compliance is met? I was part of a private semiconductor company bought by a public American company and the buying company had to convince the US gov they would not turn the product line into a captive portal. I expect it's the same here?

So what happened?

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#54

Post by 01100011 »

jaimex2 wrote: post #48
01100011 wrote: post #3

Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. "most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia" Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).

Isn't Tegra their mobile chip?

It's "mobile" as in cars and robots. It's not mobile as in cell phones.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#55

Post by structural »

jaimex2 wrote: post #48
01100011 wrote: post #3

Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. "most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia" Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).

Isn't Tegra their mobile chip?

Tegra started out as their mobile chip, but has evolved into their robotics/automotive/industrial-SoC platform through the Jetson series of modules which are alive and well.

[Sidenote: this has resulted in the hilariousness of taking an Android kernel and development infrastructure and them slowly trying to make it back into something that looks like a normal Linux system. Their board support package is a hot mess, but gets used in real products because the hardware actually works well. A software company NVidia is not.]

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#56

Post by xvilka »

axaxs wrote: post #34

I for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV. That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at t…

It will be the end of Linux on ARM. They will choke platform with blobs until the inevitable death. NVIDIA and open-source is like matter and antimatter - they simply cannot coexist in the same place and time.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#57

Post by Nitrolo »

bonzini wrote: post #26
numakerg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall the GeForce Partner Program raised some controversy, although I couldn't say whether or it was bad or good or why. There's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers. Supposedly this is because they throttle workstation GPUs to create a market for higher-end versions while reducing the manufacturing diversity, but I haven't heard a definitive source for this.

> they throttle workstation GPUs Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured ou…

Not doubting that this is the case, but what's the reason for nVidia wanting to restrict use in virtual machines?

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#58

Post by leeoniya »

axaxs wrote: post #34

I for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV. That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at t…

> Mali is terrible

care to elaborate?

the Panfrost project has reverse engineered a bunch of popular Mali ISAs and now there's hardware support on the kernel for VA-API on these chips.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Panfrost

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#59

Post by eyegor »

Nitrolo wrote: post #57
bonzini wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they throttle workstation GPUs Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured ou…

Not doubting that this is the case, but what's the reason for nVidia wanting to restrict use in virtual machines?

They don't want people using geforce cards in compute servers/clusters. It's artificial market segmentation since the workstation cards are higher margin. They want customers to pay the big bucks since hypervisor setups are basically only used in business and big budget settings.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#60

Post by protomyth »

frandroid wrote: post #33
awalton wrote: post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

> Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves Their new notebooks are still moving to an ARM-based CPU... Even if they enhanced the ARM design they still have an ARM licence.

I would assume they had protected themselves before the SoftBank purchase. Also, it's odd that they refer to the new stuff as Apple Silicon.
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