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

SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 268 posts

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#51

Post by Animats »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #26
BluSyn wrote: post #3

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likel…

>ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. Softbank needs cash. sells ARM. not a good reason?

Softbank has to prop up Uber and WeWork with something.

I dunno, would you rather have ARM technology owned by a US company or by a front for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund?

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#52

Post by klelatti »

wdb wrote: post #44
klelatti wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was - thank you. Not sure which part led me to think that Apple and Arm worked together though and it's a long presentation!

Maybe because it's a co-founder of ARM?

There was a specific exchange between Segars and Williams in this presentation which seemed to imply a close relationship.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#53

Post by gumby »

BluSyn wrote: post #3

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likel…

> While long-term this might end up being great for RISC-V... set everything back another 5+ years.

Five years is no big deal. In fact there’s so much in the pipeline it’s likely little will be different For 3-5 years.

The bigger problem is RISC-V is immature and to use ARM as an example will need another decade to get its act together (for which I have high hopes BTW). I agree with you that this will definitely be a shot in the arm for RISC-V.

> it's going to cause a huge fracture in software stacks at the exact WORST time [due to platform convergence]

This is far from the worst time, and platform monoculture is not something to be celebrated. So from that perspective you’ve given me some encouragement from the news of this deal.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#54

Post by xxpor »

BluSyn wrote: post #3

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likel…

I'll never forget when I was applying for internships back in 2010, Nvidia was the ONLY company I came across with an GPA requirement (3.5). I happened to be below that, so I didn't even bother applying.

None of the FAANGs cared in the slightest.

I bring this up just because I feel it probably probably represents their arrogance well, in addition to everything else they do.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#55

Post by gumby »

klelatti wrote: post #41
noir_lord wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The techies here including myself did, it was a deal the government should have looked into. It was a crown jewel of a company, hard to imagine the French government letting it slide or the US government letting a intel be sold to a foreign company.

Even though I've long followed Arm (I went to a presentation in Cambridge from Steve Furber about the Arm 1 in 1985ish even before the first commercial chips shipped) I'm a bit sceptical about how much value would ever be generated for the UK economy by Arm. The business model is about low margins and selling to everyone around the world so its hard to see how being next door to Arm (geographically) would be a big ad…

The theory is that clusters form around “anchor tenants”; Cambridge has the University (and its excellent CS departments), ARM and some others, and is close to he largest capital marketplaces in the world, grandiosely bundled into a so-called “silicon fen”. So school leavers can get jobs, network, start companies, develop other tech in a virtuous circle.

Well that’s the theory; nobody has actually been able to reproduce Silicon Valley except arguably in SF (it’s more like the valley grew a tentacle is the peninsula, though the distance is far enough that the culture is slightly different).

As far as Cambridge goes, I don’t see that this purchase makes any difference for those factors, except bragging rights in Whitehall.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#58

Post by [deleted] »

xxpor wrote: post #54
BluSyn wrote: post #3

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likel…

I'll never forget when I was applying for internships back in 2010, Nvidia was the ONLY company I came across with an GPA requirement (3.5). I happened to be below that, so I didn't even bother applying. None of the FAANGs cared in the slightest. I bring this up just because I feel it probably probably represents their arrogance well, in addition to everything else they do.

[deleted]

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#59

Post by pm90 »

gumby wrote: post #55
klelatti wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though I've long followed Arm (I went to a presentation in Cambridge from Steve Furber about the Arm 1 in 1985ish even before the first commercial chips shipped) I'm a bit sceptical about how much value would ever be generated for the UK economy by Arm. The business model is about low margins and selling to everyone around the world so its hard to see how being next door to Arm (geographically) would be a big ad…

The theory is that clusters form around “anchor tenants”; Cambridge has the University (and its excellent CS departments), ARM and some others, and is close to he largest capital marketplaces in the world, grandiosely bundled into a so-called “silicon fen”. So school leavers can get jobs, network, start companies, develop other tech in a virtuous circle. Well that’s the theory; nobody has actually been able to reprod…

This is a bit of an aside, but it never ceases to amaze me how many would be tech hubs try variations of Silicon Valley in their (maybe informal?) branding. Silicon hills, Silicon fern.. (I knew a couple more but I’m forgetting atm). It’s not like it’s the name which made it what it is.

Re: SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

#60

Post by ip26 »

xxpor wrote: post #25
tibbydudeza wrote: post #17

The important players like Samsung/Apple/Huawei are already ARM architecture license holders so they can do their own thing if they don't like the direction that NVidia is going in. A 128 bit version might be an issue in the future.

I could imagine we might see an architecture with 128 bit word sizes, but I doubt we'd see 128 bit pointers (aka a 128 bit address space) any time soon. Itd just be more annoying than anything. I personally have even written software where we do pointer path to get 32 bit indexes rather than storing full 64 bit pointers simply because of space constraints (like trying to fit a hot struct into a single cache line) Hav…

Current chips don't even actually support 64 bits of hardware address yet, seeing as few users can afford 2 exbibytes of DRAM and shuffling around a full 64 bits of hardware address is a noticeable tax on the chip.
Post reply on HN