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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

nvidianews.nvidia.com

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#51

Post by bluejay2 »

maxioatic wrote: post #14

> Immediately accretive to NVIDIA’s non-GAAP gross margin and EPS Can someone explain this? (From the bullet points of the article) I looked up the definition of accretive: "characterized by gradual growth or increase." So it seems like they expect this to increase their margins. Does that mean ARM had better margins than NVIDIA? Edit: I don't know what non-GAAP and EPS stand for

You are correct that it means they expect margins to increase. One possibility is that ARM has higher margins as you mentioned. Another is that they are making some assumptions about how much they can reduce certain expenses by, and once you factor in those savings, margins go up.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#52

Post by banjo_milkman »

curiousmindz wrote: post #39

Why do you think Nvidia cares about Arm? Probably the "access" into a lot of industries?

I think this is driven by partly embedded applications and more directly by the datacenter.

Nvidia already own the parallel compute/ML part of the datacenter and the Mellanox acquisition had brought the ability to compete in the networking part of the datacenter - but they were missing CPU IP, for tasks that aren't well matched to the GPU. This plugs that hole. They are in control of a complete data-center solution now.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#53

Post by andy_ppp »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #45
andy_ppp wrote: post #24

This sort of stuff really isn’t going to produce long term benefits for humanity is it. Does anyone know if or how Apple will be affected by this? What are the licensing agreements on the ISA?

This has been out there in the news for well over a month, I guess I don't understand why Apple didn't try to make a bid for ARM? Or why Apple didn't try to set up some sort of independent holding company or consortium to buy ARM. They definitely have the money and clout to have done something like that.

I guess Apple have a perpetual ARM ISA license. They haven’t used the CPU designs from ARM for many years.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#55

Post by therealmarv »

rvz wrote: post #34

What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up. Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa. In 201…

Have you read the press release at all? It's too early to judge this now. ARM will stay in Cambridge and Nvidia wants to invest in this place.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#56

Post by andy_ppp »

axaxs wrote: post #48
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…

Perhaps not. I mean AMD and soon Intel basically compete with themselves by pushing advances in both discrete GPU and APU at the same time, one negating the need for the other. I'm not claiming I'm right and you're wrong, of course. I just think it's unfair to make negative assumptions at this point, so wanted to paint a possible good thing.

Agree, Nvidia’s track record on opening things up is pretty bad. They are very good at business though!

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#57

Post by dragontamer »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

And there you have it. Perhaps the greatest thing to happen to RISC-V since the invention of the FPGA :-). I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to. Regarding the federal investment in FOSS thread that was here perhaps CPU architecture would be a good candidate.

RISC-V still seems too ad-hoc to me, and really new. Hard to say where it'd go for now.

I know momentum is currently towards ARM over POWER, but... OpenPOWER is certainly a thing, and has IBM / Red Hat support. IBM may be expensive, but they already were proven "fair partners" in the OpenPOWER initiative and largely supportive of OSS / Free Software.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#58

Post by bgorman »

bleepblorp wrote: post #31

This isn't going to do good things for anyone who doesn't own a lot of Nvidia stock. This is going to do especially bad things for anyone who needs to buy a cell phone or the SoC that powers one. There's no real alternative to ARM-based phone SoCs. Given Nvidia's business practices, any manufacturer who doesn't already have a perpetual ARM license should expect to have to pay a lot more money into Jensen Huang's reti…

Android worked on x86 and MIPS in the past, it could presumably be ported to work with RISC-V

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#59

Post by [deleted] »

ibains wrote: post #50

I love this, I was amongst early engineers on CUDA (compilers). NVIDIA was so well run, but boxed into a smaller graphics card market - ATI and it were forced into low margins since they were made replaceable by OpenGL and DirectX standards. For the standard fans - they resulted a wealth transfer from NVIDIA to Apple etc. and reduced capital available for R&D. NVIDIA was constantly attacked by a much bigger Intel (wh…

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#60

Post by sillysaurusx »

lostmsu wrote: post #47
sillysaurusx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI training is moving away from CUDA and toward TPUs anyway. DGX clusters can't keep up.

Where did you get this from? AFAIK GPT-3 (for example) was trained on a GPU cluster, not TPUs.

Experience, for one. TPUs are dominating MLPerf benchmarks. That kind of performance can't be dismissed so easily.

GPT-2 was trained on TPUs. (There are explicit references to TPUs in the source code: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/0574c5708b094bfa0b0f6df...)

GPT-3 was trained on a GPU cluster probably because of Microsoft's billion-dollar Azure cloud credit investment, not because it was the best choice.

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