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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#501

Post by my123 »

Followerer wrote: post #497
zdw wrote: post #73

I see this going a few ways for different players: The perpetual architecture license folks that make their own cores like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Fujitsu (I think they needed this for the A64FX, right?) will be fine, and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there. Apple especially will be fine as they can get code into LLVM for whatever "Apple Silicon" evolves into over time…

"and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there" No, they may not. People keep suggesting these kinds of things, but part of the license agreement is that you can't modify the ISA. Only ARM can do that.

That's untrue.

(famously so, Intel used to ship arm chips with WMMX and Apple for example ships their CPU today with the AMX AI acceleration extension)

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#503

Post by jaywalk »

fortran77 wrote: post #489
siberianbear wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition, it's not even a valid argument if the cost was entirely in cash. One would be making the argument, "the cost is essentially free because although we spent $40B, we acquired a company worth $40B". Obviously, that's not any more correct than the case of paying in stock.

I pay the car dealer $20,000, I get a car worth $20,000. Was the car free?

Technically, yes. Your net worth is unchanged. The problem is that the car is no longer worth $20,000 as soon as you drive it off the lot.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#504

Post by klelatti »

ksec wrote: post #475
klelatti wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

Completely take your point on Qualcomm.

On mobile SoC margins I guess that margins are low because there is a lot of competition - start cutting off IP to the competition and margins will rise.

I suspect that their focus will be on the server / automotive to start off with but the very fact that they can to any of this is troubling for me.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#505

Post by Zigurd »

dbcooper wrote: post #364
sib wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android, YouTube, Google Maps, DoubleClick, Applied Semantics (became AdSense), DeepMind, Urchin, ITA Software, etc. I think Google has done ok.

Has it had any successes with hardware acquisitions?

Google has steadily gained smart home device market share vs a very good competitor and is now the dominant player.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#506

Post by Zigurd »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #156

Sounds like everyone is rallying around RISC-V. What does this mean for MIPS? "ARM was probably what sank MIPS" - saagarjha https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24402107

Wave owns MIPS, about which I had no idea and googling that also returns that Wave went Chapter 11 this year.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#507

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

#508

Post by rrss »

dragontamer wrote: post #324
StillBored wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPU's, aren't general purpose compute. EPIC did fairly well with HPC/etc style applications as well, it was everything else that was problematic. So, yes there are a fair number of workload and microarch decision similarities. But right now, those workloads tend to be better handled with a GPU style offload engine (or as it appears the industry is slowly moving, possibly a lot of fat vector units attached to a normal…

I'm not talking about the SIMD portion of Volta. I'm talking about Volta's ability to detect dependencies. Which is null: the core itself probably can't detect dependencies at all. Its entirely left up to the compiler (or at least... it seems to be the case). AMD's GCN and RDNA architecture is still scanning for read/write hazards like any ol' pipelined architecture you learned in college. The NVidia Volta thing is n…

FWIW, this article suggests the static software scheduling you are describing was introduced in Kepler, so it's probably at least not entirely new in Volta:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-r...

> NVIDIA has replaced Fermi’s complex scheduler with a far simpler scheduler that still uses scoreboarding and other methods for inter-warp scheduling, but moves the scheduling of instructions in a warp into NVIDIA’s compiler. In essence it’s a return to static scheduling

and I think this is describing more or less the same thing in Maxwell: https://github.com/NervanaSystems/maxas/wiki/Control-Codes

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#509

Post by xxpor »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #468
bananaface wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$12B cash appears to be all they have available . They can't pay more cash. https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nvda/financials/... Their only other option would be taking on debt.

Right, so Nvidia with their A2 rating and their solid balance sheet in a rock bottom interest rate environment still found it favourable to purchase Arm with newly issued shares. That's telling us something about what they think about their share valuation right now.

Perhaps there are tax implications?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#510

Post by DCKing »

This is terrible. Not really just because of Nvidia - which has a lot of problems I've previously commented on the rumors of this [1] - but Nvidia's ownership completely changes ARM's incentives.

ARM created a business model for itself where they had to act as a "BDFL" for the ARM architecture and IP. They made an architecture, CPU designs, and GPU designs for others. They had no stake in the chip making game, and they had others - Samsung, Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Huawei, Mediatek, Rockchip and loads of others make the chip. Their business model was to make the ARM ecosystem accessible for as many companies as possible, so they could sell as many licenses as possible. In that way, ARM's business model enabled a very diverse and thriving ARM market. I think this is the sole reason we see ARM eating the chip world today.

This business model would continue to work perfectly fine as a privately held company, or being owned by a faceless investor company that wants you to make as much money as possible. But it's not fine if you are owned by a company that wants to use you to control their own position in the chip market. There is no way Nvidia (any other chip company, but as laid out previously Nvidia might even be more concerning) will spend 40 billion on this without them deliberately or inadvertently destroying ARM's open CPU and GPU ecosystem. Will Nvidia allow selling ARM licenses to competitors of Nvidia's business? Will Nvidia reserve ARM's best IP as a selling point for its own chips? Will Nvidia allow Mali to continue existing? Any innovations ARM made previously it sold to anyone mostly indiscriminatorily (outside of legal restrictions), but now every time the question must be asked "does Nvidia have a better propietary purpose for this?". For any ARM chip maker the situation will be that Nvidia is both your ruthless competitor, but it also sells you the IP you need to build your chips.

EDIT: ARM's interests up to last week were to create and empower as many competitors for Nvidia as possible. They were good at that and was the root of the success of the ARM ecosystem. That incentive is completely gone now.

Unless Nvidia leaves ARM alone (and why would they spend $40B on that??), this has got to be the beginning of the end of ARM's golden age.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24010821

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