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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#521

Post by janoc »

lrem wrote: post #472
janoc wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Softbank bought ARM for $32 billion, sold for $40 billion, plus they were collecting profits during all that time. Not quite sure how that meshes with "valuation drops" ...

RISC-V in high performance computing is years out even if big players like Samsung or Qualcomm decided to switch today. New silicon takes time to develop.

And Nvidia really couldn't care less about the $1-$10 RISC-V microcontrollers that companies like SiPeed or Gigadevice are churning out today (and even there ARM micros are outselling these by several orders of magnitude).

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#522

Post by klelatti »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #516
DCKing wrote: post #510

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 th…

To play devil’s advocate a bit, are nVidia's incentives necessarily so different? Their goal will be to make as much money as possible, and it's clear that licensing has been a winning strategy for ARM. Samsung comes to mind as another company that makes their own TVs, phones, SSDs, ect., but is also perfectly happy to license the underlying screens and chips in those products to other companies. From my vantage poin…

How do we know that Samsung hasn't stifled some potential competitors by refusing to sell them screens or by selling them an inferior product?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#523

Post by my123 »

Followerer wrote: post #511
my123 wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

That's like saying that my Intel CPU comes with an NVIDA Turing AI acceleration extension. The instructions the CPU can run on an Apple ARM-based CPU is all ARM ISA. That's in the license arrangement, if you fail to pass ARM's compliance tests (which include not adding your own instructions, or modifying the ones included) you can't use ARM's license. Please, stop spreading nonsense. All of this is public knowledge.

No. I reverse-engineered it and AMX on the Apple A13 is an instruction set extension running on the main CPU core.

The Neural Engine is a completely separate hardware block, and you have good reasons to have such an extension available on the CPU directly, to reduce latency for short-running tasks.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#524

Post by ATsch »

dragontamer wrote: post #303
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…

VLIW was the best implementation (20 years ago) of instruction level parallelism. But what have we learned in these past 20 years? * Computers will continue to become more parallel -- AMD Zen2 has 10 execution pipelines, supporting 4-way decode and 6-uop / clock tick dispatch per core, with somewhere close to 200 registers for renaming / reordering instructions. Future processors will be bigger and more parallel, Ice…

All of this hackery with hundreds of registers just to continue to make a massively parallel computer look like an 80s processor is what something like Itanium would have prevented. Modern processors ended up becoming basically VLIW anyway, Itanium just refused to lie to you.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#525

Post by Followerer »

yvdriess wrote: post #471
fluffything wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. Precisely the Tegra SoC within the Nintendo Switch (X1) uses ARM Cores. Specifically A57 and A53. NVIDIA's project to develop their own v8.2 ARM-based chip is called Denver.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#526

Post by Followerer »

my123 wrote: post #523
Followerer wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying that my Intel CPU comes with an NVIDA Turing AI acceleration extension. The instructions the CPU can run on an Apple ARM-based CPU is all ARM ISA. That's in the license arrangement, if you fail to pass ARM's compliance tests (which include not adding your own instructions, or modifying the ones included) you can't use ARM's license. Please, stop spreading nonsense. All of this is public knowledge.

No. I reverse-engineered it and AMX on the Apple A13 is an instruction set extension running on the main CPU core. The Neural Engine is a completely separate hardware block, and you have good reasons to have such an extension available on the CPU directly, to reduce latency for short-running tasks.

The AMX is an accelerator block... If you concluded otherwise, your reverse-engineering skills are not great...

Let me repeat this: part of the ARM architectural license says that you can't modify the ISA. You have to implement a whole subset (the manual says what's mandatory and what's optional), and only that. This is, as I've been saying, public knowledge. This is how it works. And there are very good reasons for this, like avoiding fragmentation and losing control of their own ISA.

And once again, stop spreading misinformation.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#527

Post by Followerer »

fluffything wrote: post #455
hyperpallium2 wrote: post #290

edge-AI! They're also building an ARM supercomputer at Cambridge, but server-ARM doesn't sound like a focus. I'm just hoping for some updated mobile Nvidia GPUs... and maybe the rumoured 4K Nintendo Switch. They say they won't muck it up, and it seems sensible to keep it profitable: > As part of NVIDIA, Arm will continue to operate its open-licensing model while maintaining the global customer neutrality that has bee…

> but server-ARM doesn't sound like a focus. ARM doesn't have good server CPU IP. Graviton, A64FX, etc. belong to other companies.

Graviton is Neoverse, ARM's Neoverse.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#528

Post by Zigurd »

bgorman wrote: post #58
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

MIPS support was removed from the Android NDK, though older versions of the NDK stand a good chance of working, still. So app developers with components needing the NDK support have a bit of work to remain compatible.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#529

Post by dragontamer »

ATsch wrote: post #524
dragontamer wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VLIW was the best implementation (20 years ago) of instruction level parallelism. But what have we learned in these past 20 years? * Computers will continue to become more parallel -- AMD Zen2 has 10 execution pipelines, supporting 4-way decode and 6-uop / clock tick dispatch per core, with somewhere close to 200 registers for renaming / reordering instructions. Future processors will be bigger and more parallel, Ice…

All of this hackery with hundreds of registers just to continue to make a massively parallel computer look like an 80s processor is what something like Itanium would have prevented. Modern processors ended up becoming basically VLIW anyway, Itanium just refused to lie to you.

When standard machine code is written in a "Dependency cutting" way, then it scales to many different reorder registers. A system from 10+ years ago with only 100-reorder registers will execute the code with maximum parallelism... while a system today with 200 to 300-reorder buffers will execute the SAME code with also maximum parallelism (and reach higher instructions-per-clock tick).

That's why today's CPUs can have 4-way decoders and 6-way dispatch (AMD Zen and Skylake), because they can "pick up more latent parallelism" that the compilers have given them many years ago.

"Classic" VLIW limits your potential parallelism to the ~3-wide bundles (in Itanium's case). Whoever makes the "next" VLIW CPU should allow a similar scaling over the years.

-----------

It was accidental: I doubt that anyone actually planned the x86 instruction set to be so effectively instruction-level parallel. Its something that was discovered over the years, and proven to be effective.

Yes: somehow more parallel than the explicitly parallel VLIW architecture. Its a bit of a hack, but if it works, why change things?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#530

Post by axaxs »

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…

If you only look at today's numbers, it doesn't make a ton of sense. But looking at the market, the world is moving -more- towards ARM, not away. The last couple years have given us ARM in a gaming console, ARM in mainstream laptops, ARM in the datacenter. Especially as the world strives to go 'carbon neutral', ARM kills everything from Intel/AMD. So with that in mind, I don't think it's a bad buy, but time will tell.

RISC-V and ARM can coexist, but RISC-V in the mainstream is a far away due to nothing more than momentum. People won't even touch Intel in a mobile device anymore, not just because of power usage, but software compatibility.

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