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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#531

Post by DCKing »

klelatti wrote: post #518
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…

Precisely, plus just consider the information that Nvidia will have on all its competitors who use Arm IP. - It will know of their product plans (as they will need to buy licenses for new products). - It will know their sales volumes by product (as they will need to pay fees for each Arm CPU sold). - If they need technical help from Arm in designing a new SoC then the details of that engagement will be available to N…

I wouldn't use the term "unfair" here. There's also just three x86 licensees in the world and people don't usually consider that an affront. You buy, you control, that's how the world works.

But I do think it's important that we recognize that we're going from a position of tremendous competitiveness to a much less competitive situation. And that will be a situation where ARM will be tightly controlled and much less inducive to the innovation we've seen in the last years.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#532

Post by my123 »

Followerer wrote: post #526
my123 wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hello,

Specifically about the Apple case,

After your tone, not certainly obligated to answer but will write one quickly...

Apple A13 adds AMX, a set of (mostly) AI acceleration instructions that are also useful for matrix math in general. The AMX configuration happens at the level of the AMX_CONFIG_EL1/EL12/EL2/EL21 registers, with AMX_STATE_T_EL1 and AMX_CONTEXT_EL1 being also present.

The list of instructions is at https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/xZmmVF7tS8/ (didn't bother to document it publicly at least at this point).

Hopefully that clears things up a bit,

And please don't ever do this again, thank you. (this also doesn't comply with the guidelines)

-- a member of the checkra1n team

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#533

Post by eklavya »

Followerer wrote: post #526
my123 wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You may be correct, but do you really have to be so attacking?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#534

Post by tboerstad »

DCKing wrote: post #531
klelatti wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely, plus just consider the information that Nvidia will have on all its competitors who use Arm IP. - It will know of their product plans (as they will need to buy licenses for new products). - It will know their sales volumes by product (as they will need to pay fees for each Arm CPU sold). - If they need technical help from Arm in designing a new SoC then the details of that engagement will be available to N…

I wouldn't use the term "unfair" here. There's also just three x86 licensees in the world and people don't usually consider that an affront. You buy, you control, that's how the world works. But I do think it's important that we recognize that we're going from a position of tremendous competitiveness to a much less competitive situation. And that will be a situation where ARM will be tightly controlled and much less…

The three licensees would be Intel, AMD and VIA

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#535

Post by hajile »

klelatti wrote: post #522
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Resources are limited. If a Samsung phone and a Motorola phone need the same screen and there's not enough to go around, what happens?

A bidding war of course.

On the surface, it's capitalism at work. In reality, Samsung winds up in a no-lose situation. If Motorola wins, Samsung gets bigger margins due to the battle. If Samsung wins, they play "pass around the money" with their accountants, but their only actual costs are those of production.

I'd note that chaebol wouldn't exist in a free market. They rely on corruption of the Korean government.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#536

Post by rrss »

my123 wrote: post #501
Followerer wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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)

WMMX was exposed via the ARM coprocessor mechanism (so it was permitted by the architecture). The coprocessor stuff was removed in ARMv8.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#537

Post by klelatti »

DCKing wrote: post #531
klelatti wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely, plus just consider the information that Nvidia will have on all its competitors who use Arm IP. - It will know of their product plans (as they will need to buy licenses for new products). - It will know their sales volumes by product (as they will need to pay fees for each Arm CPU sold). - If they need technical help from Arm in designing a new SoC then the details of that engagement will be available to N…

I wouldn't use the term "unfair" here. There's also just three x86 licensees in the world and people don't usually consider that an affront. You buy, you control, that's how the world works. But I do think it's important that we recognize that we're going from a position of tremendous competitiveness to a much less competitive situation. And that will be a situation where ARM will be tightly controlled and much less…

That's a good point. I guess it is "unfair" but that isn't necessarily an argument against it - as you say lots of things are unfair.

But, given the high market share of Arm in several markets allowing one firm the ability to use that market share to gain competitive advantage in related markets seems to me to be deeply problematic.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#538

Post by my123 »

rrss wrote: post #536
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)

WMMX was exposed via the ARM coprocessor mechanism (so it was permitted by the architecture). The coprocessor stuff was removed in ARMv8.

Now custom instructions are directly on the regular instruction space...

(+ there's the can of worms of target-specific MSRs being writable from user-space, Apple does this as part of APRR to flip the JIT region from RW- to R-X and vice-versa without going through a trip to the kernel. That also has the advantage that the state is modifiable per-thread)

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#539

Post by pier25 »

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…

> There is no way Nvidia will spend 40 billion on this without them deliberately or inadvertently destroy ARM's open CPU and GPU ecosystem

But why would a company spend that much money to buy a company and destroy it afterwards?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#540

Post by paulmd »

andrewprock wrote: post #207
paulmd wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"linus went on a hyperbolic rant" isn't sufficient evidence for anything. linus is a hyperbolic jerk (as he admitted himself for a few months before resuming his hyperbolic ways) who is increasingly out of touch with anything outside the direct sphere of his projects. Like his misguided and completely unnecessary rants about ZFS or AVX. if there are technical merits to discuss you can post those instead of just appea…

The notion that the maintainer if Linux has a narrow focus role that isn't capable of advocating and serving the broader community is belied by the fact that Linux has grown from being a niche hobbyist platform to the de facto cloud standard OS.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-s...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-i-hope-intels-a...

/shrug. The guy can't keep from popping off with obviously false statements about things he knows nothing about. What exactly do you want me to say? Yes, he's been a good manager for the linux kernel, but he is self-admittedly hyperbolic and statements like these show that he really doesn't have an issue running his mouth about things that he really doesn't understand.

It is the old problem with software engineers: they think expertise in one field or one area makes them a certified supergenius with relevant input in completely unrelated areas. I can't count how many times I've seen someone on HN suggest One Weird Trick To Solve Hard Problems in [aerospace/materials sciences/etc]. Linus suffers from the same thing.

His experiences with NVIDIA are probably relevant, and if so we can discuss that, but the fact that he gave someone the middle finger in a Q+A session is not. That's just Linus being an asshole.

(and him being a long-term successful project manager doesn't make him not an asshole either. Jensen's an asshole and he's one of the most successful tech CEOs of all time. Linus doesn't mince words and we should do the same - he's an asshole on a professional level, the "I'm just being blunt!" schtick is just a nice dressing for what would in any other setting be described as a textbook toxic work environment, and his defenses are textbook "haha it's just locker room talk/we're all friends here" excuses that people causing toxic work environment are wont to make. He knows it, he said he'd tone it down, that lasted about a month and he's back to hyperbolic rants about things he doesn't really understand... like ZFS and AVX. But hey I guess they're not directed at people this time.)

Again, if he's got relevant technical input we can discuss that but "linus gives the middle finger!!!!" is not the last word on the topic.

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