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?
Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
541–550 of 784 posts
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#542This 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?
Oracle and Sun at $8B.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#543This 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?
It’s not going to destroy the business it’s going to destroy the current business model. The point is that the only way this deal can make sense for Nvidia, is to use ARM’s IP as a competitive advantage over other competitors. Until now, ARM’s value proposition has been IP neutrality for the various user companies.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#544No one has seemed to notice the following two things: "To pave the way for the deal, SoftBank reversed an earlier decision to strip out an internet-of-things business from Arm and transfer it to a new company under its control. That would have stripped Arm of what was meant to be the high-growth engine that would power it into a 5G-connected future. One person said that SoftBank made the decision because it would hav…
It is not "free", it means current shareholders of Nvidia are paying for the remaining money. Their stock is diluted on fresh issue of shares.[1] The $12B comes from Nvidia the company, the remaining money comes from Nvidia's shareholders directly. [1] Only if the valuation of ARM is "worth it" the fresh issue of shares will not cost the current shareholders anything. This is rarely the case , if Nvida overvalued(or…
To me, "paying for" and "diluted" connotates negative emotions.
Cash paid in this instance is treated no different than cash in their normal operating expenses. If either generates profits in line with their current expected returns, the stock price stays the same, and everyone is indifferent to the transaction.
Same goes for stock issuance. If the expectation of the use of proceeds from the issuance are in line with the company's current expected returns, everyone is indifferent.
Your statement is still true, and the stock market jumped today on the news, so I feel my connotation is misplaced.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#545Earlier 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.
Are the AMX instructions available in EL0?
Is it possible AMX is implemented with the implementation-defined system registers and aliases of SYS/SYSL in the encoding space reserved for implementation-defined system instructions? Do you have the encodings for the AMX instructions?
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#546This 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?
Nvidia will certainly try to get as much money out of ARM's R&D capabilities, existing IP, and future roadmap as they can. They will get their money's worth - at worst they will fail trying. In that sense, they won't destroy "ARM the company" or "ARM the IP". But Nvidia will have no interest in maintaining ARM's business model whereby ARM fosters a community of Nvidia competitors - they have an interest to the opposite. Therefore they very likely will destroy "ARM the ecosystem".
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is NVIDIA's "xbox one/PS4" moment. AMD has deals with console manufacturers, their clients pay for a huge amount of R&D that gets ported back into AMD's desktop graphics architecture. Even if AMD doesn't make basically anything on the consoles themselves, it's a huge win for their R&D. Now, every reference-implementation ARM processor manufactured will fund GeForce desktop products, datacenter/enterprise, etc as…
> Now, every reference-implementation ARM processor manufactured will fund GeForce desktop products, datacenter/enterprise, etc as well. That's like throwing pennies onto a pile of gold. NVIDIA makes billions of yearly revenue. ARM makes ~300 million. NVIDIA revenue is 60% of a GPU price. ARM margins in IoT/embedded/phone chips are thin-to-non-existent. If anything, NVIDIA will need to cut GPU spending to push ARM to…
ARM doesn't make any chips. They license IP (CPU cores and the MALI GPU) needed to build those chips to companies like Apple, Samsung, TI, ST Micro, Microchip, Qualcomm ...
That margins on $1 microcontroller are "thin-to-non-existent" is thus completely irrelevant - those are margins of the silicon manufacturer, not ARM's.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek all currently just use off the shelf A5x & A7x cores in their SoCs. Unless that part of the company is losing money I don't expect nVidia to cut that off. Especially since that's likely a key part of why nVidia acquired ARM in the first place - I can't imagine they care about the Mali team(s) or IP.
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.
I don't know if Nvidia is eager to re-enter the SoC market. It wouldn't be a clear path to more money, since they would need to then handle modem, wifi, ISP, display, etc... instead of just CPU & GPU. And they'd need to work with Android & its HALs. And all the dozens/hundreds of device OEMs.
They could, but that's more than just an easy money grab. Something Nvidia would already be familiar with from Tegra.
What seems more likely/risky would be nvidia starts charging a premium for a Mali replacement, or begins sandbagging Mali on the lower end of things. But Qualcomm already has Adreno to defend against that.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
I appreciate the info. Apparently NVidia has been doing this for more years than I expected.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#550This 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…
I agree with the general sentiment here, but ARM is not exactly Snow White. It's an open secret that ARM was (and still is) selling the CPU design at a discount if you integrated their Mali (GPU). This isn't relevant to Nvidia today, but it was when they were in the mobile GPU space. Also this caused obvious problems for IMGtec and other smaller GPU players like Vivante.
Bundling isn't necessarily anti-competitive provided ARM isn't taking a loss selling their chip. I'll admit that things aren't actually free-market here because copyright and patent monopolies apply.
There are three possibilities here: ARM's design is approximately the same as the competitory, ARM's design is inferior to the competitor, and ARM's design is superior to the competitor.
If faced with two equivalent products, staying with the same supplier for both is best (especially in this case where the IP isn't supply-limited). The discount means a reduction in costs to make the device. Instead of ARM making a larger profit, their customers keep more of their money. In turn, the super-competitive smartphone market means those savings will directly go to customers.
In cases where ARM's design is superior, why would they bundle? If they did, getting a superior product at an even lower price once again just means less money going to the big corporation and more money that stays in the consumer's pocket.
The final case is where ARM has an inferior design. I want to sell the most performance/features for the price so I can sell more phones. I have 2 choices: slight discount on the CPU but bundled with an inferior GPU or full price for the CPU and full price for a superior GPU. The first option lowers phone price. The second option offers better features and performance. For the high-end market, I'm definitely not going with the discount because peak performance reigns supreme. In the lesser markets, its a calculation of price for total performance and the risk that consumers might prefer an extra few FPS for the cost of another few dollars.
Finally, there are a couple small players like Vivante or Imagination Technologies, but the remaining competitors in the space (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc) aren't going to be driven under by bundle deals, so bundling seems to be pretty much all upside for consumers who stand to save money as a result.