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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#561

Post by fencepost »

lumberingjack wrote: post #485
bencollier49 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely outrages me. I've posted elsewhere on the thread about this, but I want to do something to prevent this sort of thing in future. Setting up a think tank seems like a viable idea. See my other response in the thread if you are interested and want to get in contact.

Welcome to vulture capitalism it's been gutting American industry for about 10 20 years used to be four or five paper mills around here but now they're all in China and everyone who worked there is on drugs now

Welcome to vulture capitalism it's been gutting American industry for about 10 20 years

More like 30-40. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity_in_the_1980s

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#562

Post by rrss »

my123 wrote: post #560
rrss wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

AMX instructions are available in EL0 yes, and are used by CoreML and Accelerate.framework. A sample instruction: 20 12 20 00... which doesn't in any stretch parse as a valid arm64 instruction in the Arm specification. Edit: Some other AMX combinations off-hand: 00 10 20 00 21 12 20 00 20 12 20 00 40 10 20 00

very interesting, thanks!

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#563

Post by hajile »

paulmd wrote: post #116
baybal2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bye bye ARM Mali =(

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…

It's also constraining.

Console makers dictated that RDNA must use a forward-compatible version of the GCN ISA. While AMD might have wanted to make some changes of some ideas that turned out to be less-than-optimal, they cannot because they are stopped by the console makers paying the bills.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#564

Post by Followerer »

edderly wrote: post #513
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…

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.

" It's an open secret that ARM was (and still is) selling the CPU design at a discount if you integrated their Mali (GPU)."

Why is that bad? Not only it's common business practice (the more you buy from us, the cheaper we sell), it also makes sense from the support perspective. Support the integration between their cores and a different GPU would be more work for them than integration of their cores with their own GPUs.

That's why companies expand to adjacent markets: efficiency.

A completely different thing would be to say: "if you want our latest AXX core, you have to buy our latest Mali GPU". That's bundling, and that's illegal.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#565

Post by lrem »

janoc wrote: post #521
lrem wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let me just quote what I originally responded to:

> A 25% gain over a horizon of four years is not bad for your average investment -- but this isn't an average investment.

> First, compared to the SP500, this underperforms over the same horizon (even compared to end of 2019 rather than the inflated prices right now).

> Second, ARM's sector (semiconductors) has performed far, far better in that time. The PHOX (Philadelphia Semiconductor Index) doubled in the same time period.

> And looking at AMD and NVIDIA, it feels as if ARM would have been in a position to benefit from the surrounding euphoria.

That's the "valuation drops" - relatively to the market, ARM has significantly underperformed, despite the business being actually healthy and on the rise.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#566

Post by 48bb-9a7e-dc4f2 »

paulmd wrote: post #551
arp242 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He just responded to a complaint that nVidia hardware wasn't working with "nVidia is the worst company we've dealt with". I don't think that's "out of touch", it's pretty much the kind of stuff his job description entails. If you don't like his style, fair enough, but if the leader of a project says "company X is the worst company we deal with" then that doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence.

AFAIK the debate was mostly settled by NVIDIA submitting their own EGLStreams backend for Wayland (that promptly exposed a bunch of Wayland bugs). So difficult to work with, that NVIDIA, asking to do something different and then submitting their own code to implement it! https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=EGLStrea... AFAIK it also ended up being literally a couple thousand lines of code, not some mas…

"AFAIK". Your rant is wrong in so many levels it's not even funny.

Nvidia earned that hostility. It's not even worth replying when you're giving a comment in such bad faith. There's a search function with many many threads that dealt with this subject before if anyone wants a less biased view of EGLStream and Wayland.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#567

Post by TomVDB »

ksec wrote: post #478
TomVDB wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts. I've seen this argument made before. It would be a valid point if Apple stopped using Nvidia GPUs in 2008 (they did), and then never used them again. And yet, 4 years later, they used Nvidia GPUs on the 2012 MacBook Retina 15" on which I'm typing this.

And the 2012 GeForce GPU had GPU panic issues and let say higher chances of GPU failures. And then that was that. We haven't seen Nvidia GPU again.

I haven’t seen any of those in 8 years, but I’ll take you at your word...

That said: AMD GPUs have also had their share of issues on MacBooks.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#568

Post by walterbell »

nautilus12 wrote: post #473
walterbell wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were two separate IoT business units: Platform ( https://pelion.com ) and Data ( https://www.treasuredata.com/ ). The Platform unit fits the Segars post-acquisition comment about end-to-end IoT software architecture, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24465005 > One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make commitments to the UK government over Arm’s future in Britain, where opposition politicians…

Does this mean they are or aren't buying treasure data? What would happen if not?

That would be up to Softbank.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#569

Post by baddox »

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?

Samsung makes (excellent) screens for iPhones, which are huge competitors to Samsung's own flagship phones, but Samsung still seems happy to take the profits from the screen sales. If there are smaller potential competitors that Samsung won't work with it's most likely because the scale is too small to be in their economic interest, not because they're rejecting profits in order to stifle potential competitors.
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