Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#571

Post by Wowfunhappy » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

DCKing wrote: post #520

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…

It could be Nvidia just wants ARM's profits and leave them alone, but I don't understand why Nvidia would spend 40 billion dollars on that. They spend 40 billion on the control of a company, why would they do that if they just would leave them be? Surely they want to exercise that control in some way for their own goals. Especially a company like Nvidia which (in my linked comment) has a proven track record of not un…

> They spend 40 billion on the control of a company, why would they do that if they just would leave them be?

Well, the optimistic reason would be talent-share. nVidia has a lot of chip designers, and ARM has a lot of chip designers, and having all of them under one organization where they can share discoveries, research and ideas could benefit all of nVidia's products.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#572

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

48bb-9a7e-dc4f2 wrote: post #566

paulmd wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#573

Post by mlindner » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #33

Talking points from the founders of Arm & Nvidia: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its-... > Huang told me that first thing that the combined company will do is to, “bring NVIDIA technology through Arm’s vast network.” So I’d expect NVIDIA GPU and NPU IP to become available quickly to smartphone, tablet, TV and automobile SoC providers as quickly as possible. > Arm CEO Simon Segars framed it we…

Arm CEO really doesn't understand what's going on. There is no future where everything runs on the cloud. That simply cannot happen for legal reasons. Additionally the internet is getting more balkanized and that further is against the idea of the cloud. AI will not be running in the cloud, it will be running locally. Apple sees this but many others don't yet. You only run AI in the cloud if you want to monetize it with advertising.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#574

Post by hajile » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

janoc wrote: post #517

kabacha wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are people getting the "decade" number from? Looks demand for RISC-V just went up significantly and it's not like it's broken or not-existing, RISC-V "just worked" a year ago already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19118642

The "decade" comes from the fact that there is currently no RISC-V silicon with performance anywhere near the current ARM Cortex A series. And a realistic estimate how long it will take to develop something that would be on par with today's Snapdragon, Exynos or Apple's chips is at least those 10 years. You need quite a bit more to have a high performance processor than just the instruction set. The "just worked" chi…

A ground-up new architecture takes 4-5 years.

Alibaba recently said their XT910 was slightly faster than the A73. Since the first actual A73 launched in Q4 2016, that would imply they are at most 4 years behind.

SiFive's U8 design from last year claimed to have the same performance as A72 with 50% greater performance per watt and using half the die area. Consider how popular the Raspberry PI is with it's A72 cores. With those RISCV cores, they could drastically increase the cache size and even potentially add more PCIe lanes within the same die size and power limits.

Finding out new things takes much more time than re-implementing what is known to already work. As with other things, the 80/20 rule applies. ARM has caught up a few orders of magnitude in the past decade. RISCV can easily do the same and give the lack of royalties. Meanwhile, the collaboration helps to share costs and discoveries which might mean progress will be even faster.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#575

Post by entropicdrifter » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #548

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.

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 see…

Looks like Nvidia never left the SoC market to begin with.

The latest Tegra SoC launched March of 2020.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#576

Post by andoriyu » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

thomasjudge wrote: post #499

zdw wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their best move might be to forget about the architecture license and make the switch to something else with the rest of the market. This assumes that there isn't some other factor in transitioning architecture - this argument could boil down in the mid 2000's to "Why not go x86/amd64", but you couldn't buy a license to that easily (would need to be 3-way with Intel/AMD to further complicate things) Apple has done…

It's kind of puzzling that Apple didn't buy them. They don't seem to be particularly aggressive/creative in the M&A department

Apple buying arm would never get approved. They have way to many direct competitors that heavily rely on SoCs that has arm cores.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#577

Post by btian » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

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…

Can you provide a link to the "public knowledge" for those who don't know?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#578

Post by paulpan » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

My initial reaction is that this reminiscent of the AMD-ATI deal back in 2006. It almost killed both companies and comparatively, this deal size is much bigger ($40B vs. $6B) for both a more mature industry and companies involved.

$40B is an obscene lot of money objectively and what's the endgame for Nvidia? If it's to "fuse" ARM's top CPU designs with their GPU prowess, then couldn't they invest the money to restart their own CPU designs (e.g. Carmel)? My inner pessimist, as with others here, is that Nvidia will somehow cripple the ARM ecosystem or prioritize their own needs over those of other customers'. Perhaps an appropriate analogy is Qualcomm's IP licensing shenanigans and how they've crippled the non-iOS smartphone industry.

That said, there's also examples of companies making these purchases with minimal insidious behavior and co-existing with their would-be competitors: Microsoft's acquisition of Github, Google's Pixel smartphones, Sony's camera lenses business and even Samsung, which supposedly firewalls its components teams so the best tech is available to whoever wants (and is willing to pay for it).

I suppose if this acquisition ends up going through (big if), then we'll see Nvidia's true intent in 3-5 years.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#579

Post by hajile » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

redwood wrote: post #28

The British should never have allowed foreign ownership of their core tech

Britain and the US are politically, and economically entwined with each other. As a country, keeping core technology at home is tied to defense (don't buy your guns from your competitor). If they don't intend to go to war with the US, then there isn't any real defense loss (I'd also point out that making IP "blueprints" for a core is different from manufacturing the core itself). If Britain were to have a real issue, it would be the US locking down F35 jets they sell to their allies.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#580

Post by hajile » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

m00dy wrote: post #85

UncleOxidant wrote: post #35

On the bright side, this could end up being a big boost for RISC-V.

and this would be killer for intel

Even if/when RISCV takes over, Intel and AMD will be in a unique position to offer "combination" chips with both x86 and RISCV cores which could milk the richest enterprise and government markets for decades to come.