Simple question, is this about ARM architecture and IP... or securing a worldwide competitive advantage in 5G?
Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
581–590 of 784 posts
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> If either generates profits in line with their current expected returns, the stock price stays the same
This is a pretty naive depiction of Wall Street.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#583This it terrible news for the FLOSS community. Nvidia has consistently for many years refused to properly support Linux and other open source OSs. Heck, Wayland compositors just say "if you're using nvidia then don't even try to use our software" since they're fed up of Nvidia's lack of collaboration. I really hope ARM doesn't go the same way. :(
ARM itself has little to no impact on open source community. They only license chip IP, they don't make any chips themselves. And most of the ARM architecture is documented and open, with the exception of things like the MALI GPU. Whether or not some SoC (e.g. in a phone) is going to be supported by Linux doesn't depend on ARM but on the manufacturer of the given chip. That won't change in any way. ARM maintains the…
https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-sof...
ARM directly maintains the main ARM parts of the Linux kernel among other things.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#584Earlier 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…
> And the compiler doesn't even come close to having as much information as the CPU has. Unless your CPU has a means for profiling where your pipeline stalls are coming from, combined with dynamic recompilation/reoptimization similar to IBM's project DAISY or HP's Dynamo. It's not going to do well as out-of-order CPUs that make instruction re-optimization decisions for every instruction, but I wouldn't rule out softw…
I feel like what you describe is possible. When I think of what Transmeta was able to accomplish in the early 2000s just with CMS, certainly so.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to agree, but there may be another angle to this which could prove beneficial to consumers. Right now, the only ARM chips which are actually competitive with desktop chips are from Apple, and are obviously very proprietary. If this acquisition enables Nvidia to begin producing ARM chips at the same level as Apple (somehow, who's to say how, that's on them) then that would help disrupt the AMD/Intel duopoly on…
But Nvidia has an Arm architecture license already - the same as Apple - so can build Arm chips to whatever design it wants (and it does in Tegra). This is nothing to do with extending Nvidia's ability to use Arm IP in its own products.
perhaps they can be part of an 'early insider' program to get access to the next gen architecture improvements. and use that to steer towards integrating their own gpus for a premium instead of the dinky little Malis.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#586I see this going a few ways for different players: The perpetual architecture license folks that make their own cores like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Fujitsu (I think they needed this for the A64FX, right?) will be fine, and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there. Apple especially will be fine as they can get code into LLVM for whatever "Apple Silicon" evolves into over time…
"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.
Well, regardless of whether this amendment is kosher or not, AMX definitely exists. Perhaps the $2T tech behemoth was able to work out a sweetheart deal with the $40B semiconductor company.
> There’s been a lot of confusion as to what this means, as until now it hadn’t been widely known that Arm architecture licensees were allowed to extend their ISA with custom instructions. We weren’t able to get any confirmation from either Apple or Arm on the matter, but one thing that is clear is that Apple isn’t publicly exposing these new instructions to developers, and they’re not included in Apple’s public compilers. We do know, however, that Apple internally does have compilers available for it, and libraries such as the Acclerate.framework seem to be able to take advantage of AMX. [0]
my123's instruction names leads to a very shallow rabbit hole on google, which turns up a similar list [1]
Agreed upon: ['amxclr', 'amxextrx', 'amxextry', 'amxfma16', 'amxfma32', 'amxfma64', 'amxfms16', 'amxfms32', 'amxfms64', 'amxgenlut', 'amxldx', 'amxldy', 'amxldz', 'amxldzi', 'amxmac16', 'amxmatfp', 'amxmatint', 'amxset', 'amxstx', 'amxsty', 'amxstz', 'amxstzi', 'amxvecfp', 'amxvecint']
my123 also has ['amxextrh', 'amxextrv'].
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro....
[1] https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=187087&curpost...
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
4 years, 8 billions. 2 B / year. I don't think that's low. And during this time Arm was also filling its owner coffers. The only real question here is if they filled the coffers at a greater 2B/year or not. My guess is they didn't. Now SoftBank has a lot of cash to acquire more shining toys.
i guess i watched too many tv shows where investors think anything below 50% ROI is low
5% over inflation is average. US congress manages 25-30%, but that's on the back of insider trading (technically illegal thanks to a law signed by Obama, but also without much ability to actually investigate -- also law signed by Obama a few months later without fanfare).
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
What markup does Apple pay for Samsung OLED displays compared to Samsung’s other OLED customers? I think this is highly relevant if you want to use it as an example. Because if the markup for Apple is 5x that of other buyers of Samsung OLED displays then you certainly can’t say Samsung is “happy” to sell them to Apple.
Same for nVidia-owned-ARM: if they’re happy to sell ARM licenses at 5x the previous price, then that will surely increase sales for nVidia’s own chips. I guess my overall point is: a sufficiently high asking price is equivalent to a refusal to sell.
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#589Earlier 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.
In ARMv8 you have a much cleaner mechanism through system registers(MSR/MRS).
Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to agree, but there may be another angle to this which could prove beneficial to consumers. Right now, the only ARM chips which are actually competitive with desktop chips are from Apple, and are obviously very proprietary. If this acquisition enables Nvidia to begin producing ARM chips at the same level as Apple (somehow, who's to say how, that's on them) then that would help disrupt the AMD/Intel duopoly on…
But Nvidia has an Arm architecture license already - the same as Apple - so can build Arm chips to whatever design it wants (and it does in Tegra). This is nothing to do with extending Nvidia's ability to use Arm IP in its own products.
Nvidia is a total powerhouse when it comes to chip design. Most people here are looking at this from the angle of "how does ARM benefit Nvidia", but I think its more valuable to consider "how does Nvidia benefit ARM". In 2020, given what we know about Ampere, I really don't think there's another company out there with better expertise in microprocessor design (but, to be fair, lets say top 3 next to Apple and AMD). Now, they have more of the stack in-house, which may help produce better chips.
Yes, ARM mostly just does licensing, but it may turn out that this acquisition gives Nvidia positive influence over future ISA and fundamental design changes which emerge from their own experience building microprocessors.
Maybe that just benefits Nvidia, or maybe all of their licenses; I don't know. But, I think the high price of this acquisition should signal that Nvidia wants ARM for more than just collecting royalties (or, jesus, the people here who think they're going to cancel the licenses or something, that's a wild prediction).
The other important point is Mali, which has a very obvious and natural synergy with Nvidia's wheelhouse. Another example of Nvidia making ARM better; Nvidia is the leader in graphics, this is no argument, so their ability to positively influence Mali (whether by actually improving it, or replacing it with something GeForce) may be beneficial to the OEMs who use it.