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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#591

Post by fluffything »

janoc wrote: post #547
fluffything wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So what's the marging of ARM per chip bought? ARM's IP isn't free. It is created by engineers that cost money. Those chip sell for 0.10$, so ARM's margin's can't be more than 0.10$ per chip, otherwise seller would be operating at a loss.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#592

Post by runeks »

The root problem here is the concept of patents -- at least as far as I can see.

If patents did not exist, and nVidia were to close down ARM and tell people "no more ARM GPUs; only nVidia GPUs from now on", then a competitor who offers ARM-compatible ISAs would quickly appear. But in the real world, nVidia just bought the monopoly rights to sue such a competitor out of existence.

It's really no wonder nVidia did this given the profits they can extract from this monopoly (on the ARM ISA).

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#593

Post by dralley »

tboerstad wrote: post #534
DCKing wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

VIA doesn't have a license for the AMD64 instruction set, however. Intel and AMD did a cross-licensing deal so they have a co-equal position.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#594

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

m0zg wrote: post #379

On the one hand, this is bad news - I would prefer ARM to remain independent. But on the other, from a purely selfish standpoint, NVIDIA will likely lean on Apple pretty hard to get its GPUs into Apple devices again, which bodes well for GPGPU and deep learning applications. Apple is probably putting together a RISC-V hardware group as we speak. The Jobs ethos will not allow them to depend this heavily on somebody el…

A few weeks ago there were rumors that ARM was looking to be sold to Apple and Apple turned them down. If an NVIDIA acquisition is such a deal breaker for Apple, why wouldn't they have just acquired ARM to begin with?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#595

Post by DCKing »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #571
DCKing wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All I can say to that is that I don't share your optimism. Explaining this as an acquihire sounds nice, but that seems a thin explanation of this purchase given the key role ARM has for many of Nvidia's competitors and the ludicrous amount of money Nvidia put on the table here. We'll see what the future holds - I certainly hope the open ecosystem can survive.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#596

Post by andoriyu »

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…

Hold on, the reason why RISV-V cores slower is that companies who make it doesn't have an existing backend or just got into CPU game.

I'm not saying Apple can drop-in RISC-V front-end to their silicon and call it a day, but you get the idea.

Sifive has a pretty decent chance at making performant chips within next few years.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#597

Post by emn13 »

rocqua wrote: post #440
emn13 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, but that cost - it's not a small thing to transition ISA, and don't forget that this transition is one of the simpler ones (more registers, fairly few devices). The risks of transitioning everything away from arm would be much greater. I guess they have some ISA flexibility (which is remarkable). But not much; each transition was still a very special set of circumstances and a huge hurdle, I'm sure.

At the low-level driver interface, transitioning ISA is a big deal. But I would guess that, at higher levels, most of the work is just changing the target of your compiler? As in, most of the work occurs in the low-level parts of the Operating system. After that the OS should abstract the differences away from User-space.

No way; not at all.

First of all: there's lots of software that's not the OS. The OS is the easy bit: everything else: grindy, grindy horrorstory. A lot of that code will be third-party. And if you think, "hey, we'll just recompile!", and you can actually get them to too - well, good luck, but performance will be abysmal in many cases. Lots and lots of libraries have hand-tuned code for specific architectures. Anything with vectorization - despite compilers being much better than they used to be - may see huge bog downs without hand tuning. That's not just speculation; you can look at software that's gets the vectorization treatment or was ported to arm from x86 poorly - perfomance falls off a cliff.

Then there's the JITs and interpreters, of which there are quite a few, and they're often hyper-tuned to the ISA's they run on. Also, they can't afford to run something like LLVM on every bit of output; that's way too slow. So even non-vectorized code suffers (you can look at some of the .net core ARM developments to get a feel for this, but the same goes for JS/Java etc). Webbrowsers are hyper-tuned. regexengines, packet filters, etc etc etc

Not to mention: just getting a compiler like LLVM to support a new ISA as optimally as x86 or ARM isn't a small feat.

Finally: at least at this point, until our AI overloads render that redundant - all this work takes expertise, but that expertise takes training, which isn't that easy on an ISA without hardware. That's why Apple's current transition is so easy: they already have the hardware; and the trained experts some with over a decade of experience on that ISA!. But if they really want to go their own route... well, that's tricky, because what are all those engineers going to play around on to learn how it works; what's fast, and what's bad?

All in all, it's no coincidence transitions like this take a long time, and that's for simple (aka well-prepared) transitions like the one's Apple's doing now. Saying they have ISA "flexibility", like they're somehow interchangeable is completely missing the point on how tricky on those details are, and how much they're going to matter on how achievable such a transition is. Apple doesn't have general ISA flexibility, it has a costly route from specifically x86 to specifically ARM, and nothing else.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#598

Post by ChuckMcM »

rvense wrote: post #470
exikyut wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FS32R274VCK2VMM appears to be the cheapest in this series; Digi-Key have it for $30, NXP has it for "$13 @ 10K". This is for a 200MHz part. https://www.nxp.com/part/FS32R274VCK2VMM https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/FS32R2... The two related devkits list for $529 and $4,123: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/development-boards-kits-... -- Those processors make quite a few reference to an "e20…

These are all basically ten-year-old parts, aren't they?

Yes but hey, the core ARM ISA is like 40 years old. The key is that they are in fact "low cost SoCs" which is not something I knew existed :-).

Its really too bad the dev boards are so expensive but I get you need a lot of layers to route that sort of BGA.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#599

Post by marcosdumay »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #516
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…

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…

Screen manufacture is a highly competitive market. ARM licensing isn't.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#600

Post by throwaway5792 »

broknbottle wrote: post #317
Aeolun wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Softbank has some losses of it’s own to make up, so that’s not very surprising.

Losses? Masayoshi Son just made a cool 8 billion on this deal. Time to hit up the roulette table in Vegas to double that to 16 billion

Buying a stake in AAPL,FB, or any tech company would have netted higher returns for less effort than buying ARM. If anything, a 25% ROI in 4 years is quite poor.
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