Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

nvidianews.nvidia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 784 posts

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#631

Post by babypuncher »

baddox wrote: post #569
klelatti wrote: post #522

Earlier 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.

Apple is a much bigger company than Samsung, they can't realistically turn down a contract that big when LG is lying in wait to take all that money.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#632

Post by choiway »

I'm confused. What is it that Nvidia can do by owning ARM that it can't do by just licensing the architecture? Can't they just license and build all the chips people think they'll build without buying the whole thing?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#633

Post by bavell »

baddox wrote: post #622
simias wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhones sell massively well though, to the point where it would be a big loss if Apple went to another company for their screens. You just can't screw with a company the size of Apple without consequences. It's not like they'd go "oh no, no more iPhone now I guess :'(" if Samsung decided not to sell them screens anymore. The problem is more with smaller companies that could be destroyed before they even get a chance…

I don’t really see how it works both ways. It’s hard to imagine a bigger scarier competitor to Samsung than the Apple iPhone, yet we agree Samsung is happy selling screens to Apple.

Because there are a lot more Androids and other devices that need screens. If they didn't make screens for Apple, a competitor would.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#634

Post by easde »

DCKing wrote: post #604
013a wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). N…

> 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).…

Nvidia actually did try to license out its GPU IP a few years back: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7083/nvidia-to-license-kepler...

I don't believe they ever closed a deal, but clearly Nvidia had some interest in becoming an IP vendor. Perhaps the terms were too onerous or the price too high.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#635

Post by StillBored »

dralley wrote: post #593
tboerstad wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which hasn't kept them from building 64-bit cores with everything including AVX-512..

https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3099/centaur-unveils-its-new-...

IIRC you watch the "Rise of the Centaur" documentary they talk about the Intel lawsuit, and the corresponding counter suit that they won. Which makes the whole thing sound like MAD.

More interesting there is https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/zhaoxin/kaixian

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#636

Post by melbourne_mat »

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 think it's wonderful news that Arm is joining the ranks of giant American tech oligopolies. This is a win for freedom and increases prosperity for all.

/s

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#637

Post by fishermanbill »

When will Europe realise that there is no second place when it comes to a market - the larger player will always eventually end up owning everything.

I can not put into words how furious I am at the UK's Conservative party for not protecting our last great tech company.

Europe has been fooled into the USA's ultra free market system (which works brilliantly for the US but is terrible for everybody else). As such American tech companies have brought EVERYTHING and eventually moth balled them.

Take Renderware it was the leading game engine of the PS2 era consoles, brought by EA and mothballed. Nokia is another great example brought by Microsoft and mothballed. Imagination Technologies was slightly different in that it wasn't bought but Apple essentially mothballed them. Now ARM will undoubtedly be the next via an intermediate buyout.

You look across Europe and there is nothing. Deepmind could have been a great European tech company - it just needed the right investment.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#638

Post by alfalfasprout »

fishermanbill wrote: post #637

When will Europe realise that there is no second place when it comes to a market - the larger player will always eventually end up owning everything. I can not put into words how furious I am at the UK's Conservative party for not protecting our last great tech company. Europe has been fooled into the USA's ultra free market system (which works brilliantly for the US but is terrible for everybody else). As such Ameri…

And you really think more protectionism will help?

Maybe part of the problem is that due to so many regulations, there's not a healthy startup ecosystem and the compensation isn't remotely high enough to draw the best talent.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#639

Post by Barrin92 »

fishermanbill wrote: post #637

When will Europe realise that there is no second place when it comes to a market - the larger player will always eventually end up owning everything. I can not put into words how furious I am at the UK's Conservative party for not protecting our last great tech company. Europe has been fooled into the USA's ultra free market system (which works brilliantly for the US but is terrible for everybody else). As such Ameri…

tech is only 10% of the US economy, and European nations are much more reliant on free-trade. Germany in particular, whose exports constitute almost 47% of their GDP, globally only comparable to South Korea for a developed nation.

I get that Hackernews is dominated by people working in software and software news, but as a part of the real economy (and not the stock market) it's actually not that large and Europe doesn't frame trade policy around it, for good reasons.

The US also doesn't support free-trade for economic reasons, but for political and historical reasons, which is to maintain a rule based alliance across the globe, traditionally to fend off the Soviets. Because they aren't around any more, the US is starting to ditch it. The US has never economically benefited from free-trade, it's one of the most insular nations on the planet. EU-Asia trade with a volume of 1.5 trillion almost doubles EU-American trade, tendency increasing, and that's why Europe is free-trade dependent.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#640

Post by arp242 »

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…

I'm not sure if Linus was talking about the Wayland stuff specifically; the answer was in response to a complaint that the nvidia/Intel graphics card switching didn't work on Linux.

I haven't used nvidia products for about 10 years and I' m not really in to gaming or graphics, so I don't really have an opinion on them either way, either business or technical. I used their FreeBSD drivers back in the day and was pretty happy it allowed me to play Unreal Tournament on my FreeBSD machine :-)

Linus is not always right, but a lot of what he says is often considerably more nuanced and balanced than his "worst-of" highlight reel suggests. There are plenty of examples of that in the presentation/Q&A he did from which this excerpt comes, for example (but of course, most people only see the "fuck you" part).

So if Linus – the person responsible for writing operating systems with their hardware – says they're the "worst company we deal with" then this strikes me as a good reason to at least do your research if you plan to buy hardware from them, if you intend to use it with Linux anyway. I'll take your word for it that they're doing great stuff, but if it outright refuses to work on my Linux box then that's kinda useless to me.

This was also 6 or 7 years ago I think, so perhaps things are better now too.

Post reply on HN