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

Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 313 posts

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#71

Post by rswail »

jimbob45 wrote: post #35

Yeah, Hermann? Where was this grave concern when you sold to SoftBank? Why don’t you man up and just admit you play favorites? Edit: His concern was far more muted when it came to SoftBank in 2016 https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/690588/ARM-Holdings-...

So you're arguing about the level of concern? I can think of lots of reasons to be more concerned about a chip manufacturer buying the design/licensing business literally at the core of the majority of mobile phones than of a technology investment firm.

Or maybe you should just admit that your original comment was not well founded?

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#72

Post by segfaultbuserr »

Nitrolo wrote: post #57
bonzini wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they throttle workstation GPUs Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured ou…

Not doubting that this is the case, but what's the reason for nVidia wanting to restrict use in virtual machines?

Why does Intel cripple ECC and I/O virtualization [0] in high-end consumer desktop systems? Force people to buy Xeon, even if the performance is otherwise equivalent or higher for the use case. Why does Nvidia restrict virtualization? Force people to buy Quadro and Tesla.

> nVidia

FYI, a few years ago, nVidia has officially changed their name to "Nvidia"...

[0] IOMMU is not only a virtualization feature, it's also an important security feature to protect the host from DMA attacks of malicious peripherals (e.g. 1394, ExpressCard, Thunderbolt, USB 4). Fortunately Intel no longer cripples IOMMU (VT-D) since Skylake, but ECC is another story.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#73

Post by axaxs »

dralley wrote: post #70
axaxs wrote: post #34

I for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV. That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at t…

Samsung recently entered into a licensing deal with AMD to use their graphics technology in a mobile design. Early performance leaks/rumors are very promising (if true). I don't see this as much of a problem, competition is already on the way.

After what, 8 years? I welcome competition, but that's ALWAYS been the exynos curse. What if Nvidia makes a better GPU spec?

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#74

Post by segfaultbuserr »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #49
bonzini wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they throttle workstation GPUs Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured ou…

It is absolutely not a bug, Disassembly of NVIDIA drivers shows that its looking for specific KVM signatures, and if you modify those signatures, magically it starts working again...

Removing KVM signature is now the standard solution. But there's still a working driver patch to remove the virtualization check, it's available at here.

* sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher: Fixes "Bug" in Nvidia Driver preventing "Unsupported Configurations" from being used on KVM

https://github.com/sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#75

Post by duskwuff »

axaxs wrote: post #68
xvilka wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be the end of Linux on ARM. They will choke platform with blobs until the inevitable death. NVIDIA and open-source is like matter and antimatter - they simply cannot coexist in the same place and time.

ARM has little use except for open source. They have zero incentive to kill it, as they don't compete with it.

> ARM has little use except for open source.

Huh?? ARM is probably the most popular CPU architecture in use today -- unlike x86, which is largely limited to desktop/laptop and server computing, ARM is used in a lot of embedded applications.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#76

Post by Nexxxeh »

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #17

Seems like alarmist FUD to me. While I agree that having Arm owned by any one of its major customers creates some potential conflicts of interests, I think the notion that NVIDIA or any other company would start to drive licensees away with draconian terms/costs with some poor business planning pretty silly. The more interesting question to me is what would any single (major customer of Arm) company gain from owning…

If they are buying the perpetual license and hiring the ARM expertise anyway, why not just get the company, which also includes giving nVidia majority control of the ARM roadmap as well.

You get the people who literally wrote the book on modern ARM, you get all the IP which builds up the patent chest (improving chances of counter-suit and cross-licensing in the event of patent infringement issues), you don't need to pay for the license, and you know you aren't going to get fucked by roadmap or licensing changes in future. And your competitors literally end up paying you for privilege of competing against you.

Not saying it's right, but there's certainly multiple arguments for it.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#77

Post by axaxs »

duskwuff wrote: post #75
axaxs wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM has little use except for open source. They have zero incentive to kill it, as they don't compete with it.

> ARM has little use except for open source. Huh?? ARM is probably the most popular CPU architecture in use today -- unlike x86, which is largely limited to desktop/laptop and server computing, ARM is used in a lot of embedded applications.

Have you the counts of systems using ARM on Linux(Android) vs ARM in everything else? It's not even close.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#78

Post by segfaultbuserr »

leeoniya wrote: post #58
axaxs wrote: post #34

I for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV. That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at t…

> Mali is terrible care to elaborate? the Panfrost project has reverse engineered a bunch of popular Mali ISAs and now there's hardware support on the kernel for VA-API on these chips. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Panfrost

> has reverse engineered a bunch of popular Mali ISAs

As a FOSS user and developer, this is already a big problem to me. Although the situation of Nvidia's mobile GPUs (e.g. Tegra) is a bit better than desktop GPUs, but not much better.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#79

Post by throwaway2048 »

chongli wrote: post #23
awalton wrote: post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. There's far too much at stake here. Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?

Why give them the opportunity to do so?

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#80

Post by beached_whale »

frandroid wrote: post #33
awalton wrote: post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

> Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves Their new notebooks are still moving to an ARM-based CPU... Even if they enhanced the ARM design they still have an ARM licence.

Apple licenses the architecture(instruction set), but the chip design is theirs, I think
Post reply on HN