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

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#71

Post by gumby » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 12:10 AM UTC

CleanItUpJanny wrote: post #61

rvz wrote: post #34

What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up. Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa. In 201…

>long standing tech companies like FAANMG why are people going out of their ways to avoid the obvious and intuitive "FAGMAN" acronym?

Because smoking is no longer acceptable

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#72

Post by PragmaticPulp » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 12:10 AM UTC

I’m not convinced this is a death sentence for ARM. I doubt nVidia spent $40b on a company with the intention of killing it’s golden goose business model. The contractual agreements might change, but ARM wasn’t exactly giving their IP away for free before this move.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#73

Post by zdw » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 12:11 AM UTC

I 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.

The smaller vendors that license core designs (like the A5x and A7x series, etc.) like Allwinner, Rockchip, and Broadcom are probably in a worse state - nVidia could cut them off from any new designs. I'd be scrambling for an alternative if I were any of these companies.

Long term, it really depends on how nVidia acts - they could release low end cores with no license fees to try to fend off RISC-V, but that hasn't been overly successful when tried earlier with the SPARC and Power architectures. Best case scenario, they keep all the perpetual architecture people happy and architecturally coherent, and release some interesting datacenter chips, leaving the low end (and low margin) to 3rd parties.

Hopefully they'll also try to mend fences with the open source community, or at least avoid repeating past offenses.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#74

Post by stupendousyappi » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 12:11 AM UTC

realbarack wrote: post #66

CleanItUpJanny wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>long standing tech companies like FAANMG why are people going out of their ways to avoid the obvious and intuitive "FAGMAN" acronym?

Because it has an offensive slur in it

People should be fighting to join their favorite Silicon Valley FANMAG. Some would prefer the Bill Gates FANMAG, others Jeff Bezos...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#75

Post by enragedcacti » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 12:11 AM UTC

ibains wrote: post #50

I love this, I was amongst early engineers on CUDA (compilers). NVIDIA was so well run, but boxed into a smaller graphics card market - ATI and it were forced into low margins since they were made replaceable by OpenGL and DirectX standards. For the standard fans - they resulted a wealth transfer from NVIDIA to Apple etc. and reduced capital available for R&D. NVIDIA was constantly attacked by a much bigger Intel (wh…

Nvidia might have been an underdog once, but they are now the world's largest chipmaker, even surpassing Intel.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/312528-nvidia-overtake...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#76

Post by swarnie_ » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 12:11 AM UTC

CleanItUpJanny wrote: post #61

rvz wrote: post #34

What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up. Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa. In 201…

>long standing tech companies like FAANMG why are people going out of their ways to avoid the obvious and intuitive "FAGMAN" acronym?

Lost on the way to 4chan?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#77

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 12:12 AM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #57

ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

And there you have it. Perhaps the greatest thing to happen to RISC-V since the invention of the FPGA :-). I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to. Regarding the federal investment in FOSS thread that was here perhaps CPU architecture would be a good candidate.

RISC-V still seems too ad-hoc to me, and really new. Hard to say where it'd go for now. I know momentum is currently towards ARM over POWER, but... OpenPOWER is certainly a thing, and has IBM / Red Hat support. IBM may be expensive, but they already were proven "fair partners" in the OpenPOWER initiative and largely supportive of OSS / Free Software.

I would love OpenPOWER to succeed. I just don't see the 48 pin QFP version that costs I don't see OpenPOWER going there, but I can easily see RISC-V going there. So, for the moment, that is the horse I'm betting on.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#78

Post by lacker » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 12:12 AM UTC

CleanItUpJanny wrote: post #61

rvz wrote: post #34

What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up. Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa. In 201…

>long standing tech companies like FAANMG why are people going out of their ways to avoid the obvious and intuitive "FAGMAN" acronym?

Netflix really doesn’t belong in the same category as the others. It’s big but not as big, and it isn’t a sprawling conglomerate. Clearly “FAGMA” is the best acronym.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#79

Post by newsclues » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 12:13 AM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #64

ladberg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Nvidia's GPUs now include the same type of hardware that TPUs have, so there's no reason to believe that TPUs will win out over GPUs.

The key difference between a TPU and a GPU is that a TPU has a CPU. It's an entire computer, not just a piece of hardware. Is nVidia moving in that direction?

They just bought ARM for 40$billion. I think they want to integrate CPU,GPU and high speed networks

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#80

Post by causality0 » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 12:13 AM UTC

therealmarv wrote: post #55

rvz wrote: post #34

What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up. Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa. In 201…

Have you read the press release at all? It's too early to judge this now. ARM will stay in Cambridge and Nvidia wants to invest in this place.

Why would you read the press release at all? Do you expect a company to not do what's in their own financial self-interest? Look, I love nVidia. I only buy nVidia GPUs and I adore their devices like the SHIELD TV, handheld, tablet, even the Tegra Note 7. Even I can see that they're not just buying ARM on a whim. They intend to make that money back. Them using ARM to make that money is good for absolutely nobody except nVidia themselves.