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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#701

Post by headmelted »

saagarjha wrote: post #619
headmelted wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Apple’s strategy here is very clear: Offer customers iOS apps and games on the next MacBook as a straight swap for Boot Camp and Parallels. Once they’ve moved everyone over to their own chips and brought back Rosetta and U/Bs they’re essentially free to replace whatever they like at the architecture level. In their reveal I noticed that they only mentioned ARM binaries running in virtual environments. It mak…

I would be quite surprised if LLVM ever lost the ability to compile C for the platform.

Exactly my point though.

Apple is large enough that if they want to break from ARM in the future they can do so by forking an LLVM backend. That's not a large job if it's a very small change, but once it's been done once they have plenty of resources to provide ongoing support (like they do for webkit).

The dividends of doing so are potentially massive. Given that they've been able to make really large gains with the A series chips to date on mobile (not least because they've been able to offload tasks to dedicated co-processors that general-purpose ARM cores don't ship with), the rewards for having chips that are a generation ahead of other like-for-like computers will outweigh the cost of maintaining the software.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#703

Post by alexhektor »

None of the top comments disuss the possibility of the deal not going through due to antitrust or other concerns by regulators. While it's owned by a Japanese company and being sold to an American one, China most likely doesn't approve and it could be a diplomatic issue due to security and intelligence concerns?

Not sure how relistic that scenario is, although I personally can very much see this being used as a negotiation vehicle, depending on the actual security concern (I'm obviously not an expert there..)

[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1200871.shtml

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#704

Post by bitL »

nitrobeast wrote: post #664
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 if Europe develop a company that threatens US leading tech / surveillance companies like Facebook / Google, or becomes the leader of the next tech wave, be prepared for US government actions to take it down. See: Japanese semi conductor industry in the 80s, Alstim, Bombardier, Tiktok.

One could argue that's what happened to NOKIA - the only non-US company controlling the largest growing market at the time. For anyone saying that it was dead already, you don't understand that despite minimal presence on the US market it controlled over 60% of the world's market and that could have lasted much longer due to loyalty of customers and upcoming MeeGo (that even US reviewers liked) if it wasn't Eloped.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#705

Post by starfallg »

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…

The reason that ARM is only worth 30-40 billion while powering nearly all smartphones and much of the embedded space is because their business model is not that profitable. If Nvidia is looking for profits, ARM is a bad investment. If they are looking for synergies to boost nVidia profits, it will be done at the expense of other licensees. That's exactly what people fear.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#707

Post by bananaface »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #468
bananaface wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$12B cash appears to be all they have available . They can't pay more cash. https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nvda/financials/... Their only other option would be taking on debt.

Right, so Nvidia with their A2 rating and their solid balance sheet in a rock bottom interest rate environment still found it favourable to purchase Arm with newly issued shares. That's telling us something about what they think about their share valuation right now.

That's not how interest works. "Low rate environments" are low rate because debt is less attractive than in a high rate environment. Debt isn't automatically preferable when interest rates are low - if it were, rates would rise. There's no free lunch.

All it tells you is that they think it's preferable to taking on debt, which in some sense is the position you always start from. Debt has a deadweight cost that you have to overcome.

But we can test your theory. You're saying they thought their shares were overvalued. The market's reaction was the opposite - announcing the deal bumped their share price 7.5%.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#708

Post by netheril96 »

Well, China will surely block this, just like how it blocked the Qualcomm attempt to buy NXP (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nxp-semicondtrs-m-a-qualc...).

Otherwise ARM would become a US company, and then the US would have another weapon in their arsenal to sanction China's tech companies (e.g. Huawei).

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#709

Post by spronkey »

simias wrote: post #610
emn13 wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Anythi…

Extremely aggressive optimizations are really special though, and they tend to require rewrites when new CPU extensions release (and workarounds to work on older hardware). If you rely on super low level ultra-aggressive micro optimizations your code is going to have a relatively short shelf life, different ISA or not. The vast majority of the code written for any given computer or smartphone doesn't have this level…

Absolutely this - even some aggressively optimised stuff like game engines don't have insurmountable amounts of micro optimisations in them.

Also - why would Apple massively up and change uArchs? Even if they did decide to turn Apple Silicon into not-ARM, I'd wager it would look a lot more like ARM than for example, x86 does.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#710

Post by aasasd »

deaddodo wrote: post #677
dralley wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VIA isn't privy to the cross-licensing agreement Intel/AMD signed which gives them full access to the other's technology portfolio (since AMD was a second source foundry for Intel, while Cyrix/VIA was not). However, the Court ruled (when they were still Cyrix) that they are allowed to sell any clean-room designed x86 hardware. So while they don't have access to internal architectural documents, they're allowed to rev…

> they are allowed to sell any clean-room designed x86 hardware

Uuuuh, presumably the case was about patents, right? I don't see how cleanroom-ing is fine with regard to patents.

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