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

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#721

Post by delfinom » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

pathseeker wrote: post #296

Blammar wrote: post #243

No one has seemed to notice the following two things: "To pave the way for the deal, SoftBank reversed an earlier decision to strip out an internet-of-things business from Arm and transfer it to a new company under its control. That would have stripped Arm of what was meant to be the high-growth engine that would power it into a 5G-connected future. One person said that SoftBank made the decision because it would hav…

>Also, to first order, when a company issues stock to purchase another corporation, that cost is essentially "free" since the value of the corporation increases. This isn't correct. If investors thing Nvidia overpaid, its share price will decline. There are many examples of acquiring companies losing significant value on announcements to buy other companies even in pure stock deals.

>If investors thing Nvidia overpaid, its share price will decline

You realize that logic no longer matters in this economy. There's an oversupply of printed money and stonks literally only going up.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#722

Post by delfinom » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 1:11 PM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #242

scarface74 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt Apple is dumb enough not to have basically a perpetual license for ARM.

I would also agree, the thing is - businesses breakup and come together all the time. If it makes sense and both parties can agree despite of past disagrements and lawsuits, they will partner. Just because Apple and nVidia has bad relationship at the moment regarding their GPUs is probably orthogonal to what they'll do with this new branch of nVidia, that is ARM.

>Just because Apple and nVidia has bad relationship at the moment regarding their GPUs is probably orthogonal to what they'll do with this new branch of nVidia, that is ARM.

Yea, they got fucked by Nvidia business practices multiple times. There's a saying about shame on you, shame on me, etc. Unless the entire Nvidia business unit also gets replaced in the same transaction, it doesn't matter how much of a faux separation of concerns they want to market.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#723

Post by delfinom » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 1:12 PM UTC

TomVDB wrote: post #567

ksec wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the 2012 GeForce GPU had GPU panic issues and let say higher chances of GPU failures. And then that was that. We haven't seen Nvidia GPU again.

I haven’t seen any of those in 8 years, but I’ll take you at your word... That said: AMD GPUs have also had their share of issues on MacBooks.

AMD doesn't grossly lie about their thermal specifications like Nvidia consistently does. To the point engineers can't design shit properly. It's one thing to make mistakes in engineering, that can be smoothed out with cash. It's another to outright lie and cover up.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#724

Post by rvense » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #598

rvense wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, the ARM ISA is old, but a few things have happened in microarchitecture since then. I wouldn't be rushing to use a 10-year-old ARM over a newer one. The Cortex cores are pretty great compared to ARM9 or whatever.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#725

Post by lagadu » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

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.

I recall reading a breakdown at one point a few years ago that indicated that between screen, fabs (before Apple went for TSMC) and memory, Samsung made more money from each iphone sold than they did for each galaxy S phone of the time. Seems like a winning deal to me.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#726

Post by xigency » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #601

xigency wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to. I understand what you're saying and this seems to be the prevailing pattern but I really don't understand it. ARM could easily be a standalone company. For some reason, mergers are in.

I would like to understand what you know about ARM that it's board of director's didn't (doesn't) know? In my experience companies merge when they are forced to, not because they want to. I have always assumed that their shareholders were offered so much of a premium on their shares that they chose to sell them rather than hold onto them. Clearly based on their fiscal 2015 results[1] they were a going concern. [1] ht…

I don't have any specific knowledge of the ARM sale but I've seen other mergers.

Clearly, if a buyer is willing to pay a premium for shares, it's because they believe the company is worth that premium. If the shareholders were optimistic, they might consider that as a signal of the company's underlying value and choose not to sell.

Sometimes activist shareholders will pressure a company to sell, like in the case of the Whole Foods sale to Amazon. Jana Partners owned ~8% and they motivated Whole Foods to look for buyers. They dumped their shares after the sale was announced and before it was executed. Whether that was the best for the other 92% of shareholders, the company's employees, and its customers is another question entirely.

My question is really outside of that. There will always be banks, investors, and companies that are motivated to consolidate and integrate companies to be increasingly competitive to the point of being anti-competitive. What is the counter force that helps maintain moderately sized companies that are profitable on their own?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#727

Post by lagadu » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

DCKing wrote: post #595

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't see it as much as Nvidia trying to strangle the competition that licenses ARM as much as I see it Nvidia having full control over the development of the architecture. This would enable them to own full solutions in their AI part of the business and tailor the architecture to their very specific needs.

Buying ARM not only allows them to control the direction of development, it also protects them should anyone else have bought it with hostile intent.

Personally I see this as more of an attack on Intel.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#728

Post by phkahler » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

DCKing wrote: post #531

klelatti wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely, plus just consider the information that Nvidia will have on all its competitors who use Arm IP. - It will know of their product plans (as they will need to buy licenses for new products). - It will know their sales volumes by product (as they will need to pay fees for each Arm CPU sold). - If they need technical help from Arm in designing a new SoC then the details of that engagement will be available to N…

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…

I dont even think this is about CPUs. This purchase is consolidation of two GPU companies. I've said it before, as Risc-V further commoditizes CPUs, the differentiator will be who has graphics. In that light, this is pure consolidation.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#729

Post by gorbachev » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #539

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…

> There is no way Nvidia will spend 40 billion on this without them deliberately or inadvertently destroy ARM's open CPU and GPU ecosystem But why would a company spend that much money to buy a company and destroy it afterwards?

They figure they can make more than $40B by driving ARM to the ground?

Personally I don't think that's true in this particular case, but the strategy isn't exactly unheard of.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#730

Post by floatboth » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #728

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…

I dont even think this is about CPUs. This purchase is consolidation of two GPU companies. I've said it before, as Risc-V further commoditizes CPUs, the differentiator will be who has graphics. In that light, this is pure consolidation.

Arm's Mali GPUs don't seem very important in the grand scheme of things. They're the choice for SoC makers who don't have anything else. Qualcomm has their own Adreno, Apple has their own thing, NXP buys GPUs from Vivante, Samsung is now going to include AMD Radeons in phones..