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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#731

Post by floatboth »

pjmlp wrote: post #712
ngcc_hk wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But are they successful. It is AMD that kick intel not the other way round both architecture x86 64 bit) and now through working with others (Taiwan which is not in your list) to break their hardware. Might and reality is not right. We need competition. We adore competition. And even the countries you quote many do have competition. You just do not innovate and of course one can try to stop and rest. But the wor…

Without AMD I could be enjoying Itanium nowadays.

Itanic was sinking from the start, it wouldn't be unlikely that Intel would've invented something like amd64 just a few years later if AMD didn't do the smart thing.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#732

Post by floatboth »

bogomipz wrote: post #487
fluffything wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What have confidence when we can just look at ARM financials? There are more ARM chips sold each year than those of all its competitors together. Yet ARM's revenue is 300 million $. Why? Because ARM lives from the ISA royalties, and their revenue on the cores they license is actually small. With RISC-V on the rise, and west sanctions against china, RISC-V competition against ARM will only increase, and it is very har…

>" If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu, etc. are built and designed by better teams)." The latest Fujitsus HPC offering the A64FX is also ARM based though.[1][2] And it sounds as though this is replacing their SPARC64 in this role . [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)

Fujitsu is using custom cores, but AWS Graviton (1 and 2) actually uses Arm Neoverse cores. The Ampere Altra will too.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#733

Post by pjmlp »

floatboth wrote: post #731
pjmlp wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without AMD I could be enjoying Itanium nowadays.

Itanic was sinking from the start, it wouldn't be unlikely that Intel would've invented something like amd64 just a few years later if AMD didn't do the smart thing.

You can pick any colour as long as it is black.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#734

Post by DCKing »

lagadu wrote: post #727
DCKing wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree actually that Nvidia's strategic motivation here is their long-term position w.r.t. Intel and AMD, maybe even Apple/Huawei/Samsung. And that's actually a good reason for this investment!

I likewise don't think destroying the ARM ecosystem is Nvidia's primary objective here - far from it. It might not even be a secondary objective. But I do think the ARM ecosystem will be slowly torn apart either as an innocent bystander or as a less prominent secondary objective (given real-world complexities, probably some combination of both). When Nvidia buys ARM, and they explicitly buy them to improve their competitive position, there's only one direction where I see the incentives going. Those will be against the open ARM ecosystem, which is a breeding ground for big and small competition against Nvidia.

Even if Nvidia's primary motives are relatively benign, I think they'll inevitably create a sitation where the ARM ecosystem can't continue existing in its current form. That's where the real tragedy will be.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#735

Post by floatboth »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #623
pas wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if your chip heavily builds on arm's IP you need a license for that at least as long as you can't replace the infringing parts of the design. Which sounds very much impossible if you also want to progress on other aspects of having the best chips.

Apple uses the ARM ISA. It doesn't use ARM IP - as in, the design of the chip. Apple designed their own damn chip! Since they're not branding it as ARM in any way, shape, or form, and they have a perpetual architectural license to the ISA, I suspect they could do pretty much what they please - as long as they don't call it ARM. Which they don't.

They definitely call it ARM in developer tools and technical documents.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#736

Post by floatboth »

dragontamer wrote: post #303
anarazel wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO VLIW is an absurdly bad choice for a general purpose processor. It requires baking in a huge amount of low level micro-architectural details into the compiler / generated code. Which obviously leads to problems with choosing what hardware generation to optimize for / not being able to generate good code for future architectures. And the compiler doesn't even come close to having as much information as the CPU has…

VLIW was the best implementation (20 years ago) of instruction level parallelism. But what have we learned in these past 20 years? * Computers will continue to become more parallel -- AMD Zen2 has 10 execution pipelines, supporting 4-way decode and 6-uop / clock tick dispatch per core, with somewhere close to 200 registers for renaming / reordering instructions. Future processors will be bigger and more parallel, Ice…

Main lesson: we failed to make all the software JIT-compiled or AOT-recompiled-on-boot or something, that would allow retargeting the optimizations for the new generation of a VLIW CPU. Barely anyone even tried. Well I guess in the early 2000s there was this vision that everything would be Java, which is JIT, but lol

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#737

Post by captainbland »

floatboth wrote: post #730
phkahler wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Sure but you have to assume that at some point in the future that Nvidia is going to start making those non-Nvidia GPUs very difficult/expensive to use in future ARM designs. They could do this legally, technically through manipulating the reference designs to tightly integrate Nvidia GPUs, cutting support for third party GPU integrating SoCs or any of the above.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#738

Post by rcgorton »

pjmlp wrote: post #711
klelatti wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very briefly: - They don't license because they can make a lot more money manufacturing the chips themselves. - AMD also has the right to x86 because Intel originally allowed them to build x86 compatible chips (some customers insisted on a 'second source' for cpus) and following legal action and settlements between the two companies over the years there is now a comprehensive cross licensing agreement in place. [1] -…

Those cross licenses are the only reason why this laptop isn't running on Itanium, without them there wouldn't exist AMD64.

The 'only' reasons (plural) that your laptop does not run Itanium: - battery life: an Itanium in a laptop would run for less than an your - too hot: Itanium servers ran incredibly hot due to power. A laptop would probably catch fire in short order - Windows was not supported on Itanium - cost: would you pay $5K for an Itanium laptop?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#740

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #700
mytherin wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation has little to do with it. Most of the tech industry is inherently winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most because of how easy it is to scale up tech solutions. US companies get a huge head-start because of their large home market compared to the fragmented EU market, and can easily carry that advantage into also dominating the EU market. There is a reason Russia and China have strong tech companies and Europ…

When is the time china and Russia has a lead in IT by not protectionist and copycat. I can only think of tik tok. The strange thing is if you do not count brexit, Arm is one of the many example Uk can do it. And whilst we say Nokia, Sieman and japan fuji (sitting in Hosiptal now and thinking those mri, ...) non-chinese and non-Russia do dominate the tech world even they are not USA. But communist ideology totalitaria…

Huawei. They lead in 5G equipment because they did the necessary R&D investment.

Their phones are pretty good, too (or were pretty good before they got cut off from their suppliers). Their edge was that they built really great cameras into their phones.

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