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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#751

Post by fishermanbill »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #641
Barrin92 wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tech is only 10% of the US economy, and European nations are much more reliant on free-trade. Germany in particular, whose exports constitute almost 47% of their GDP, globally only comparable to South Korea for a developed nation. I get that Hackernews is dominated by people working in software and software news, but as a part of the real economy (and not the stock market) it's actually not that large and Europe does…

Only because of EU. Intra-EU trade is more comparable to trade between US states then true international trade.

Just to be clear my statement has nothing to do the 'EU' which is largely a trade body. I specifically used the term 'Europe' and 'free markets' not 'free trade'. This has nothing to do with Brexit to avoid confusion.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#752

Post by klelatti »

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.

I have a lot of respect for RISC-V but I really struggle with an unqualified statement that RISC-V "is" commoditising CPUs in a meaningful way when there are basically no mobile, desktop or server chipsets with a meaningful presence in the market. All that may change over the next 10 years but who knows? For now x86 is dominant on servers and Arm in mobile.

In reality Arm commoditised in many markets CPUs by making reasonable designs available to all at reasonable cost, keeping control over the ISA and allowing firms to innovate in their implementations. You can have the same code running on a Raspberry PI, an iPhone and a 64 core Graviton2 server.

The Nvidia takeover threatens all this by giving control to a firm who could well 'unlevel' the playing field and even refuse to offer the latest IP to competitors.

RISC-V may provide a way out for firms unhappy with Nvidia but it could be a bumpy path. And its certainly not the case that Nvidia are paying $40bn to consolidate Mali with their own graphics IP.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#753

Post by fishermanbill »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #638
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 you really think more protectionism will help? Maybe part of the problem is that due to so many regulations, there's not a healthy startup ecosystem and the compensation isn't remotely high enough to draw the best talent.

Yes the US is all about protectionism, same goes for China, same goes for the EU (also note my use of Europe, EU != Europe). Hence why all three major trade blocks dont have complete free trade deals setup between them (not that comment has anything to do with free trade deals - at least not primarily).

Ultimately free trade is where the world would like to get to purely from an economic basis but you have to do that in tandem with the rest of the world. If you go first everybody else has a economic advantage over you as possibly the UK will find out after Brexit actually happens. Also politics gets in the way of the world achieving full free trade. Some gov will always want votes by protecting an industry - like the UK's fishing industry for instance.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#754

Post by murgindrag »

aasasd wrote: post #710
deaddodo wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That case was about patents, but I'm not sure patents are as central here. Right now, there is a patent minescape of mutually assured destruction between everyone. If anyone exercises their patent rights, no one can make anything modern, and the whole industry would come screeching to a halt.

Oddly enough, integrated circuits have their own IP scheme. IP has copyright, patent right, trade secrets, trademarks, and mask works. You rarely learn about mask works, since they're so narrow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_layout_desi...

I think a lot of this would hinge on that corner of the law.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#755

Post by mas3god »

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…

If Europe doesnt like American business they can make their own company or use open source... Risc V is a great alternative to arm anyways.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#756

Post by spacedcowboy »

pas wrote: post #643
spacedcowboy wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

During the design were they careful not to create any derivative works of arm IP and/or not to infringe on any of arm's patents?

Apple co-founded the company. I imagine that they have a right to that IP.

Even if not, then yes, I would imagine that a behemoth of IP design like Apple would probably have considered IP rights during that design...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#758

Post by dijit »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #638
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 you really think more protectionism will help? Maybe part of the problem is that due to so many regulations, there's not a healthy startup ecosystem and the compensation isn't remotely high enough to draw the best talent.

There are a lot of tech companies that start and are successful in Europe. They just get bought when they get big enough and killed later.

Skype is another example to add to the list.

Skype is effectively dead technology and isn’t even promoted any more.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#759

Post by welfare »

mihaaly wrote: post #698
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…

> You buy, you control, that's how the world works NO! That is how the world does NOT work! We seen it trillion times, I am disappointed the least seeing this negligent 'argument' for blocking dominance! Shame!

How does the world work then?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#760

Post by dragontamer »

rvense wrote: post #724
ChuckMcM wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ARM Cortex-M3 was released in 2006 and is still a popular microcontroller core. Microcontrollers have a multi-decade long lifespan. (I'm still seeing new 8051-based designs...)

There are still new chips using the Cortex-M3 today. Microcontroller devs do NOT want to be changing their code that often.

New chips move the core to lower-and-cheaper process nodes (and lower the power consumption), while otherwise retaining the same overall specifications and compatibility.

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