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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#771

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #674
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has done quite well with their ARM license, outperforming the rest of the mobile form factor CPU market by a considerable margin. But that has really nothing to do with the architecture. They just spent more money on CPU R&D than their ARM competitors. They could have done the same thing with RISC-V, and if that's where the rest of the industry is going, they could be better off going there too. Especially fo…

The problem I see with your argument is that it ignores their superior mobile ARM SoC. If they are going to unify on an architecture, it would certainly be easier to migrate Mac to ARM than iOS to x86.

Your assumption is that the architecture matters and they couldn't build an x86 SoC which is just as good, but they could.

And you don't want to move to ARM if everybody else is moving away from it.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#772

Post by guorzhen »

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…

Tmall of Alibaba processed 544,000 transactions per second during the peak of its Singles' Day in 2019. I believe this has set a new world record for an e-commerce platform.

In case you didn't know about Singles' Day: https://graphics.reuters.com/SINGLES-DAY-ALIBABA/0100B30E24T...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#773

Post by ZuLuuuuuu »

013a wrote: post #553
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…

I tend to agree, but there may be another angle to this which could prove beneficial to consumers. Right now, the only ARM chips which are actually competitive with desktop chips are from Apple, and are obviously very proprietary. If this acquisition enables Nvidia to begin producing ARM chips at the same level as Apple (somehow, who's to say how, that's on them) then that would help disrupt the AMD/Intel duopoly on…

The failed "Windows on Snapdragon" experiment is not because of the fault of Qualcomm but Microsoft's. Qualcomm consistently released chips for PCs since Snapdragon 835 and the chips are pretty competitive in raw power compared to Intel. But even some of Microsoft's own software is not compiled natively for ARM leading to bad performance. No 64-Bit emulation means a lot of programs users download does not work at all. .Net Framework which is probably the most popular .Net framework for Windows programs is not compiled for ARM either so people who want to compile their apps need to first transition to .Net Core, and this wasn't even an option a year ago (because of lack of missing parts in .Net Core). So Microsoft is to blame for the handling of the Windows on Snapdragon experiment.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#774

Post by yearoflinux »

StillBored wrote: post #635
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.

Which hasn't kept them from building 64-bit cores with everything including AVX-512.. https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3099/centaur-unveils-its-new-... IIRC you watch the "Rise of the Centaur" documentary they talk about the Intel lawsuit, and the corresponding counter suit that they won. Which makes the whole thing sound like MAD. More interesting there is https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/zhaoxin/kaixian

Why doesn't someone like, say, TSMC acquire VIA in a deal where M&A experts do all their jugglery and cunning to make the licensing stay I wonder?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#775

Post by scarface74 »

floatboth wrote: post #735
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.

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

I doubt that will be true going forward. They first used the “Apple Silicon” branding for the Mac and yesterday they used the branding for the Watch and iPad (?)

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#776

Post by fishermanbill »

Speednet wrote: post #658
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…

Wait - it was OK when ARM was owned by a Japanese company, but suddenly bad when a US company buys them? Being anti-US is not a legitimate point. If anything, nVidia will create new market opportunities and expand existing ones for ARM. They have already said they will be expanding their UK presence. Maybe don't react so emotionally next time.

No it wasn't OK when Softbank bought them, I vehemently disagreed with the sale then, as this was the next step after Softbank acquired them.

Although I dont agree with selling to Softbank at least they didn't have a dog in the game. What is bad about Nvidia is that they have a dog in the (chip) game. A major reason you went to ARM was for a non biased design team - you knew you were getting their best if you paid for it. Now I'm afraid you don't.

Also my comment is not anti US, it just so happens that the US has all the big tech companies and foolishly the European countries, especially the UK believes it can compete in a level playing field with the US even though the US's GDP is about 9 times bigger than the UK's - god knows how much bigger its equities markets are.

At the EU level the US is not but then this kind of stuff isn't decided about at the EU level - maybe it should be, not that that will help the UK see the error in its ways after Christmas.

As for emotional reaction with the greatest of respect did you read your message before you posted it?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#777

Post by thesz »

yearoflinux wrote: post #774
StillBored wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which hasn't kept them from building 64-bit cores with everything including AVX-512.. https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3099/centaur-unveils-its-new-... IIRC you watch the "Rise of the Centaur" documentary they talk about the Intel lawsuit, and the corresponding counter suit that they won. Which makes the whole thing sound like MAD. More interesting there is https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/zhaoxin/kaixian

Why doesn't someone like, say, TSMC acquire VIA in a deal where M&A experts do all their jugglery and cunning to make the licensing stay I wonder?

Because TSMC can't compete with their customers and of them is AMD, I believe. TSMC promised not to build their chips, AFAIK, for exactly non-competition reason.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#778

Post by WhyNotHugo »

janoc wrote: post #414
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #410

This it terrible news for the FLOSS community. Nvidia has consistently for many years refused to properly support Linux and other open source OSs. Heck, Wayland compositors just say "if you're using nvidia then don't even try to use our software" since they're fed up of Nvidia's lack of collaboration. I really hope ARM doesn't go the same way. :(

ARM itself has little to no impact on open source community. They only license chip IP, they don't make any chips themselves. And most of the ARM architecture is documented and open, with the exception of things like the MALI GPU. Whether or not some SoC (e.g. in a phone) is going to be supported by Linux doesn't depend on ARM but on the manufacturer of the given chip. That won't change in any way. ARM maintains the…

> And most of the ARM architecture is documented and open

That's exactly the thing -- nvidia refuses to document their products, so third parties can't support it.

Should they extend their practices to ARM, then ARM support will quickly whither.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#779

Post by emn13 »

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…

That's not my experience. Plain old SIMD code ages fairly well - but if you port to a new arch, you will need to look at it again.

This isn't a question of precise instruction timing, it's a question of compilers being pretty bad at leveraging SIMD in general, even in 2020. Also, while I'm sure lots of projects have hand-tuned assembly, even higher level stuff like intrinsics help a lot, and need manual porting.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#780

Post by spfzero »

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…

Exactly, there is no way ARM is worth 40 B to Invidia, unless they are going to use it to arm-twist their competition.

Just look at ARMs annual net, multiply by 10, multiply that by 2 assuming starry-eyed optimism about you being better at generating value from ARM IP, you’re still far from 40 billion.

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