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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

nvidianews.nvidia.com

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#91

Post by therealmarv »

causality0 wrote: post #80
therealmarv wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read the press release at all? It's too early to judge this now. ARM will stay in Cambridge and Nvidia wants to invest in this place.

Why would you read the press release at all? Do you expect a company to not do what's in their own financial self-interest? Look, I love nVidia. I only buy nVidia GPUs and I adore their devices like the SHIELD TV, handheld, tablet, even the Tegra Note 7. Even I can see that they're not just buying ARM on a whim. They intend to make that money back. Them using ARM to make that money is good for absolutely nobody excep…

Well it seems to be normal to judge without reading in 2020 and customize your news yourself. Time will tell...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#93

Post by burnte »

therealmarv wrote: post #67
gautamcgoel wrote: post #20

This is awful . Out of all the big tech companies, Nvidia is probably least friendly to open source and cross-platform comparability. It seems to me that their goal is to monopolize AI hardware over the next 20 years, the same way Intel effectively monopolized cloud hardware over the last 20. Expect to see less choice in the chip market and more and more propietary software frameworks like CUDA. A sad day for CS and…

The problem is more that AMD is sleeping in regard of GPU AI and good software interfaces.

Hardly sleeping, they have a fraction of the revenue and profit of NVidia and Intel. Revenue was half of Nvidia, profit was 5% of NVidia. Intel is even bigger. They only have so much in the way of R&D money.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#94

Post by bleepblorp »

bgorman wrote: post #58
bleepblorp wrote: post #31

This isn't going to do good things for anyone who doesn't own a lot of Nvidia stock. This is going to do especially bad things for anyone who needs to buy a cell phone or the SoC that powers one. There's no real alternative to ARM-based phone SoCs. Given Nvidia's business practices, any manufacturer who doesn't already have a perpetual ARM license should expect to have to pay a lot more money into Jensen Huang's reti…

Android worked on x86 and MIPS in the past, it could presumably be ported to work with RISC-V

Android still works on x86-64; indeed there are quite a few actively maintained x86-64 Android ports that are used, both on bare metal PCs and virtualized, for various purposes.

The problem is that there are no x86 SoCs that are sufficiently power efficient to be battery-life competitive with ARM SoCs in phones.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#95

Post by shmerl »

That's nasty Nvidia, very nasty. But on the other hand might be it will be a motivation for everyone to use ARM less.

I quite expect AMD for example to drop ARM chips from their hardware. Others should also follow suit. Nvidia is an awful steward for ARM.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#98

Post by mhh__ »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #11
easton wrote: post #4

Could Apple hypothetically use their perpetual license to ARM to license the ISA to other manufacturers if they so desired? (not that they do now, but it could be a saving grace if Nvidia assimilated ARM fully).

I'm pretty sure they can't, but I also think there's no way in hell they'd do it if they could. It's not in Apple's DNA. Better for them if no one else has access to the instruction set. I bet they'd make a completely custom ISA if they could. Heck, maybe they plan to some day, and that's why they're calling the new Mac processors "Apple Silicon".

I could see apple being the next in line of basically failed VLIW ISAs - the cost/benefit doesn't really add up to completely redesign, prove, implement, and support a new ISA unless it was worth it technologically.

If they could pull it off I would be very impressed.

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