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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

• ChuckMcM 6y ago
  And there you have it. Perhaps the greatest thing to happen to RISC-V since the invention of the FPGA :-). I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to. Regarding the federal investment in FOSS thread that was here perhaps CPU architecture would be a good candidate.
  • dragontamer 6y ago
    RISC-V still seems too ad-hoc to me, and really new. Hard to say where it'd go for now. I know momentum is currently towards ARM over POWER, but... OpenPOWER is certainly a thing, and has IBM / Red Hat support. IBM may be expensive, but they already were proven "fair partners" in the OpenPOWER initiative and largely supportive of OSS / Free Software.
    • ChuckMcM 6y ago
      I would love OpenPOWER to succeed. I just don't see the 48 pin QFP version that costs < $1 and powers billions of gizmos. For me the ARM ecosystem's biggest win is that it scales from really small (M0/M0+) to really usefully big (A78) and has many points between those two architectures. I don't see OpenPOWER going there, but I can easily see RISC-V going there. So, for the moment, that is the horse I'm betting on.
      • dragontamer 6y ago
        Not quite 48-pin QFP chips, but 257-pin embedded is still smaller than Rasp. Pi. (Just searched what NXP's newest Power-chip is, and its a S32R274: 2MB 257-pin BGA. Definitely "embedded" size, but not as small as Cortex-M0) To be honest, I don't think that NVidia/ARM will screw over their Cortex-M0 or Cortex-M0+ customers over. I'm more worried about the higher-end, whether or not NVidia will "play nice" with its bigger rivals (Apple, Intel, AMD) in the datacenter.
        • exikyut 6y ago
          The FS32R274VCK2VMM appears to be the cheapest in this series; Digi-Key have it for $30, NXP has it for "$13 @ 10K". This is for a 200MHz part. https://www.nxp.com/part/FS32R274VCK2VMM https://www.nxp.com/part/FS32R274VCK2VMM https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/FS32R274VCK2VMM/FS32R274VCK2VMM-ND/7645581 https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/FS32R2... The two related devkits list for $529 and $4,123: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/development-boards-kits-programmers/evaluation-boards-embedded-mcu-dsp/786?k=S32R274 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/development-boards-kits-... -- Those processors make quite a few reference to an "e200", which I think is the CPU architecture. I discovered that Digi-Key lists quite a few variants of this under Core Processor; and checking the datasheets of some random results suggests that they are indeed Power architecture parts. https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-microcontrollers/685?FV=-8%7C685%2C506%7C342439%2C506%7C342440%2C506%7C342441%2C506%7C342442%2C506%7C342443%2C506%7C342444%2C506%7C342445%2C506%7C342446%2C506%7C342447%2C506%7C342448%2C506%7C342449%2C506%7C342450%2C506%7C342451%2C506%7C342452%2C506%7C342453%2C506%7C342454%2C506%7C342455%2C506%7C342472%2C506%7C431926%2C506%7C431928&quantity=0&ColumnSort=1000011&page=1&pageSize=25 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/... The cheapest option appears to be the $2.67@1000, up-to-48MHz SPC560D40L1B3E0X with 256KB ECC RAM. Selecting everything >100MHz finds the $7.10@1000 SPC560D40L1B3E0X, an up-to-120MHz part that adds 1MB flash (128KB ECC RAM). Restricting to >=200MHz finds the $13.32@500 SPC5742PK1AMLQ9R has which has dual cores at 200MHz, 384KB ECC RAM and 2.5MB flash, and notes core lock-step. -- After discovering the purpose of the "view prices at" field, the landscape changes somewhat. https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-microcontrollers/685?FV=143%7C100399%2C143%7C105872%2C143%7C114552%2C143%7C114561%2C143%7C140510%2C143%7C147811%2C143%7C153451%2C143%7C160669%2C143%7C182367%2C143%7C213330%2C143%7C77976%2C143%7C79202%2C143%7C84100%2C143%7C85683%2C143%7C90674%2C143%7C94618%2C143%7C95635%2C506%7C342439%2C506%7C342440%2C506%7C342441%2C506%7C342442%2C506%7C342443%2C506%7C342444%2C506%7C342445%2C506%7C342446%2C506%7C342447%2C506%7C342448%2C506%7C342449%2C506%7C342450%2C506%7C342451%2C506%7C342452%2C506%7C342453%2C506%7C342454%2C506%7C342455%2C506%7C342472%2C506%7C431926%2C506%7C431928%2C-8%7C685&quantity=1&ColumnSort=1000011&page=1&pageSize=25 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/... The SPC574S64E3CEFAR (https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/spc574s64e3.pdf https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/spc574s64e3.pdf) is 140MHz, has 1.5MB code + 64KB data flash and 96KB+32KB data RAM, and is available for $14.61 per 1ea. The SPC5744PFK1AMLQ9 (https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MPC5744P.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MPC5744P.pdf) is $20.55@1, 200MHz, 2.5MB ECC flash, 384KB ECC RAM, and has two cores that support lockstep. The MPC5125YVN400 (https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/product-brief/MPC5125PB.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/product-brief/MPC5125PB.pdf) is $29.72@1, 400MHz, supports DDR2@200MHz (only has 32KB onboard (S)RAM), and supports external flash. (I wonder if you could boot Linux on this thing?)
      • na85 6y ago
        I miss DIP chips that would fit on breadboards. I don't have steady enough hands to solder QFP onto a PCB, and I'm too cheap to buy an oven :(
        • Ecco 6y ago
          You’re supposed to drag-solder those. Look it up on YouTube, it’s super easy. The hardest part is positioning the chip, but it’s actually easier than with an oven, because you can rework it if you only solder one or two pins :)
          • na85 6y ago
            Wow, just looked up a video and some guy did an 0.5mm pitch chip pretty darn quickly. Thank you!
            • Ecco 6y ago
              You’re welcome! Also, flux. Lots of it. Buy some good one, and use tons of it. Then clean the hell out of your PCB!
          • IshKebab 6y ago
            There's an even easier way than drag soldering - just solder it normally, without worrying about bridges. You can put tons of solder on it. The use some desoldering braid to soak up the excess solder. It will remove all the bridges and leave perfect joints.
        • ChuckMcM 6y ago
          https://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/smt-breakout-pcb-for-48-qfn-or-48-tqfp/57383 https://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/smt-breakout-pc... can help. I have hand soldered STM32s to this adapter (use flux, a small tip)
        • foldr 6y ago
          A cheap toaster oven or hot air tool works fine for these. Or, as others have said, a regular soldering iron with lots of flux.
      • awill 6y ago
        the war is over. Arm has won. That dominance will take a long time to fade. AWS and Apple's future is Arm.
    • darksaints 6y ago
      OpenPOWER is pretty awesome but would be nowhere near as awesome as an OpenItanium. IMHO, Itanium was always mismarketed and misoptimized. It made a pretty good server processor, but not so good that enterprises were willing to migrate 40 year old software to run on it. In mobile form, it would have made a large leap in both performance and battery life. And it would have been a fairly easy market to break into: the average life of a mobile device is a few years, not a few decades. Recompilation and redistribution of software is the status quo.
      • drivebycomment 6y ago
        Itanuim deserved its fiery death and resurrection doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's a dead end architecture, and humanity gained (by freeing up valuable engineering power to other more useful endeavors) when it died.
        • darksaints 6y ago
          Itanium was an excellent idea that needed investment in compilers. Nobody wanted to make that investment because speculative execution got them 80% of the way there without the investment in compilers. But as it turns out, speculative execution was a phenomenally bad idea, and patching its security vulnerabilities has set back processor performance to the point where VLIW seems like a good idea again. We should have made those compiler improvements decades ago.
          • dragontamer 6y ago
            NVidia Volta: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06826.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06826.pdf Each machine instruction on NVidia Volta has the following information: * Reuse Flags * Wait Barrier Mask * Read/Write barrier index (6-bit bitmask) * Read Dependency barriers * Stall Cycles (4-bit) * Yield Flag (1-bit software hint: NVidia CU will select new warp, load-balancing the SMT resources of the compute unit) Itanium's idea of VLIW was commingled with other ideas; in particular, the idea of a compiler static-scheduler to minimize hardware work at runtime. To my eyes: the benefits of Itanium are implemented in NVidia's GPUs. The compiler for NVidia's compiler-scheduling flags has been made and is proven effective. Itanium itself: the crazy "bundling" of instructions and such, seems too complex. The explicit bitmasks / barriers of NVidia Volta seems more straightforward and clear in describing the dependency graph of code (and therefore: the potential parallelism). ---------- Clearly, static-compilers marking what is, and what isn't, parallelizable, is useful. NVidia Volta+ architectures have proven this. Furthermore, compilers that can emit such information already exist. I do await the day when other architectures wake up to this fact.
  • Koshkin 6y ago
    The next Apple machine I am going to buy will be using RISC-V cores.
    • gumby 6y ago
      Because of this transaction? I’m sure this deal will have absolutely no impact on apple’s deal with ARM. Apple could of course Afford to invest in RISC-V (and surely has played with it internally) but they have enough control of their future under the current arrangement that it will be a long long time before they feel any need to switch — 15 years at least.
      • acomjean 6y ago
        Apple and Nvidia don't seem to see eye to eye. Nvidia doesn't support macs (CUDA support was pulled a year or two ago) and apples don't include Nvidia cards. This could change.
        • gumby 6y ago
          This is because Nvidia screwed apple (from Apple’s POV) years ago with some bad GPUs to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts. I don’t know the internal details of course just the public ones so can’t say if Apple is being petty or if Nvidia burned the bridge while the problem was unfolding. Given that the CEO was the supply chain guy at the time I suspect the latter, as I’d imagine he’d be more dispassionate than Jobs. In any case I seriously doubt nvidia could, much less would benefit from cancelling Apple’s agreement.
          • TomVDB 6y ago
            > ... to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts. I've seen this argument made before. It would be a valid point if Apple stopped using Nvidia GPUs in 2008 (they did), and then never used them again. And yet, 4 years later, they used Nvidia GPUs on the 2012 MacBook Retina 15" on which I'm typing this.
  • xigency 6y ago
    > 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.
    • ChuckMcM 6y ago
      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] https://www.arm.com/company/news/2016/02/arm-holdings-plc-reports-results-for-the-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2015 https://www.arm.com/company/news/2016/02/arm-holdings-plc-re...
      • xigency 6y ago
        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?
• RubberShoes 6y ago
  This is not good
  • chid 6y ago
    I have heard numerous arguments but they arguments don't feel that compelling, what are reasons why this is bad?
    • wetpaws 6y ago
      More power concentrated in a company that already has a de-facto monopoly over a gpu market.
    • RobLach 6y ago
      ARM will not be cheaper after this.
      • stupendousyappi 6y ago
        Conversely, Nvidia has done a solid job of advancing GPU performance even in the face of weak competition, and with their additional resources, ARM performance may advance even faster, and provide the first competition in decades to x86 in servers and desktops.
        • teruakohatu 6y ago
          The tech may have advanced due to the insatiable hunger of machine learning, but the weak competition has meant pricing has not decreased as much as it should have or could have, only enough to move more GPUs. (nvidia biggest competitor are the GPUs they manufactured two years earlier).
          • dannyw 6y ago
            Really? You get 2x perf per dollar with Ampere. That’s not good enough on the pricing front?
• easton 6y ago
  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).
  • pokot0 6y ago
    Why would they ever want to enable their competitors?
    • newsclues 6y ago
      To spite nVidia.
      • hndamien 6y ago
        If Larry David has taught me anything, it is that spite stores are not good business.
        • mumblerino 6y ago
          It depends on who you are. Are you a Larry David or are you a Mila Kunis?
  • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    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".
    • pier25 6y ago
      > 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". That was my first thought. I'd be surprised if Apple wasn't already working on this.
• ianai 6y ago
  They sure seem to be marketing this as a logical move for their AI platform.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• paxys 6y ago
  No doubt because Softbank was facing investor pressure to make up for their losses.
• fizzled 6y ago
  Wow, this is tectonic. I cannot wait to see how this redraws the competition map. There are dozens of major embedded semi vendors that license Arm IP. Nvidia could eradicate them trivially.
• maxioatic 6y ago
  > Immediately accretive to NVIDIA’s non-GAAP gross margin and EPS Can someone explain this? (From the bullet points of the article) I looked up the definition of accretive: "characterized by gradual growth or increase." So it seems like they expect this to increase their margins. Does that mean ARM had better margins than NVIDIA? Edit: I don't know what non-GAAP and EPS stand for
  • pokot0 6y ago
    GAAP is an accounting set of rules, EPS is Earning per Share. Basically means they think it will increase their gross margin and EPS but you can't sue them if it does not.
  • ericmay 6y ago
    EPS -> earnings per share Non-GAAP -> doesn’t follow generaly accepted accounting practices. There are alternative accounting methods. GAAP is very US-centric (not good or bad, just stating a fact).
    • salawat 6y ago
      Though note the intent of GAAP is to cut down on "creative accounting" which can tend to mislead.
  • tyingq 6y ago
    I would guess they do have higher margins since they are mostly selling licenses and not actual hardware. This article is old, but suggests a 48% operating margin: https://asia.nikkei.com/NAR/Articles/ARM-posts-strong-profit-margin-on-chip-royalties https://asia.nikkei.com/NAR/Articles/ARM-posts-strong-profit...
  • bluejay2 6y ago
    You are correct that it means they expect margins to increase. One possibility is that ARM has higher margins as you mentioned. Another is that they are making some assumptions about how much they can reduce certain expenses by, and once you factor in those savings, margins go up.
• yissp 6y ago
  I still think the real reason was just to spite Apple :)
  • ericmay 6y ago
    How does this spite Apple?
  • RL_Quine 6y ago
    The company who was part of the creation of ARM and has a perpetual license to its IP? Tell me how.
    • hu3 6y ago
      Even perpetual license to future IP?
      • scarface74 6y ago
        Why would Apple need future ARM IP? They have more than enough in house talent to take their license in any direction they wish.
        • hu3 6y ago
          Such deal could certainly benefit both players. Hence my question.
• gautamcgoel 6y ago
  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 for AI.
  • sillysaurusx 6y ago
    AI training is moving away from CUDA and toward TPUs anyway. DGX clusters can't keep up.
    • ladberg 6y ago
      And Nvidia's GPUs now include the same type of hardware that TPUs have, so there's no reason to believe that TPUs will win out over GPUs.
      • sillysaurusx 6y ago
        The key difference between a TPU and a GPU is that a TPU has a CPU. It's an entire computer, not just a piece of hardware. Is nVidia moving in that direction?
        • newsclues 6y ago
          They just bought ARM for 40$billion. I think they want to integrate CPU,GPU and high speed networks
        • dikei 6y ago
          In term of cutting edge tech, They have their own GPUs, CPUs from ARM, Networking from Mellanox, so I'd say they're pretty much set to build a kick ass TPU.
        • shaklee3 6y ago
          A TPU is a chip you cannot program. It's purpose built and can't run the fraction of the type of workloads that a GPU can.
• axaxs 6y ago
  This seems fair, as long as it stays true(regarding open licensing and neutrality). I've mentioned before, I think this will ultimately be a good thing. NVidia has the gpu chops to really amp up the reference implementation, which is a good thing for competition in the mobile, settop, and perhaps even desktop space.
  • andy_ppp 6y ago
    No, what everyone thinks will happen is a pretend open ARM architecture and Nvidia CPUs dominating. Nvidia isn’t going to license the best GPU features they start adding. It’s an excellent deal for NVIDIA of course, I’m certain they intend to make the chips they produce much faster than the ones they license (if they even ever release another open design) to the point where buying CPUs from Nvidia might be they only game in town. We’ll have to see but this is what I expect to happen.
    • axaxs 6y ago
      Perhaps not. I mean AMD and soon Intel basically compete with themselves by pushing advances in both discrete GPU and APU at the same time, one negating the need for the other. I'm not claiming I'm right and you're wrong, of course. I just think it's unfair to make negative assumptions at this point, so wanted to paint a possible good thing.
      • andy_ppp 6y ago
        Agree, Nvidia’s track record on opening things up is pretty bad. They are very good at business though!
    • fluffything 6y ago
      That's not what everyone thinks. NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own ARM CPUs with an unlimited ARM license. ARM doesn't give NVIDIA a world-class CPU team like apple's, amazon's or fujitsu. ARM own cores are "meh" at best. Buying such a team, would also have been much cheaper than 40b$. Mobile ARM chips are meh, but nvidia doesn't have GPUs for that segment, and their current architectures probably don't work well there. The only ARM chips that are ok-ish are embedded/IoT at < 1W power envelope. It would probably take nvidia 10 years to develop GPUs for that segment, the margins on that segment are razor thin (0.10$ is the cost of a full SoC on that segment), and it is unclear whether applications on that segment need GPUs (your toaster certainly does not). The UK appears to require huge R&D investments in ARM to allow the sale. And ARMs bottom line is 300million $/year in revenue, which is peanuts for nvidia. So if anything, ARM has a lot to win here with nvidia pumping in money like crazy to try to improve ARM's CPU offering. Yet this all seem super-risky because at the segments ARM is competing at, RISC-V competes as well, and without royalties. It is hard to compete against something that's free, even if it is slightly less good. And chances are that over the next 10 years RISC-V will have much better cores (NVIDIA themselves started replacing ARM cores with RISC-V cores in their GPUs years ago already...). Either way, the claim that it is obvious to everybody what the 3D-chess being played here is false. To me this looks like a bad buy for nvidia. They could have paid 1 billion for a world class CPU team and just continue to license ARM and/or switch to RISC-V chips. Instead they are spending 40 billion in a company that makes 300 million a year, makes meh-cpus, is heavily regulated in the UK and the world, has problems with China due to being in the West, have to invest in the UK which is leaving the EU in a couple of weeks, etc.
• andy_ppp 6y ago
  This sort of stuff really isn’t going to produce long term benefits for humanity is it. Does anyone know if or how Apple will be affected by this? What are the licensing agreements on the ISA?
  • UncleOxidant 6y ago
    This has been out there in the news for well over a month, I guess I don't understand why Apple didn't try to make a bid for ARM? Or why Apple didn't try to set up some sort of independent holding company or consortium to buy ARM. They definitely have the money and clout to have done something like that.
    • andy_ppp 6y ago
      I guess Apple have a perpetual ARM ISA license. They haven’t used the CPU designs from ARM for many years.
  • gumby 6y ago
    ARM and Apple go way back (Apple was one of the three original consortium members who founded ARM). I am sure they pay a flat fee and have freedom to do whatever they like (probably other than sub licensing). Owning ARM would make no sense for them as they would gain no IP but would have to deal with antitrust which would force them to continue licensing the ip to others, which is not a business they are in. If ARM vanished tomorrow I doubt it would affect apple’s business at all.
  • dharma1 6y ago
    I doubt Apple's arm license will be affected. But I think they will be getting tougher competition in the sense that Android phones will be getting a fair bit better now - most of them will be using super well integrated Nvidia GPU/ML chips in the future because of this deal. I think it will also bring Google and Nvidia closer together
• redwood 6y ago
  The British should never have allowed foreign ownership of their core tech
  • ranbumo 6y ago
    Yes. It'd have been reasonable to block sales to non eu parties for national security reasons. Now arm is yet another US company.
    • scarface74 6y ago
      Isn’t the UK leaving the EU?
      • mkl 6y ago
        Yes, but the Brexit referendum was only 1 month before SoftBank acquired Arm Holdings. The deal was probably already in progress, and finalised before the UK had any real policies about Brexit, so EU requirements would have been reasonable if decided ahed of time. But the timing may also explain the lack of any national security focused requirement (general confusion).
      • kzrdude 6y ago
        That just means that their home/core market got smaller, so they should have protected ARM to stay inside E̶U̶ the UK, then.
  • bencollier49 6y ago
    I'm so exercised about this that I'm setting up a think tank to actively discuss UK control of critical tech (and "golden geese" as per others in this thread). If you're in tech and have a problem with this, please drop me a line, I'm @bencollier on Twitter.
  • hajile 6y ago
    Britain and the US are politically, and economically entwined with each other. As a country, keeping core technology at home is tied to defense (don't buy your guns from your competitor). If they don't intend to go to war with the US, then there isn't any real defense loss (I'd also point out that making IP "blueprints" for a core is different from manufacturing the core itself). If Britain were to have a real issue, it would be the US locking down F35 jets they sell to their allies.
• zeouter 6y ago
  Eeek. My gut reaction to think is.. could we have less powerful conglomerates.. please?
• bleepblorp 6y ago
  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 retirement fund going forward. These costs will be passed on to consumers and will also provide an avenue for perpetual license holders to raise their consumer prices to match.
  • bgorman 6y ago
    Android worked on x86 and MIPS in the past, it could presumably be ported to work with RISC-V
    • bleepblorp 6y ago
      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.
      • seizethegdgap 6y ago
        Can confirm, just spun up Bliss OS on my Surface Book. Not at all the smoothest experience I've ever had using an Android tablet, but it's nice.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      It might pretty much work today, perhaps with a few config file changes.
    • janoc 6y ago
      You would first need an actual working RISC-V silicon that it would be worth porting to. Not the essentially demo chips with poor performance that are around now. RISV-V is a lot of talk and hype but the actual silicon that you could buy and implement into a product is hard to come by. With the exception of a few small microcontroller efforts (GigaDevice, Sipeed).
• walterbell 6y ago
  Talking points from the founders of Arm & Nvidia: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its-officialnvidia-acquires-arm-for-40b-to-create-what-could-be-a-computing-juggernaut/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its-... > Huang told me that first thing that the combined company will do is to, “bring NVIDIA technology through Arm’s vast network.” So I’d expect NVIDIA GPU and NPU IP to become available quickly to smartphone, tablet, TV and automobile SoC providers as quickly as possible. > Arm CEO Simon Segars framed it well when he told me, “We're moving into a world where software doesn't just run in one place. Your application today might run in the cloud, it might run on your phone, and there might be some embedded application running on a device, but I think increasingly and with the rollout of 5g and with some of the technologies that Jensen was just talking about this kind of application will become spread across all of those places. Delivering that and managing that there's a huge task to do." > Huang ... “We're about to enter a phase, where we're going to create an internet that is thousands of times bigger than the internet that we enjoy today. A lot of people don't realize this. And so, so we would like to create a computing company for this age of AI.”
  • baybal2 6y ago
    Bye bye ARM Mali =(
    • paulmd 6y ago
      This is NVIDIA's "xbox one/PS4" moment. AMD has deals with console manufacturers, their clients pay for a huge amount of R&D that gets ported back into AMD's desktop graphics architecture. Even if AMD doesn't make basically anything on the consoles themselves, it's a huge win for their R&D. Now, every reference-implementation ARM processor manufactured will fund GeForce desktop products, datacenter/enterprise, etc as well. NVIDIA definitely needs something like this in the face of the new Samsung deal, as well as AMD's pre-existing console deals.
      • mr_toad 6y ago
        If I was an nVidia shareholder I wouldn’t want ARM profits to subsidise GPU development. GPU profits should be able to cover their own R&D, especially given the obscene prices on the high end cards.
• rvz 6y ago
  What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up. Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa. In 2011, I thought that they would learn the lessons and warnings highlighted from Eric Schmidt about the UK creating long standing tech companies like FAANMG. [0] I had high hopes for them to learn from this, but after 2016 with Softbank and now this, it is just typical. ARM will certainly be more expensive after this and will certainly be even more closed-source, since their Mali GPUs drivers were already as closed as Nvidia's GPUs. This is a terrible outcome I have seen but from Nvidia's perspective, it makes sense. From a FOSS perspective, ARM is dead, long live RISC-V. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schmidt-chairman-google-education https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schm...
  • throwaway5792 6y ago
    Once they were sold to SoftBank ARM had no more control over its destiny. You're saying that they're repeating the pattern, but they had no choice in this today. This was SoftBank's decision as the owner of ARM.
    • Aeolun 6y ago
      Softbank has some losses of it’s own to make up, so that’s not very surprising.
      • broknbottle 6y ago
        Losses? Masayoshi Son just made a cool 8 billion on this deal. Time to hit up the roulette table in Vegas to double that to 16 billion
        • throwaway5792 6y ago
          Buying a stake in AAPL,FB, or any tech company would have netted higher returns for less effort than buying ARM. If anything, a 25% ROI in 4 years is quite poor.
• UncleOxidant 6y ago
  On the bright side, this could end up being a big boost for RISC-V.
  • kristianpaul 6y ago
    Indeed, looking right now at https://rioslab.org/ https://rioslab.org/.
  • m00dy 6y ago
    and this would be killer for intel
    • UncleOxidant 6y ago
      Maybe? But somehow I don't think they'll be able to capitalize on it because Intel.
    • hajile 6y ago
      Even if/when RISCV takes over, Intel and AMD will be in a unique position to offer "combination" chips with both x86 and RISCV cores which could milk the richest enterprise and government markets for decades to come.
  • nickt 6y ago
    Probably worth a second look at this RISC desktop thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19118642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19118642
  • miguelmota 6y ago
    Would love to see RISC-V catch up and be more widely adopted.
• curiousmindz 6y ago
  Why do you think Nvidia cares about Arm? Probably the "access" into a lot of industries?
  • andy_ppp 6y ago
    No to make a better ARM chip, with awesome graphics/AI, not licence the design and take all the mobile CPU profits for 5-10 years?
  • banjo_milkman 6y ago
    I think this is driven by partly embedded applications and more directly by the datacenter. Nvidia already own the parallel compute/ML part of the datacenter and the Mellanox acquisition had brought the ability to compete in the networking part of the datacenter - but they were missing CPU IP, for tasks that aren't well matched to the GPU. This plugs that hole. They are in control of a complete data-center solution now.
    • paulmd 6y ago
      There's a huge number of synergies that this deal provides. (a) NVIDIA becomes a full-fledged full-stack house, they have both CPU and GPU now. They can now compete with AMD and Intel on equal terms. That has huge implications in the datacenter. (b) GeForce becomes the reference implementation of the GPU, ARM processors now directly fund NVIDIA's desktop/datacenter R&D in the same way consoles and Samsung SOCs fund Radeon's R&D. CUDA can be used anywhere on any platform easily. (c) Acqui-hire for CPU development talent. NVIDIA's efforts in this area have not been very good to date. Now they have an entire team that is experienced in developing ARM and can aim the direction of development where they want. Basically there's a reason that NVIDIA was willing to pay more than anyone else for this property. And (Softbank's) Son desperately needed a big financial win to show his investors that he's not a fucking idiot for paying $32b for ARM and to make up for his other recent losses.
      • RantyDave 6y ago
        Quite. Nvidia will be able to make a single chip CPU, GPU and Infiniband. Plus they'll score some people that know about cache coherency from Arm. We can see the future datacentre starting to form...
• ibains 6y ago
  I love this, I was amongst early engineers on CUDA (compilers). NVIDIA was so well run, but boxed into a smaller graphics card market - ATI and it were forced into low margins since they were made replaceable by OpenGL and DirectX standards. For the standard fans - they resulted a wealth transfer from NVIDIA to Apple etc. and reduced capital available for R&D. NVIDIA was constantly attacked by a much bigger Intel (which changed interfaces to kill products and was made to pay by a court) Through innovation, developing new technologies (CUDA) they increased market cap, and have used that to buy Arm/Mellanox. I love the story of the underdog run by a founder, innovating it’s way to getting into new markets against harsh competition. Win for capitalism!
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • enragedcacti 6y ago
    Nvidia might have been an underdog once, but they are now the world's largest chipmaker, even surpassing Intel. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/312528-nvidia-overtakes-intel-as-worlds-most-valuable-chip-maker https://www.extremetech.com/computing/312528-nvidia-overtake...
    • mhh__ 6y ago
      And Intel's revenue remains 700% larger than Nvidia's
    • verall 6y ago
      Samsung and TSMC are both worth more. America's largest chipmaker.
  • justicezyx 6y ago
    The comment identified the positive side of the nvidia story. Note that nvidia had not had large acquisition for many years. This acquisition can be seen as a beacon of nvidia's past struggle against the market and the competitors. For whatever happened, nvidia innovated to their success, and had enabled possibly the biggest tech boom so far through deep learning. Might be one day everyone claimed nvidia to be the "most important company" on earth.
• ykl 6y ago
  I wonder what this means for NVIDIA's recent RISC-V efforts [1]. Apparently they've been aiming to ship (or already have been shipping?) RISC-V microcontrollers on their GPUs for some time . [1] https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDIA-Sijstermans.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDI...
• ComputerGuru 6y ago
  Doesn’t this need regulatory approval from the USA and Japan? (Not that the USA would look a gift horse in the mouth, of course.)
  • sgift 6y ago
    There is a note at the end of the article: "The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals for the U.K., China, the European Union and the United States. Completion of the transaction is expected to take place in approximately 18 months." Hopefully, the EU does its job, laughs at this and tells Nvidia to either go home or forces them to FRAND licensing of ARM IP.
    • kasabali 6y ago
      > forces them to FRAND licensing of ARM IP FRAND licensing is worthless, if Qualcomm taught us anything.
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  I’m not convinced this is a death sentence for ARM. I doubt nVidia spent $40b on a company with the intention of killing it’s golden goose business model. The contractual agreements might change, but ARM wasn’t exactly giving their IP away for free before this move.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    It is less about them intentionally killing it and more about their culture and attitude killing it.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      Does Nvidia have a habit of killing acquisitions? I'm only familiar with their graphics business, but as far as I can see the only culture going on there is excellence.
      • ATsch 6y ago
        The concern is more that nvidias culture has historically been being overall hostile to parterships. Which works great for what Nvidia is doing right now, but is probably bad for a company that depends heavily on partnerships.
      • p1necone 6y ago
        NVIDIAs whole schtick is making a bunch of interesting software and arbitrarily locking it to their own hardware. Doesn't seem compatible with being the steward for what has up until now been a relatively open CPU architecture.
        • ImprobableTruth 6y ago
          arbitrarily? Nvidia invests a lot in software R&D, why should they just give it away to their competitor AMD who basically invest nothing in comparison?
• zdw 6y ago
  I see this going a few ways for different players: The perpetual architecture license folks that make their own cores like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Fujitsu (I think they needed this for the A64FX, right?) will be fine, and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there. Apple especially will be fine as they can get code into LLVM for whatever "Apple Silicon" evolves into over time. The smaller vendors that license core designs (like the A5x and A7x series, etc.) like Allwinner, Rockchip, and Broadcom are probably in a worse state - nVidia could cut them off from any new designs. I'd be scrambling for an alternative if I were any of these companies. Long term, it really depends on how nVidia acts - they could release low end cores with no license fees to try to fend off RISC-V, but that hasn't been overly successful when tried earlier with the SPARC and Power architectures. Best case scenario, they keep all the perpetual architecture people happy and architecturally coherent, and release some interesting datacenter chips, leaving the low end (and low margin) to 3rd parties. Hopefully they'll also try to mend fences with the open source community, or at least avoid repeating past offenses.
  • mxcrossb 6y ago
    It seems to me that if Apple felt that Nvidia would limit them, they could have outbid them for ARM! So I think you are correct.
    • dannyw 6y ago
      Apple would not get antitrust approval (iPhone maker controls all android chips????). So that’s why.
      • macintux 6y ago
        Were it a serious enough threat to their ARM license, they'd find a way to buy ARM and keep it independent.
      • kabacha 6y ago
        Exactly, Apple is already straddling the line (and imho way past it) on anti-comp laws.
• m00dy 6y ago
  Can anyone point me who would be competing with Nvidia in AI Market ?
  • option 6y ago
    Google, Habana (Intel), AMD in a year or two, Amazon in few years
  • joshvm 6y ago
    There's low power inference from Intel (Movidius) and Google (Coral Edge TPU). Nvidia doesn't really have anything below the Jetson Nano. I think there are a smattering of other low power cores out there (also dedicated chips in phones). TPUs are used on the high performance end and there are also companies like Graphcore who do insane things in silicon. Also niche HPC products like Intel Knight's Landing (Xeon Phi) which is designed for heterogeneous compute. There isn't a huge amount of competition in the consumer/midrange sector. Nvidia has almost total market domination here. Really we just need a credible cross platform solution that could open up gpgpu on AMD. I'm surprised Apple isn't pushing this more, as they heavily use ML on-device and to actually train anything you need Nvidia hardware (eg try buying a Macbook for local deep learning training using only apple approved bits, it's hard!). Maybe they'll bring out their own training silicon at some point. Also you need to make a distinction between training and inference hardware. Nvidia absolutely dominate model training, but inference is comparably simpler to implement and there is more competition there - often you don't even need dedicated hardware beyond a cpu.
• gumby 6y ago
  Amidst all the hand-wringing: RISC-V is at least a decade away (at current pace + ARM’s own example). But what if Google bought AMD and put TPUs on the die?
  • askvictor 6y ago
    Because so many of Google's acquisitions have ended up doing well...
    • sib 6y ago
      Android, YouTube, Google Maps, DoubleClick, Applied Semantics (became AdSense), DeepMind, Urchin, ITA Software, etc. I think Google has done ok.
      • dbcooper 6y ago
        Has it had any successes with hardware acquisitions?
        • Zigurd 6y ago
          Google has steadily gained smart home device market share vs a very good competitor and is now the dominant player.
  • thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
    AMD's x86 licence isn't transferrable. To acquire them is to destroy their value.
• shmerl 6y ago
  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.
• bitxbit 6y ago
  They need to block this deal. A real clean case.
  • iso8859-1 6y ago
    Who needs to block it? And why is it a clean case?
• cowsandmilk 6y ago
  What is Amazon's license for ARM like to make graviton processors?
• QuixoticQuibit 6y ago
  HN being hyperbolic and anti-NVIDIA as usual. I think this is a great thing. Finally a competitor to the AMD-Intel x86 duopoly. I imagine the focus will first be on improving ARM’s data center offerings but eventually I’m hoping to see consumer-facing parts available sometime as well.
  • japgolly 6y ago
    I think the biggest concern is NVIDIA's stance against OSS.
    • QuixoticQuibit 6y ago
      Look at their AI/CUDA documentation and associated githubs. Many of their tools and libraries are open source. Tell me, what other AI platform works with x86 and PowerPC and ARM? Currently NVIDIA’s GPUs do.
      • cycloptic 6y ago
        It's good that they open sourced that stuff, but the main problem is that CUDA itself is closed source and vendor locked to nvidia's hardware.
        • TomVDB 6y ago
          It only makes sense to demand them to give this away for free if you consider them a hardware company and a hardware company only. Look at them as a solutions company and the first question to answer is: why is it fine for companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe etc and any other software company to profit from closed software yet a company should be ostracized for it as soon as hardware becomes part of the deal? Nvidia invested 15 years in developing and promoting a vast set of GPU compute libraries and tools. AMD has only paid lip service and to this day treats it as an ugly stepchild, they don't even bother anymore to support consumer architectures. Nvidia is IMO totally justified to reap the rewards of what they've created.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• throw_m239339 6y ago
  Tangential, but when I hear about all these insane "start-up du jour" valuations, does anyone else feel like $40B isn't a lot of a hardware company sur as ARM?
  • beervirus 6y ago
    $40 billion is a real valuation though, as opposed to WeWork’s.
    • incognition 6y ago
      Maybe referencing Nikola?
    • broknbottle 6y ago
      are you suggesting a bunch of office space leases that are fully stocked with beer is not worth $40 billion?
• jasoneckert 6y ago
  Most tech acquisitions are fairly bland - they often maintain their separate ways for several years with a bit of integration. Others satisfy a political purpose or serve to stifle competition. However, given the momentum of Nvidia these past several years alongside the massive adoption and evolution of ARM, this is probably going to be the most interesting acquisition to watch over the next few years.
• geogra4 6y ago
  smic and Huawei better be prepared to have to dump arm asap
• hetspookjee 6y ago
  I wonder what the this means for Apple and their move to ARM for their macbooks. End of 2019 Apple and NVIDIA broke up their cooperation on CUDA. Both these companies are very tight on their hardware. Apple must've known this was happening but I guess they weren't willing to pay more than 40B for this risky joint venture they're bound to go into. Anyone has a proper analysis on the ramifications of this acquisition for Apple's future in ARM?
  • renewiltord 6y ago
    Apple is an ARM founder. You can bet your boots they made sure they were safe through the history of ARM's existence and sale to Softbank in the first place. No one can cite the deep magic to them, they were there when it was written.
• 01100011 6y ago
  Can we,for once, hear the opinions of people in the chip industry and not the same tired posts from software folks? NVIDIA Bad! Ok, we get it. Do you have anything more insightful than that? I'm starting to feel like social media based on upvotes is a utter waste of time. Echo chambers and groupthink. People commenting on things they barely know anything about and getting validation from others who don't know anything. I'd rather pay for insightful commentary and discussion. I feel like reddit going downhill has pushed a new group of users to HN and it's sending it down the tube. Maybe it's time for me to stop participating and get back to work.
  • diydsp 6y ago
    as an embedded dev, the last 2-4 years of STM (major ARM provider) have seen a large degree of integration of specialized hardware into 32-bit microcontrollers. e.g. radios, motor control, AI, 64-bit FPUs, graphics, low-power, etc. I expect more of the same. The only way it could go wrong is if they lose customer focus. Microcontrollers are a competitive, near-commodity market, so companies have to provide valuable features. I don't really know Nvidia well - I only buy their stock! - but they seem to be keeping their customers happy by paying attention to what they need. Perhaps their fabrication will be a boon to micros, as they're usually a few gens behind laptop/server processors.
  • drivebycomment 6y ago
    You're not wrong, but most of HN threads are like this. 80% of comments are low information, Dunning-Kruger effect in action. But among that, there are still some useful gems, so despite what you said, HN is still worth it. If you fold the first two top level comments, the rest have some useful , informed perspective. I don't see this as having that much of an impact on any short to medium term. ARM has too much intricate business dependencies and contracts nVidia can't just get out of. My speculation is that nVidia might be what it takes to push arm to overcome the final huddle into more general purpose and server cpu, and achieve that pipedream of a single binary/ISA running everywhere. Humanity would be better off if a single ISA does become truly universal. Whether business/technology politics will allow that to happen and whether nVidia has enough understanding and the shrewdness to pull that off is to be seen.
• peterburkimsher 6y ago
  Sounds like everyone is rallying around RISC-V. What does this mean for MIPS? "ARM was probably what sank MIPS" - saagarjha https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24402107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24402107
  • Zigurd 6y ago
    Wave owns MIPS, about which I had no idea and googling that also returns that Wave went Chapter 11 this year.
• deleted 6y ago
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• zmmmmm 6y ago
  Many various reasons for this but one perspective I am curious about is how much this is actually a defensive move against Intel, because nVidia knows Intel is busy developing dedicated graphics via Xe, and if nVidia just allows that to continue they are going to find themselves simultaneously competing with and dependent on a vendor that owns the whole stack that their platform depends on. It is not a place I would want to be, even accounting for how incompetent Intel seems to have been for the last 10 years. Edit: yes I meant nVidia not AMD!
  • jml7c5 6y ago
    How does AMD enter into this? Did you mean Nvidia?
    • zmmmmm 6y ago
      ouch I wrote a whole comment and systematically replaced Nvidia with AMD ... kind of impressive. Thanks!
  • Tehdasi 6y ago
    Intel has been promising high-end graphics for decades, and delivering low end integrated graphics as a feature for their CPUs. Which makes sense, the market for CPUs is worth more than the market for game oriented GPUs. The rise of GPUs used in AI might change this calculation, but I doubt it. I suspect that nVidia just would like to move into the CPU market.
  • fluffything 6y ago
    Nvidia could have bought a world-class CPU architects team, and build their own ARM or RISC-V chips (NVIDIA has an infinite ARM license already).
• 127 6y ago
  What does this change for STM32 and many other such low power MCUs? They're pretty ubiquitous in electornics.
• alphachloride 6y ago
  I hope the stonks go up
• luxurycommunism 6y ago
  Hopefully that means we will see some big leaps in performance.
• Blammar 6y ago
  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 have put it in conflict with commitments made to the U.K. over Arm, which were agreed at the time of the 2016 deal to appease the government." (from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/nvidia-reportedly-to-acquire-arm-holdings-from-softbank-for-40-billion/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/nvidia-reportedly-to... ) and "The transaction does not include Arm’s IoT Services Group." (nvidia news.) which appear to contradict each other. I'm not sure about the significance of this. I would have guessed Nvidia would have wanted the IoT group to remain. 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. In other words, Nvidia is essentially paying $12 billion in cash for ARM up front, and that's all. (The extra $5B in cash or stock depends on financial performance of ARM, and thus is a second-order effect.)
  • walterbell 6y ago
    There were two separate IoT business units: Platform (https://pelion.com https://pelion.com) and Data (https://www.treasuredata.com/ https://www.treasuredata.com/). The Platform unit fits the Segars post-acquisition comment about end-to-end IoT software architecture, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24465005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24465005 > One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make commitments to the UK government over Arm’s future in Britain, where opposition politicians have recently insisted that any potential deal must safeguard British jobs. So the deal has already been influenced by one regulator. That should encourage other regulators. > SoftBank will remain committed to Arm’s long-term success through its ownership stake in NVIDIA, expected to be under 10 percent. Why is this stake necessary?
    • xbmcuser 6y ago
      Are they getting 10% of nvidia or keeping 10% of Arm
• filereaper 6y ago
  Excellent, can't wait for Jensen to pull out a Cortex A-78 TI from his oven next year. /s
  • broknbottle 6y ago
    hodl out for the Titan A-78 Super if you can, I hear it runs a bit faster
• MangoCoffee 6y ago
  https://semiwiki.com/ip/287846-tears-in-the-rain-arm-and-china-jvs/ https://semiwiki.com/ip/287846-tears-in-the-rain-arm-and-chi... Does this mean Nvidia will have to deal with the hot mess at China ARM?
  • justincormack 6y ago
    Allegedly it has been sorted, before this deal was announced. No idea how.
• nl 6y ago
  Just noting that Apple doesn't have a perpetual license, they have an architecture license[1], including for 64bit parts[2]. This allows them to design their own cores using the Arm instruction set[3] and presumably includes perpetual IP licenses for Arm IP used while the license is in effect. New Arm IP doesn't seem to be included, since existing 32bit Arm licensees had to upgrade to a 64bit license[2]. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-how-arms-business-model-works/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-h... [2] https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-adds-architectural-licensee-2015-04/ https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural_licence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural...
• yangcheng 6y ago
  I am surprised that no one has mentioned China will very likely block this deal.
  • incognition 6y ago
    Are you thinking retribution for Huawei?
    • ttflee 6y ago
      China de-facto blocked Qualcomm-NXP merger during a trade talk by not providing a decision before the deadline to the deal.
  • zaptrem 6y ago
    On what grounds/with what authority?
    • genocidicbunny 6y ago
      Is it that hard to see that China might see this as an American company further monopolizing silicon tech, potentially cutting China off from Arm designs. But more to the point, this is also China. If you want to do business in China, you're going to do as they tell you, or you get the stick. And if you don't like it, what are you going to do?
    • yangcheng 6y ago
      is this a question or just sarcasm? The post said clearly "The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals for the U.K., China, the European Union and the United States. Completion of the transaction is expected to take place in approximately 18 months."
  • mnd999 6y ago
    I really hope so. The UK government should block it also, but I don't think they will.
• hyperpallium2 6y ago
  edge-AI! They're also building an ARM supercomputer at Cambridge, but server-ARM doesn't sound like a focus. I'm just hoping for some updated mobile Nvidia GPUs... and maybe the rumoured 4K Nintendo Switch. They say they won't muck it up, and it seems sensible to keep it profitable: > As part of NVIDIA, Arm will continue to operate its open-licensing model while maintaining the global customer neutrality that has been foundational to its success, with 180 billion chips shipped to-date by its licensees.
  • fluffything 6y ago
    > but server-ARM doesn't sound like a focus. ARM doesn't have good server CPU IP. Graviton, A64FX, etc. belong to other companies.
    • Followerer 6y ago
      Graviton is Neoverse, ARM's Neoverse.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• yogrish 6y ago
  SoftBank isa true banking company .. invested (Bought) in ARM and selling it now for meagre profit. A company that says it has 300 year vision
  • stunt 6y ago
    Maybe they are forced to choose behind the scene. Or, they know better opportunities and they need to cash out right now.
• totorovirus 6y ago
  nvidia is notorious for being not nice to oss developers as Linus Torvalds claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&ab_channel=SiliconNews https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&ab_channel=Silic... I wonder how Linux would react to this news.
  • tontonius 6y ago
    You mean how GNU/Linux would react to it?
    • RealStickman_ 6y ago
      Don't exclude the alpine folks please
• patfla 6y ago
  How does this get past the FTC? Oh right, it's been a dead letter since the Reagan administration. Monopoly 'R Us. Never mind the FTC - the rest of the semiconductor industry has to be [very] strongly opposed.
• sizzle 6y ago
  Holy shit this is huge. Did anyone see this coming?!?
• weregiraffe 6y ago
  Wow. It costs an arm.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Lind5 6y ago
  Arm’s primary base is in the IoT and the edge, and it has been very successful there. Its focus on low power allowed it to shut out Intel from the mobile phone market, and from there it has been gaining ground in a slew of vertical markets ranging from medical devices to Apple computers. But as more intelligence is added to the edge, the next big challenge is to be able to radically improve performance and further reduce power, and the only way to make that happen is to more tightly customize the algorithms to the hardware, and vice versa https://semiengineering.com/nvidia-to-buy-arm-for-40b/ https://semiengineering.com/nvidia-to-buy-arm-for-40b/
• browserface 6y ago
  Vertical integration. It's the end products, not the producers that matter. Or maybe, more accurately, the middle of the supply chain doesn't matter. The most value is at either end: raw materials and energy, and end products. Or so it seems :p ;) xx
• throwaway4good 6y ago
  Qualcomm and Apple are going to be fine even with NVIDIA owning ARM. They are American companies under the protection of US legislation and representation. However the situation for Chinese companies is even clearer now. Huawei, Hikvision etc. need to move away from ARM. Probably on to their own thing as RISC-V is dominated by US companies.
  • vaxman 6y ago
    Qualcomm, Apple and NVidia will lose favor with the US government unless they bring (at least a full copy of) their FAB partners and the rest of their supply chains home to America (Southwest including USMCA zone). We love Southeast Asia, but the pandemic highlighted our vulnerability and, as a country, we’re not going to keep sourcing our critical infrastructure in China —or it’s back yard. If those American CEOs keep balking at the huge investment required, you will see the US government write massive checks to Intel (has numerous, albeit obsolete, domestic FABs), DELL and upstarts (like System76 in Colorado) to pick winners, while the elevator to hell gains a new stop in Silicon Valley and San Diego (nationalizing patents, etc) during a sort of “war effort” like we had in the early 1940s.
• sharken 6y ago
  Related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24009177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24009177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454958
  • someperson 6y ago
    and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467989
• gigatexal 6y ago
  How large or little of boost does this give the likes of RISC-V?
• sshlocalhost 6y ago
  I am really worried of a single company monopolising over the entire market
• vletal 6y ago
  Nvidia being like "Apple did now want to use our tech? Let's just buy ARM!"
• ckastner 6y ago
  Softbank paid $32B for ARM in 2016. A 25% gain over a horizon of four years is not bad for your average investment -- but this isn't an average investment. First, compared to the SP500, this underperforms over the same horizon (even compared to end of 2019 rather than the inflated prices right now). Second, ARM's sector (semiconductors) has performed far, far better in that time. The PHOX (Philadelphia Semiconductor Index) doubled in the same time period. And looking at AMD and NVIDIA, it feels as if ARM would have been in a position to benefit from the surrounding euphoria. On the other hand, unless I'm misremembering, ARM back then was already considered massively overvalued precisely because it was such a prime takeover target, so perhaps its the $32B that are throwing me off here.
  • yreg 6y ago
    It vastly overperforms the Softbank ventures we usually hear about (excluding BABA).
    • smcl 6y ago
      To be honest, cash deposited in a boring current account outperforms Softbank's Vision Fund
  • lrem 6y ago
    There's also a fundamental threat to ARM in the raise of RISC-V.
    • janoc 6y ago
      RISC-V is only a tiiny player in the low end embedded space (there are only a few parts actually available with that instruction set) and no competition at all at the high end. Maybe in a decade or so it may be more relevant but not today. Calling this a "fundamental threat" is a tad exaggerated.
      • kabacha 6y ago
        Where are people getting the "decade" number from? Looks demand for RISC-V just went up significantly and it's not like it's broken or not-existing, RISC-V "just worked" a year ago already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19118642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19118642
• m0zg 6y ago
  On the one hand, this is bad news - I would prefer ARM to remain independent. But on the other, from a purely selfish standpoint, NVIDIA will likely lean on Apple pretty hard to get its GPUs into Apple devices again, which bodes well for GPGPU and deep learning applications. Apple is probably putting together a RISC-V hardware group as we speak. The Jobs ethos will not allow them to depend this heavily on somebody else for such a critical technology.
  • buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
    A few weeks ago there were rumors that ARM was looking to be sold to Apple and Apple turned them down. If an NVIDIA acquisition is such a deal breaker for Apple, why wouldn't they have just acquired ARM to begin with?
• hn3333 6y ago
  Softbank buys low ($32B in 2016) and sells high ($40B in 2020). Nice trade!
  • tuananh 6y ago
    i thought that would be low in investment world.
    • unnouinceput 6y ago
      4 years, 8 billions. 2 B / year. I don't think that's low. And during this time Arm was also filling its owner coffers. The only real question here is if they filled the coffers at a greater 2B/year or not. My guess is they didn't. Now SoftBank has a lot of cash to acquire more shining toys.
      • tuananh 6y ago
        i guess i watched too many tv shows where investors think anything below 50% ROI is low
        • hajile 6y ago
          5% over inflation is average. US congress manages 25-30%, but that's on the back of insider trading (technically illegal thanks to a law signed by Obama, but also without much ability to actually investigate -- also law signed by Obama a few months later without fanfare).
  • aneutron 6y ago
    How does it fare, adjusting for inflation and other similar factors ?
• jpswade 6y ago
  I feel like this is yet more terrible news for the UK.
• deafcalculus 6y ago
  nVidia clearly wants to compete with Intel in data centers. But how does buying ARM help with that? They already have an architectural license. Right now, I can see nVidia replacing Mali smartphone GPUs in low to mid-end Exynos SoCs and the like. But it's not like nVidia to want to be in that low-margin area.
  • fluffything 6y ago
    > I can see nVidia replacing Mali smartphone GPUs in low to mid-end Exynos SoCs and the like. Replacing these with what? What nvidia gpus can operate at that power envelope ?
    • deafcalculus 6y ago
      Lower power versions of what they put in Tegra / Switch? Or perhaps they can whip up something in 1-2 years. I'd be astonished if nVidia doesn't take any interest in smartphone GPUs after this acquisition.
      • fluffything 6y ago
        A nintendo switch has ~2 hours of battery... There is a big difference between having interest in a market, and being able to compete in it. There are also many trade-offs. Nobody has designed yet a GPU architecture that works at all from 500W HPC clusters to sub 1W embedded/IoT systems, much less that works well to be a market leader in all segments. So AFAICT whether this is even possible is an open research problem. If this were possible, there would already be nvidia GPUs at least in some smartphones and IoT devices.
• poxwole 6y ago
  It was good while it lasted. RIP ARM
• unixhero 6y ago
  It's so amazing Apple didn't win this M&A race.
  • rahoulb 6y ago
    Apple isn't interested in selling tech licences to other companies - they want to own their core technologies so they can sell products to consumers. And, as an original member of the Arm consortium, they have a perpetual licence to the Arm IP (I have no inside knowledge about that, just many people who know more than me have said it)
• WhyNotHugo 6y ago
  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. :(
  • janoc 6y ago
    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 GCC toolchain for the ARM architecture but that is unlikely to go anywhere (and even if it did, it is open source and anyone else can take it over). The much bigger problem is that Nvidia could now start putting squeeze on chip makers who license the ARM IP for their own business reasons - Nvidia makes its own ARM-based ICs (e.g. the Jetson, Tegra) and it is hard to imagine that they will not try to use their position to stiffle the competition (e.g. from Qualcomm or Samsung).
    • hajile 6y ago
      https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-software/linux-kernel https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-sof... ARM directly maintains the main ARM parts of the Linux kernel among other things.
    • WhyNotHugo 6y ago
      > 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.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• naruvimama 6y ago
  (Nvidia - ARM) - Nvidia >> 40 Bn Only about 50% is gaming and nascent divisions like data centres can get a big boost from the acquisition. We only connected Nvidia with GPUs, perhaps AI & ML. Now they are going to be a dominant player everywhere from consumer devices, IOT, cloud, HPC & Gaming. And since Nvidia does not FAB its own chips like intel, this transformation is going to be pretty quick. If only they go into public cloud business, we as costumers would have one other strong vendor to choose from.
• CivBase 6y ago
  I was hoping that Apple's switch to ARM would prompt better ARM support for popular Linux distros. Given NVIDIA's track record with the OSS community, I'm definitely less hopeful now.
• jl2718 6y ago
  This is all about NVLink in ARM.
• bfrog 6y ago
  So when does everyone switch to risc-v then
• DCKing 6y ago
  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 they had others - Samsung, Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Huawei, Mediatek, Rockchip and loads of others make the chip. Their business model was to make the ARM ecosystem accessible for as many companies as possible, so they could sell as many licenses as possible. In that way, ARM's business model enabled a very diverse and thriving ARM market. I think this is the sole reason we see ARM eating the chip world today. This business model would continue to work perfectly fine as a privately held company, or being owned by a faceless investor company that wants you to make as much money as possible. But it's not fine if you are owned by a company that wants to use you to control their own position in the chip market. There is no way Nvidia (any other chip company, but as laid out previously Nvidia might even be more concerning) will spend 40 billion on this without them deliberately or inadvertently destroying ARM's open CPU and GPU ecosystem. Will Nvidia allow selling ARM licenses to competitors of Nvidia's business? Will Nvidia reserve ARM's best IP as a selling point for its own chips? Will Nvidia allow Mali to continue existing? Any innovations ARM made previously it sold to anyone mostly indiscriminatorily (outside of legal restrictions), but now every time the question must be asked "does Nvidia have a better propietary purpose for this?". For any ARM chip maker the situation will be that Nvidia is both your ruthless competitor, but it also sells you the IP you need to build your chips. EDIT: ARM's interests up to last week were to create and empower as many competitors for Nvidia as possible. They were good at that and was the root of the success of the ARM ecosystem. That incentive is completely gone now. Unless Nvidia leaves ARM alone (and why would they spend $40B on that??), this has got to be the beginning of the end of ARM's golden age. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24010821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24010821
  • edderly 6y ago
    I agree with the general sentiment here, but ARM is not exactly Snow White. It's an open secret that ARM was (and still is) selling the CPU design at a discount if you integrated their Mali (GPU). This isn't relevant to Nvidia today, but it was when they were in the mobile GPU space. Also this caused obvious problems for IMGtec and other smaller GPU players like Vivante.
• hastradamus 6y ago
  Why would Nvidia spend $40B to ruin Arm? I can't see them making a return on this investment. No one wants to work with Nvidia they are notoriously roothless. I'm sure everyone is making plans to move to something else ASAP. Maybe RISC-V
  • mzs 6y ago
    Some decision makers there dislike Apple that much.
• mikorym 6y ago
  Wow, didn't someone call this out recently on HN? I mean, someone mentioned that this was going to happen. (Or rather, feared that this was the direction things were going in.) On a different topic, how would this influence Raspberry Pis going forward?
• mlindner 6y ago
  This is really bad news. I hope the deal somehow falls through.
• paulpan 6y ago
  My initial reaction is that this reminiscent of the AMD-ATI deal back in 2006. It almost killed both companies and comparatively, this deal size is much bigger ($40B vs. $6B) for both a more mature industry and companies involved. $40B is an obscene lot of money objectively and what's the endgame for Nvidia? If it's to "fuse" ARM's top CPU designs with their GPU prowess, then couldn't they invest the money to restart their own CPU designs (e.g. Carmel)? My inner pessimist, as with others here, is that Nvidia will somehow cripple the ARM ecosystem or prioritize their own needs over those of other customers'. Perhaps an appropriate analogy is Qualcomm's IP licensing shenanigans and how they've crippled the non-iOS smartphone industry. That said, there's also examples of companies making these purchases with minimal insidious behavior and co-existing with their would-be competitors: Microsoft's acquisition of Github, Google's Pixel smartphones, Sony's camera lenses business and even Samsung, which supposedly firewalls its components teams so the best tech is available to whoever wants (and is willing to pay for it). I suppose if this acquisition ends up going through (big if), then we'll see Nvidia's true intent in 3-5 years.
  • acuozzo 6y ago
    > what's the endgame for Nvidia? Announced at ARM TechCon last year: https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/ai-platform https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/ai-platform
  • dijit 6y ago
    I see two ways of it playing out for Nvidia: 1) Adoption of ARM CPU's (AWS Graviton, rPi etc) will cause software to be adapted to ARM anyway, meaning: Nvidia could come out with a full vertically integrated cloud. or 2) Leveraging full vertical integration with ML based super computers.
• ryanmarsh 6y ago
  Simple question, is this about ARM architecture and IP... or securing a worldwide competitive advantage in 5G?
• runeks 6y ago
  The root problem here is the concept of patents -- at least as far as I can see. If patents did not exist, and nVidia were to close down ARM and tell people "no more ARM GPUs; only nVidia GPUs from now on", then a competitor who offers ARM-compatible ISAs would quickly appear. But in the real world, nVidia just bought the monopoly rights to sue such a competitor out of existence. It's really no wonder nVidia did this given the profits they can extract from this monopoly (on the ARM ISA).
• oldschoolrobot 6y ago
  This is horrible for Arm
• hitpointdrew 6y ago
  LOL, Apple must be shitting bricks. Serves them right for going with ARM for their new Mac Books, the smarter move would have been to move to an AMD Ryzen APU, they also clearly should have gone with AMD Epyc for the new Mac Pro's.
• kkielhofner 6y ago
  Looking at the conversations almost 24 hours after posting the IP, licensing, ecosystem, political, and overall business aspects of this have been discussed to death. Oddly for Hacker News there has been little discussion of the potential technical aspects of this acquisition. Pure speculation (of course)... To me (from a tech standpoint) this acquisition centers around three things we already know about Nvidia: - Nvidia is pushing to own anything and everything GPGPU/TPU related, from cloud/datacenter to edge. Nvidia has been an ARM licensee for years with their Jetson line of hardware for edge GPGPU applications: https://developer.nvidia.com/buy-jetson https://developer.nvidia.com/buy-jetson Looking at the architecture of these devices (broadly speaking) Nvidia is combining an ARM CPU with their current gen GPU hardware (complete with Tensor Cores, etc). What's often left out of this mention is that they utilize a shared memory architecture where the ARM CPU and CUDA cores share memory. Not only does this cut down on hardware costs and power usage, it increases performance. - Nvidia has acquired Mellanox for high performance network I/O across various technologies (Ethernet and Infiniband). Nvidia is also actively working to be able to remove the host CPU from as many GPGPU tasks as possible (network I/O and data storage): https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect - Nvidia already has publicly available software in place to effectively make their CUDA compute available over the network using various APIs: https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server Going on just the name Triton is currently only available for inference but it provides the ability to not only directly serve GPGPU resources via network API at scale but ALSO accelerate various models with TensorRT optimization: https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/triton-inference-server/user-guide/docs/optimization.html#framework-specific-optimization https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/triton-inference-server... Given these points I think this is an obvious move for Nvidia. TDP and performance is increasingly important across all of their target markets. They already have something in place for edge inference tasks powered by ARM with Jetson but looking at ARM core CPU benchmarks it's sub-optimal. Why continue to pay ARM licensing fees when you can buy the company, collect licensing fees, get talent, and (presumably) drastically improve performance and TDP for your edge GPGPU hardware? In the cloud/datacenter, why continue to give up watts in terms of TDP and performance to sub-optimal Intel/AMP/x86_64 CPUs and their required baggage (motherboard bridges, buses, system RAM, etc) when all you really want to do is shuffle data between your GPUs, network, and storage as quickly and efficiently as possible? Of course many applications will still require a somewhat general purpose CPU for various tasks, customer code, etc. AWS already has their own optimized ARM cores in place. aarch64 is more and more becoming a first class citizen across the entire open source ecosystem. As platform and software as a service continues to eat the world cloud providers likely have already started migrating the underlying hardware powering these various services to ARM cores for improved performance and TDP (same product, more margin). Various ARM cores are already showing to be quite capable for most CPU tasks but given the other architectural components in place here even the lowliest of modern ARM cores is likely to be asleep most of the time for the applications Nvidia currently cares about. Giving up licensing, die space, power, tighter integration, etc to x86_64 just seems to be foolish at this point. Meanwhile (of course) if you still need x86_64 (or any other arch) for whatever reason you can hit a network API powered by hardware using Nvidia/Mellanox I/O, GPU, and ARM. Potentially (eventually) completely transparently using standard CUDA libraries and existing frameworks (see work like Apex): https://github.com/NVIDIA/apex https://github.com/NVIDIA/apex I, for one, am excited to see what comes from this.
• krick 6y ago
  We've been repeating the word "bad" for the last couple of weeks here, but I don't really remember any insights on what can happen long term (and I'm asking, because I have absolutely no idea). I mean, let's suppose relationships with Qualcomm don't work out (which we all kind of suspect already). What's the alternative? Is it actually possible to create another competitive architecture at this point? Does it take 5, 10 years? Is there even a choice for some other (really big) company, that doesn't want to depend on NVIDIA?
• choiway 6y ago
  I'm confused. What is it that Nvidia can do by owning ARM that it can't do by just licensing the architecture? Can't they just license and build all the chips people think they'll build without buying the whole thing?
• fishermanbill 6y ago
  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 American tech companies have brought EVERYTHING and eventually moth balled them. Take Renderware it was the leading game engine of the PS2 era consoles, brought by EA and mothballed. Nokia is another great example brought by Microsoft and mothballed. Imagination Technologies was slightly different in that it wasn't bought but Apple essentially mothballed them. Now ARM will undoubtedly be the next via an intermediate buyout. You look across Europe and there is nothing. Deepmind could have been a great European tech company - it just needed the right investment.
  • alfalfasprout 6y ago
    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.
    • AsyncAwait 6y ago
      > Maybe part of the problem is that due to so many regulations, there's not a healthy startup ecosystem Reaganomics talking point since the 80s, yet the U.S. constantly relaxes regulations, recently it released even more environmental ones and it looks in parts like Mars. But of course, cut regulations, cut corporate taxes, cut benefits, cut, cut, cut. There's never a failure model for such capitalism apparently. 2008 even was blamed on regulation, rather than lack of thereof. Am quite frankly done with this line of argument.
      • quadrifoliate 6y ago
        I know what you are referring to in the US, but that doesn't explain the intra-Europe differences in regulation when it comes to doing business. Like Denmark is number 4, Germany is number 22, and Greece is number 79 on this index? [1] I don't think Denmark (or Norway, at number 9) is exactly an unregulated capitalist paradise where the environment is being destroyed in the name of business. I say this because I think Europe with a set of consistent regulations and ways of establishing business would serve as a good counterweight to the freewheeling, "anything goes" nature of US capitalism. But I think the fragmentation is its Achilles Heel. ------------------------ [1] https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/rankings?region=oecd-high-income https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/rankings?region=oecd-high-i...
• jbotz 6y ago
  There is now but one choice... RISC-V, full throttle.
• andy_ppp 6y ago
  Okay let’s look at this from a slightly different POV. We have two different things here, ARM CPU design licenses and ARM ISA licenses. If I was an ARM cpu maker I think it would be best to setup something to design better shared ARM CPU designs, the problem of course is building an amazing team and patents which could prove extremely expensive to solve. Is it possible/legal for nvidia to charge a billion dollars per cpu for the isa license or are these things perpetual?
• w_t_payne 6y ago
  Sounds like we need someone to found another ARM.
• alexhektor 6y ago
  None of the top comments disuss the possibility of the deal not going through due to antitrust or other concerns by regulators. While it's owned by a Japanese company and being sold to an American one, China most likely doesn't approve and it could be a diplomatic issue due to security and intelligence concerns? Not sure how relistic that scenario is, although I personally can very much see this being used as a negotiation vehicle, depending on the actual security concern (I'm obviously not an expert there..) [1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1200871.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1200871.shtml
• hankchinaski 6y ago
  this should have triggered an anti-trust probe into the deal, as this radically changes powers at play into the the chip market how many have outlined.
• netheril96 6y ago
  Well, China will surely block this, just like how it blocked the Qualcomm attempt to buy NXP (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nxp-semicondtrs-m-a-qualcomm/qualcomm-ends-44-billion-nxp-bid-after-failing-to-win-china-approval-idUSKBN1KF193 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nxp-semicondtrs-m-a-qualc...). Otherwise ARM would become a US company, and then the US would have another weapon in their arsenal to sanction China's tech companies (e.g. Huawei).
• intricatedetail 6y ago
  Isn't pay for IP model used by companies to avoid paying tax? I wonder if Nvidia is going to be forced to absorbe Arm in its entirety to avoid tax issues?
• atg_abhishek 6y ago
  Has this become the post with the most points and engagement by number of comments?
• wpdev_63 6y ago
  What do 5 hurricanes, global pandemic, and Nvidia buying Arm have in common? What a wild year! Let's not forget Apple announce they are transitioning from x86 to Arm :b.