Nvidia looking at acquiring Arm

[porina]

 

Quote

ARM, the British silicon ship designer backed by SoftBank, has long been the subject of speculative interest. Today, that interest has reached a fever pitch amid reports that NVIDIA is exploring the possibility of acquiring the UK-based chip designer.

According to the reporting by Bloomberg, NVIDIA has approached SoftBank, ARM’s parent company, regarding a possible takeover deal. Nonetheless, as the talks are currently in a preliminary stage, other bidders might emerge as well.

Sources

https://wccftech.com/arm-the-british-chip-designer-may-be-acquired-by-nvidia/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-22/softbank-s-chip-company-arm-is-said-to-attract-nvidia-interest

 

Summary

There's not a lot to add, nvidia are reportedly looking at acquiring Arm. These big business deals are usually not openly stated so information like this will be indirect until such point either side makes a more official statement, if anything happens at all.

 

My thoughts

Nvidia are a bit of an odd ball in the PC chipmaker space, as their focus is pretty much on GPUs without their own serious CPU to pair with it. Intel are strong on CPUs, putting aside 14nm jokes, and are looking to gain share in the GPU space. AMD already play in both areas. This would be a good complement to nvidia.

 

Arm based designs have the majority of the mobile device space, as well as entrants in server, with a move to desktop/laptops lead by Apple. That last point could be interesting. I wasn't active when it happened, but I understand that Apple and Nvidia are not the best friends. So Apple might object to this deal should it go anywhere.

How to size up the companies? Nvidia as a listed stock means we can check its market cap, currently US$257B. Arm is harder to value. It was bought by Softbank in 2016 for $32B. So in that sense nvidia would seem big enough to make a move. Depending on how deep the wounds go between nvidia and Apple, have to wonder if Apple might just out-bid nvidia to block them.

 

-------- 8< --------

 

Update 14 September 2020 - they did it!

 

 

[ImAlsoRan]

Nvidia was disappointed in no tablets using Tegra, so they just bought the architecture so they could be in every tablet CPU /s

Edited July 22, 2020 by ImAlsoRan
Sarcasm wasn't apparent

[porina]

The new supercomputers for the US that were announced last year has one notable omission: nvidia. Intel got one, AMD got another, but nvidia weren't part of the picture. It was speculated at the time that if you can get your CPUs and GPUs from one place, it means you have one place to go for support. nvidia may have missed out because they didn't have their own CPU line. People had speculated what they could do, with RISC-V being thrown around but that seems too immature. Arm at least is well known.

[LukeSavenije]

Apple acquires Nvidia after Nvidia buys out ARM from Softbank

[BigDamn]

Apple has left the chat

[Drama Lama]

Could be the beginning of an interesting partnership 

 

Spoiler

The press team does not want you to know this but

Spoiler

AMD is using ARM cores in their Ryzen CPUs

 

 

Edited July 22, 2020 by Drama Lama

[Windows7ge]

I'm kind of curious as to where this will go if NVIDIA succeeds here. I really can't see NVIDIA starting their own CPU line with board partners as AMD & Intel have. I don't think they'd pick a worthwhile userbase for it but perhaps in proprietary lower power consumption laptops and other mobile products that run off batteries I could see this helping them gain independence from Intel for their mobile scene.

[BuckGup]

I haven't met a single person who works in the industry who has said something good about Nvidia. They are asshats

[Drama Lama]

9 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I'm kind of curious as to where this will go if NVIDIA succeeds here. I really can't see NVIDIA starting their own CPU line with board partners as AMD & Intel have. I don't think they'd pick a worthwhile userbase for it but perhaps in proprietary lower power consumption laptops and other mobile products that run off batteries I could see this helping them gain independence from Intel for their mobile scene.

Maybe Nvidia could later buy one of those new ARM server chip startups that are like sand at the beach 

mir create their own server chips 

why not?    ARM in servers is coming and Nvidia could integrate both to sell entire servers themselves ( they already have mellanox for networking and interconnects )

[Windows7ge]

4 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

Maybe Nvidia could later buy one of those new ARM server chip startups that are like sand at the beach 

mir create their own server chips 

why not?    ARM in servers is coming and Nvidia could integrate both to sell entire servers themselves ( they already have mellanox for networking and interconnects )

I don't see why not. It'd open an entire new market for them if they can sell reasons to switch over to NVIDIA ARM processors. I assume the users would need to have specific applications that work with ARM but the power savings could be worthwhile to data centers in primarily GPU compute applications where an x86 CPU is just waste power.

 

Did NVIDIA buy Mellanox or are you saying they just use them?

[Master Disaster]

I have a sneaky suspicion the competition watchdog might have something to say about this. Nvidia suddenly gaining power over pretty much all other tech hardware manufacturers seems a bit too much.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, porina said:

 

 

 

My thoughts

Nvidia are a bit of an odd ball in the PC chipmaker space, as their focus is pretty much on GPUs without their own serious CPU to pair with it. Intel are strong on CPUs, putting aside 14nm jokes, and are looking to gain share in the GPU space. AMD already play in both areas. This would be a good complement to nvidia.

 

Arm based designs have the majority of the mobile device space, as well as entrants in server, with a move to desktop/laptops lead by Apple. That last point could be interesting. I wasn't active when it happened, but I understand that Apple and Nvidia are not the best friends. So Apple might object to this deal should it go anywhere.

How to size up the companies? Nvidia as a listed stock means we can check its market cap, currently US$257B. Arm is harder to value. It was bought by Softbank in 2016 for $32B. So in that sense nvidia would seem big enough to make a move. Depending on how deep the wounds go between nvidia and Apple, have to wonder if Apple might just out-bid nvidia to block them.

 

It's almost certainly not to happen as that would put valuable IP in the hands of a company that is openly hostile to open standards and open source. 

 

It would be different if ARM wasn't in practically everything that's not a desktop computer. But if nVidia acquired ARM, then you will see a Qualcomm situation happening where Qualcomm won't licence their patents to anyone who doesn't buy their chips, and their chips only use their CPU and GPU cores, which is a death-knell for Linux and Android-based systems, since nVidia has the worst support for Linux. Heck it might end up with wholesale abandonment of ARM by smartphone and smartTV vendors to RISC-V. nVidia uses RISC-V already. 

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-RISC-V-Next-Gen-Falcon

 

https://medium.com/syncedreview/is-nvidia-doubling-down-on-risc-v-1ce714a919eb

 

So it seems strange that they would want ARM if they were already invested in RISC-V unless they planned to abandon that work.

Quote

NVIDIA listed the technical criteria for its next-gen architecture: more than twice the performance of Falcon, less than twice the area cost of Falcon, support for caches, tightly coupled memories, 64-bit addresses, and suitability for modern operating systems. They concluded only RISC-V meets all criteria. The new RISC-V micro-controllers will outperform Falcon micro-controllers by three times, Tom’s Hardware has reported.

 

Anyway, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Tegra was basically a failure, for all but the Nintendo Switch and the most popular Kodi Piracy boxes.

 

[Bombastinator]

One thing I read the other day was a Forbes article stating that the contract Apple has with arm is non standard.  They don’t license the arm architecture, merely parts(?) of the code, and they may not use all of that. There was a lot of vagueness. Implication is that Apple CPUs possibly aren’t all that ARM to begin with. 

[Kisai]

9 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

One thing I read the other day was a Forbes article stating that the contract Apple has with arm is non standard.  They don’t license the arm architecture, merely parts(?) of the code, and they may not use all of that. There was a lot of vagueness. Implication is that Apple CPUs possibly aren’t all that ARM to begin with. 

Considering that Apple basically helped create ARM in the first place, it would not surprise me if their contract gave them license to any/all IP that ARM develops containing ARM CPU cores. 

 

Likewise Intel has license to build ARM as well, they just don't outside of their FPGA business they acquired not that long ago.

https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/products/programmable/soc.html

 

So Intel would certainly have a reason to protest this, since it jeopardizes the FPGA business.

[GDRRiley]

2 hours ago, porina said:

The new supercomputers for the US that were announced last year has one notable omission: nvidia. Intel got one, AMD got another, but nvidia weren't part of the picture. It was speculated at the time that if you can get your CPUs and GPUs from one place, it means you have one place to go for support. nvidia may have missed out because they didn't have their own CPU line. People had speculated what they could do, with RISC-V being thrown around but that seems too immature. Arm at least is well known.

they are in some. NERSC is getting one that has AMD CPU along with Nivida GPUs

[Curufinwe_wins]

Personally, I think this would be a very good thing for the industry.

 

But hey, armchair here, so **shrugs**

[Warin]

3 hours ago, LukeSavenije said:

Apple acquires Nvidia after Nvidia buys out ARM from Softbank

I thought exactly the same thing.

[StDragon]

Apple grovels back to AMD.

[mr moose]

6 hours ago, porina said:

 

 have to wonder if Apple might just out-bid nvidia to block them.

 

I really really really hope not, the best thing about ARM being a CPU design company is that anyone can license their IP and competition is guaranteed.  If NVIDIA buy it they have no reason to not carry on that business.   But if apple buy it then all bets are off.  Kiss goodbye what ever competition we had left in the mobile world.

[Bombastinator]

7 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I really really really hope not, the best thing about ARM being a CPU design company is that anyone can license their IP and competition is guaranteed.  If NVIDIA buy it they have no reason to not carry on that business.   But if apple buy it then all bets are off.  Kiss goodbye what ever competition we had left in the mobile world.

Nvidia is risc5 they might have a pretty good reason to strip out the good workers and kill it.

[StDragon]

7 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I really really really hope not, the best thing about ARM being a CPU design company is that anyone can license their IP and competition is guaranteed.  If NVIDIA buy it they have no reason to not carry on that business.   But if apple buy it then all bets are off.  Kiss goodbye what ever competition we had left in the mobile world.

Google would move to RISC V more than likely for their Android platform..

[mr moose]

16 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Nvidia is risc5 they might have a pretty good reason to strip out the good workers and kill it.

I can't see NVIDIA killing something that brings in revenue unless they are almost guaranteed in doing so every phone is going to swap to their offerings. Also given NVIDIA don't make phones they are then going to be more concerned with providing a product people want.

The alternative is apple owning the IP that every phone is reliant on and they have a vested interest in their competition being worse. .

 

 

16 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Google would move to RISC V more than likely for their Android platform..

Another reason it would be bad for consumers.  They can do that already if they want,   after a theoretical apple take over it no longer is an option but potentially a forced necessity.   The whole thing doesn't exactly instill confidence in the consumer getting the better part of that deal.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

I can't see NVIDIA killing something that brings in revenue unless they are almost guaranteed in doing so every phone is going to swap to their offerings. Also given NVIDIA don't make phones they are then going to be more concerned with providing a product people want.

The alternative is apple owning the IP that every phone is reliant on and they have a vested interest in their competition being worse. .

 

 

Another reason it would be bad for consumers.  They can do that already if they want,   after a theoretical apple take over it no longer is an option but potentially a forced necessity.   The whole thing doesn't exactly instill confidence in the consumer getting the better part of that deal.

I’m not sure that’s the only alternative.  I could see China trying to buy arm on the super quiet. Would be very very bad for the UK, EU, and USA if they managed it.

[igormp]

That'd be an interesting move. Nvidia already has some ARM products, be it on their mobile SoCs or embedded ones, and they're looking towards their market share on the automotive market, where ARM makes a lot of sense.

 

Given that, as people mentioned before, it'd also lower the difficulty for them to get into the server space since they could easily build their own complete solution without having to worry about licenses. 

 

Another extra is that having complete control of where the ISA is going would be a huge plus for any heterogeneous computing plans that they might have in mind, maybe even integrate nvlink into their own ARM-based CPU, similar to current POWER9 offerings nowadays.

[D13H4RD]

Could potentially be tied to NVIDIA's growing share in the data center and deep learning space. 

 

Since that's where they look to get most of their revenue from.