Nvidia looking at acquiring Arm

[xtroria]

Doubt apple and samsung would be interested in seeing this happening

[LAwLz]

11 hours ago, BuckGup said:

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

I think that has more to do with the general attitude people in the PC community has against Nvidia, you not talking to the right people, and possibly some confirmation bias, rather than Nvidia's actual reputation.

 

• Talk to an OpenGL developer and they will probably have a lot of terrible things to say about pretty much all GPU makers except Nvidia. They are (or at least used to) be the only ones that actually implemented OpenGL in a bug-free and well documented way.
• Talk to game developers and they will probably also praise Nvidia for their immense help they provide when making and optimizing games.
• Talk to gamers and they will most likely say that Nvidia is way ahead of the competition when it comes to GPUs.
• Talk to AI and data science people and they will probably tell you great things about Nvidia's "Inception program", which support startup companies in the field.
• Talk to other people and they will tell you about a lot of the innovations that has come from Nvidia.
• Talk to Nvidia Shield TV owners and they will tell you that Nvidia's support for the platform has been top-notch, basically Apple-tier support. On top of great performance (even to this day, despite being 5 years old now).

 

 

Nvidia makes lots and lots of good things. It's just that the general sentiment about them are that AMD is an angel and therefore their competition has to be the devil. For crying out loud people still bring up the time Linus Torvalds gave them the finger. That was 8 years ago and the thing he complained about has since long been fixed. But let's keep bringing it up because "Nvidia bad lol".

[suicidalfranco]

11 hours ago, BigDamn said:

Apple has left the chat

*starts throwing money at RISC-V

[suicidalfranco]

9 hours ago, Kisai said:

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

never put all your eggs in one basket

[Moonzy]

it's g-

it's gonna...

it's gonna cost them an ARM

[williamcll]

But does that mean the next nintendo switch will get DLSS and RTX?

[porina]

4 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

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.

The current US gov would more than likely block even the slightest hint of that happening.

 

Interesting seeing the comments here. On the regulatory side, the question to be asked is if a combined nvidia-arm would be anti-competitive or excessively powerful in some way. Given their respective main products don't significantly overlap, at least I think it passes the first hurdle.

 

If it were to happen, what would nvidia do with Arm? It will not be an insignificant spend so in the short term they will want to preserve the operation of Arm as we currently know it. I really don't think they can afford to remove the IP model of operation. Arm IP is used in enough custom devices, nvidia simply wont be able to replace them all with their own silicon. However, I wonder if one route they could go would be to offer a reference chip consisting of some arm cores + nv GPU on the cheap. This could be used to build a platform (think of it as an upmarket Raspberry Pi) and encourage growth in both areas. It would also be complementary to other implementations and not replace them.

[igormp]

30 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

For crying out loud people still bring up the time Linus Torvalds gave them the finger. That was 8 years ago and the thing he complained about has since long been fixed. But let's keep bringing it up because "Nvidia bad lol".

Tbh, nvidia has better drivers and support on linux (and even FreeBSD) than AMD. Usually their products have day 1 support and just work, while AMD struggles during months to bring all features into their AMDGPU driver (which is not bad, it's way better than the old Radeon, but still not on par with nvidia's one).

 

The only actual complaints about nvidia on linux is the fact that their drivers are closed source, and that they only support their own APIs instead of supporting existing ones (see the whole VDPAU/NVDECODE vs VA-API fiasco, along with the whole GBM vs EGLStreams).

[RejZoR]

You must be an idiot selling off a company whose tech is these days found in virtually any portable device...

[leadeater]

14 hours ago, BigDamn said:

Apple has left the chat

Tbh I expect Apple to enter the chat and block Nvidia and buy instead and in a war of dollar bills we know who will win that one. I could see Apple doing it just to piss off Nvidia lol

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

You must be an idiot selling off a company whose tech is these days found in virtually any portable device...

Rumors has it that ARM isn't that profitable.

For some, it doesn't really matter if you are in virtually all portable devices if you aren't making money from those devices.

 

 

 

47 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Tbh I expect Apple to enter the chat and block Nvidia and buy instead and in a war of dollar bills we know who will win that one. I could see Apple doing it just to piss off Nvidia lol

I would like to see Nvidia, Apple, Samsung and maybe a few other companies team up, buy and collectively own/run ARM.

I think having multiple companies run it would ensure that no one company gains massive influence over such an important thing.

[igormp]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

You must be an idiot selling off a company whose tech is these days found in virtually any portable device...

But ARM only licenses the ISA itself along with CPU designs, but takes no part in actual production or sale of chips. In fact, ARM has been losing money in the last couple years, and seeing how the SoftBank group is a large conglomerate that has many other profitable business, I guess that it makes sense for then to get rid of such money-waster.

 

Another thing is that ARM is really huge when it comes to microcontrollers (I'd dare to say that it's their largest market), which is low cost but high volume, and is currently being threatened by RISC-V designs that are free.

[leadeater]

14 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I would like to see Nvidia, Apple, Samsung and maybe a few other companies team up, buy and collectively own/run ARM.

I think having multiple companies run it would ensure that no one company gains massive influence over such an important thing.

An industry consortium would be ideal, doubt it'll happen though. Tends to be common for protocols and standards than something as large as a ISA, but in saying that an ISA is just an standard so precedent is already there.

 

Don't think it'll happen though because of the money issue, unless Softbank are willing to gift it somehow a neutral standards body is basically impossible.

[LAwLz]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

An industry consortium would be ideal, doubt it'll happen though. Tends to be common for protocols and standards than something as large as a ISA, but in saying that an ISA is just an standard so precedent is already there.

 

Don't think it'll happen though because of the money issue, unless Softbank are willing to gift it somehow a neutral standards body is basically impossible.

I don't think it will happen either, just wanted to throw that idea out there because I think it would be cool.

 

What would be even cooler would be if something like the EU or UN bought it, made it open for all (open source/design) and then maybe gave it to some universities or something (Linux foundation maybe) to run and manage. Kinda like RISC-V.

That's even less likely than the industry consortium though, but one can dream.

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, igormp said:

Tbh, nvidia has better drivers and support on linux (and even FreeBSD) than AMD. Usually their products have day 1 support and just work, while AMD struggles during months to bring all features into their AMDGPU driver (which is not bad, it's way better than the old Radeon, but still not on par with nvidia's one).

 

The only actual complaints about nvidia on linux is the fact that their drivers are closed source, and that they only support their own APIs instead of supporting existing ones (see the whole VDPAU/NVDECODE vs VA-API fiasco, along with the whole GBM vs EGLStreams).

It’s always binary though.  Nvidia is traditionally verrrry closed mouth about their drivers, and when they are bad they sometimes refuse to fix them.  That’s what pissed apple off so much they quit working with them.

[Habibi_Boi]

15 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

They have their positives: top notch researchers and give some cool rulers to their employees.

 

Thats A nice ruler

[TheoryInPractice]

17 hours ago, valdyrgramr said:

Does that mean AMD gets the rest of the body?

You win the dad joke of the year!

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

It’s always binary though.  Nvidia is traditionally verrrry closed mouth about their drivers, and when they are bad they sometimes refuse to fix them.  That’s what pissed apple off so much they quit working with them.

That's the problem and also where nearly half the complaints come from. "nVidia doesn't publish the necessary information to produce an open source driver, unlike Intel and AMD", so by necessity, nVidia parts can't be used in devices that commit to the GPL, and no Linux distributions can include the nVidia closed-source driver. It's also a gigantic pain in the ass to install the closed source driver on anything other than LTS Ubuntu or LTS Redhat due to the typical dependency hell on Linux.

 

The other half of the complaints come entirely from team red (AMD-Radeon), where developers of games are forced to choose between developing software that works on AMD and nVidia GPU's by not using ANY nVidia libraries, or only AMD's libraries (which tend to work on both, but aren't nearly as good/stable.) nVidia's libraries just do little or nothing on AMD's GPU's because they're designed around the CUDA API and nVidia's own API extensions rather than support OpenCL or Vulkan-compute at all.

 

In a more ideal situation nVidia wouldn't be so protective of their own IP and commit to things like Vulkan, OpenCL and such, but the reality is that is a competitive thing, and if they permitted open source drivers to exist, Intel and AMD would see the man behind the curtain. The sheer lack of interest by nVidia for OpenCL has pretty much resulted in few games invoking OpenCL, and just running things like physics on the CPU instead, where it's instead of a known quantity. Since a certain subset of software and games use CUDA, that's a vendor-lockin. If nVidia stopped supporting CUDA or AMD was able to implement it in their own hardware, then suddenly nVidia loses it's contemplative advantage. AMD has no vendor lock-in advantage (it's own libraries haven't been updated in 8 years) and almost nobody uses Intel's own middleware, the last time I even looked at it, they were trying to charge money for it, now they're giving it away and trying to get you to use it with their cloud platform.

 

Nobody (consumer side) doubts the nVidia products are good themselves, but developers often don't want to work with proprietary API's when it's not nVidia parts in game consoles but rather AMD parts, and the game consoles use something closer to Vulkan or DirectX, to base their proprietary API's on. Proprietary API's hamstring various efforts of using AMD hardware in other places like OpenCV and propietarty Raytracing software's, which is why you almost never see AMD GPU's in engineering offices, as their tools are based on nVidia products and they can make their purchasing decisions based on their software requirements rather than the other way around.

 

Apple doesn't even use nVidia in any of their machines, which goes back to driver support as well.  If you go look at nVidia's driver lists, you'll often only find Windows 10, Linux x64/aarch64 and maybe FreeBSD x64 available for the Quadro/Geforce boards. MacOS you'll only find drivers for the Mac Pro 2010/MacBook Pro 2012 and nothing else which are Kepler parts and notebook models are discontinued on Windows.

 

[ne0tic]

Honestly, I could really see Nvidia being interested in buying ARM but other companies, especially Apple, will never let them do it. 

[RejZoR]

Would be hilarious if all of a sudden we see news that AMD bought ARM. That would be totally unexpected lol

[ne0tic]

11 hours 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.

Yeah. I'm hoping no one buys ARM tho. Because if Nvidia really want to buy them, Apple will probably feel forced to buy them instead to secure their ARM future without any issues that could occur if Nvidia instead would own ARM. 

[Nena Trinity]

Ok I am gonna buy team green CPU and pair it with team BLU GPU, stupid? Maybe but I do not care! O3O

[cj09beira]

7 hours ago, igormp said:

Tbh, nvidia has better drivers and support on linux (and even FreeBSD) than AMD. Usually their products have day 1 support and just work, while AMD struggles during months to bring all features into their AMDGPU driver (which is not bad, it's way better than the old Radeon, but still not on par with nvidia's one).

 

The only actual complaints about nvidia on linux is the fact that their drivers are closed source, and that they only support their own APIs instead of supporting existing ones (see the whole VDPAU/NVDECODE vs VA-API fiasco, along with the whole GBM vs EGLStreams).

considering their drivers come with the kernel its kinda normal to have long periods between releases, and one can use other branches of mesa for more up to date versions

[Bombastinator]

The question that hits me is why is arm for sale?  They should be doing well, and it looks like they’re going to be doing even better in the future.  Just holding the asset would be profitable.  Maybe there are problems with the parent company that put them in desperate need of ready cash.  It’s the only reason a good property like this even might be sold at all.

[Donut417]

I’m conflicted. On one hand Nvidia is a very competitive and innovative company. On the other hand they are not supportive of open source. 
 

One one hand they might be able to take ARM to the next level. On the other hand they might lock others out.