Nvidia looking at acquiring Arm

[Bombastinator]

13 minutes ago, Video Beagle said:

from the article I read, it's not IP but like administrative stuff...the company seal or some such...that by holding it he's in charge...it honestly sounded very archaic/ceremonial...i may have misunderstood, mind you.

Some kind of ruperts rules of order loophole maybe..  that’s happened before.  Caused the creation of the weather underground and some other pretty evil groups 

[illegalwater]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/nvidia-said-in-advanced-talks-to-buy-softbank-s-chip-company-arm

 

Holy shit they might actually be doing it

[SpikeSpiegel]

https://www.techspot.com/news/86101-report-nvidia-considering-buying-arm.html

[mr moose]

You don't really think about just how big a company is until you hear them talking about buying another company for $55B.    

[porina]

39 minutes ago, mr moose said:

You don't really think about just how big a company is until you hear them talking about buying another company for $55B.    

Did I miss it somewhere? Where did 55B come from?

 

Edit: forget I asked, just saw it on the Bloomberg link. I didn't see it before as it said I had used up my free quote despite never visiting it before.

 

Edit 2: thinking more, 55B is a LOT. About 20% of nvidia's market cap, so it's going to make a dent.

[mr moose]

10 hours ago, porina said:

 

Edit 2: thinking more, 55B is a LOT. About 20% of nvidia's market cap, so it's going to make a dent.

Yes it is a huge undertaking.  Which is why I think I was a little surprised. 

[Chett_Manly]

We need a serious ARM contender in the PC space. Qualcomm has been 2nd rate to Apple for years now, and ARMs own designs haven't worked wonders. Nvidia throwing a ton of money and effort into creating ARM cpus for Windows and Mobile like they have GPUs is a huge win for consumers! 

 

Apple and Nvidia pushing high performance computing with ARM.

AMD and Intel pushing high performance computing with x86.

 

Bring it on!

[Bombastinator]

6 minutes ago, Chett_Manly said:

We need a serious ARM contender in the PC space. Qualcomm has been 2nd rate to Apple for years now, and ARMs own designs haven't worked wonders. Nvidia throwing a ton of money and effort into creating ARM cpus for Windows and Mobile like they have GPUs is a huge win for consumers! 

 

Apple and Nvidia pushing high performance computing with ARM.

AMD and Intel pushing high performance computing with x86.

 

Bring it on!

Re: pc space.  
a vague term.  If “PC space” means personal computers  Apple could be considered to be such.  If “PC space” means “No No No! Apple vs. PC!  Apples can’t be PCs!” microsoft could have been considered to be such.  Raspberry would be such.  It might even be argued that the “PC space” is by definition AMD64 in which case ARM machines can’t ever be in the PC space in the first place.

 

Re: Nvidia throwing tons of money

throwing tons of money to buy it and gain control, sure.  Them throwing more money at development doesn’t automatically follow though.  It might even make more financial sense for them to kill it.  So the opposite of throwing tons of money at development. 

[igormp]

32 minutes ago, Chett_Manly said:

We need a serious ARM contender in the PC space. Qualcomm has been 2nd rate to Apple for years now, and ARMs own designs haven't worked wonders. Nvidia throwing a ton of money and effort into creating ARM cpus for Windows and Mobile like they have GPUs is a huge win for consumers! 

 

Apple and Nvidia pushing high performance computing with ARM.

AMD and Intel pushing high performance computing with x86.

 

Bring it on!

Nvidia already has arm cpus and they aren't that good. I really doubt nvidia plans to push arm towards the personal computer space, but instead the HPC, datacenter and embedded ones.

[LAwLz]

38 minutes ago, Chett_Manly said:

We need a serious ARM contender in the PC space. Qualcomm has been 2nd rate to Apple for years now, and ARMs own designs haven't worked wonders. Nvidia throwing a ton of money and effort into creating ARM cpus for Windows and Mobile like they have GPUs is a huge win for consumers! 

 

Apple and Nvidia pushing high performance computing with ARM.

AMD and Intel pushing high performance computing with x86.

 

Bring it on!

The gap between Apple and Qualcomm will soon be fixed.

 

Pretty much everyone making consumer chips these days use stock or near stock ARM cores (except Apple) so that is what has dictated performance these last couple of years. ARM has recently announced that they will now start making and licensing high performance cores, and the estimations right now puts their performance at around Apple A13 levels.

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15813/arm-cortex-a78-cortex-x1-cpu-ip-diverging

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

The gap between Apple and Qualcomm will soon be fixed.

 

Pretty much everyone making consumer chips these days use stock or near stock ARM cores (except Apple) so that is what has dictated performance these last couple of years. ARM has recently announced that they will now start making and licensing high performance cores, and the estimations right now puts their performance at around Apple A13 levels.

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15813/arm-cortex-a78-cortex-x1-cpu-ip-diverging

So, a Month or two after this announcement Nvidia trys to buy ARM.  Interesting.   Kind of surprised Apple wouldn’t want in on it as the x1 would be competition.  Might be why they didn’t.  Anti-trust issues.

[mr moose]

35 minutes ago, igormp said:

Nvidia already has arm cpus and they aren't that good. I really doubt nvidia plans to push arm towards the personal computer space, but instead the HPC, datacenter and embedded ones.

And I think the more substantial reason they would be interested is because instead of paying for  the licenses to produce these products they can make money from them. 

 

 

Having digested the idea for a while it really seems a good business move for NVIDIA, so long as the price is right. 

[Bombastinator]

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

And I think the more substantial reason they would be interested is because instead of paying for  the licenses to produce these products they can make money from them. 

 

 

Having digested the idea for a while it really seems a good business move for NVIDIA, so long as the price is right. 

Sure, buying low is often a good idea.  The general fear is the control issue.  What else might Nvidia do besides that?

[mr moose]

8 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Sure, buying low is often a good idea.  The general fear is the control issue.  What else might Nvidia do besides that?

One of the driving benefits is access to the core design and R+D team.  I really can't see them using it to hostage the industry.  Possible, but in my mind unlikely given there lack of enthusiasm they have shown trying to compete.   Lets be honest, the put as much effort into tegra as MS did into WP. There is a product there, but who really knows or cares about it? 

[Zodiark1593]

55 minutes ago, igormp said:

Nvidia already has arm cpus and they aren't that good. I really doubt nvidia plans to push arm towards the personal computer space, but instead the HPC, datacenter and embedded ones.

In the hypothetical scenario that Windows desktops move to ARM however, having control of ARM would be absolutely ideal for a company like Nvidia. 
 

18 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Sure, buying low is often a good idea.  The general fear is the control issue.  What else might Nvidia do besides that?

As Nvidia actually knows the industry, they’re probably much more aware of how to make licensing terms hurt.
 

Apple, I think would be safe to say, has probably some sort of perpetual ISA agreement that would prevent Nvidia/ARM from influencing them in any adverse way (wouldn’t make sense to take the risk of moving the Mac line over otherwise and spending the obscene resources on developing the CPUs only for ARM to still have control over license renewals). 
 

Everyone else, I suppose we’ll have to see. My Crystal Ball App is pretty foggy here.

 

[mr moose]

12 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Everyone else, I suppose we’ll have to see. My Crystal Ball App is pretty foggy here.

 

And that's what's wrong with the younger generations, they rely on a crystal ball app.   Now us children of the 80's, we're different,  we had the magic 8 ball.  That was never foggy, it always gave a clear answer.   

 

 

[Dylanc1500]

19 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Now us children of the 80's, we're different,  we had the magic 8 ball.  That was never foggy, it always gave a clear answer.   

And if you didn't like the answer you broke it open and took the answer you were wanting.

[Bombastinator]

47 minutes ago, mr moose said:

One of the driving benefits is access to the core design and R+D team.  I really can't see them using it to hostage the industry.  Possible, but in my mind unlikely given there lack of enthusiasm they have shown trying to compete.   Lets be honest, the put as much effort into tegra as MS did into WP. There is a product there, but who really knows or cares about it? 

They may not be too interested at the moment but that kind of thing can always come up unless it’s locked out somehow.  It might be.  Could explain why other companies aren’t too interested.   Particulars would be important.

[Bombastinator]

25 minutes ago, mr moose said:

And that's what's wrong with the younger generations, they rely on a crystal ball app.   Now us children of the 80's, we're different,  we had the magic 8 ball.  That was never foggy, it always gave a clear answer.   

 

 

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I have never had that answer before.  Although now I think about it I o recall seeing a "Maybe" once.

 

EDIT: anyway, stop ruining jokes with facts.

[Bombastinator]

13 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I have never had that answer before.  Although now I think about it I o recall seeing a "Maybe" once.

 

EDIT: anyway, stop ruining jokes with facts.

I had this pic already on my phone.  I was using it to reply to questions about future proofing and amphere

[Zodiark1593]

59 minutes ago, mr moose said:

And that's what's wrong with the younger generations, they rely on a crystal ball app.   Now us children of the 80's, we're different,  we had the magic 8 ball.  That was never foggy, it always gave a clear answer.   

 

 

Even the Magic 8 Ball is pretty hazy on my Game Boy.

 

[porina]

9 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Kind of surprised Apple wouldn’t want in on it as the x1 would be competition.  Might be why they didn’t.  Anti-trust issues.

Another reason is that companies are kidna like people to an extent. They have certain interests. While other ideas may be good, it might not be for them. The value of buying Arm and managing it into the wider organisation may not be what they want to spend time doing, if there are other more interesting things to go forward with.

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, porina said:

Another reason is that companies are kidna like people to an extent. They have certain interests. While other ideas may be good, it might not be for them. The value of buying Arm and managing it into the wider organisation may not be what they want to spend time doing, if there are other more interesting things to go forward with.

It does imply there may be baked in limitations. I don’t know what those are.

[LAwLz]

Holy crap I just realized something... Not sure if anyone has brought this up yet but what happens to Mali (GPUs designed by ARM) if Nvidia buys ARM?

My guess is that they would just stop development of Mali (because why develop Mali and the Nvidia GPUs?), which means SoCs would be left without a reference GPU to implement, and I doubt Nvidia will sell their GPU designs either.

 

So what happens then with GPUs for SoCs?

Qualcomm does their own thing with Adreno.

Samsung is working with AMD so they will be fine, maybe (if the AMD collaboration works out well).

Apple makes their own GPUs.

What would companies like MediaTek and Rockchip do (I assume HiSilicon are screwed regardless)? They don't have their own GPU designs and rely on Mali at this point in time. Would they have to go to Imagination?