Nvidia might be just weeks away from closing the acquisition of ARM

[Master Disaster]

According to the Evening Standard, Nvidia might be just weeks away from closing the deal with Softbank to acquire ARM.

Quote

THE race to buy up British tech giant ARM is hotting up with US chipmaket Nvidia entering exclusive talks, it emerged today.

 

Sources said a takeover, which could value the company which supplies technology to Apple at up to £40 billion, is on course to be complete by the end of the summer.

Softbank is looking to sell ARM after they lost out on investments and had hired Goldman Sachs to try and find a buyer.

Quote

Cambridge-headquartered chip designer Arm was first put up for sale by its private equity Japanese owner Softbank back in April when Goldman Sachs was hired to sound out buyers.

 

Softbank was struggling and had posted heavy losses after trophy investments such as WeWork failed.

GS had initially offered ARM to Apple before apparently trying to get a consortium made up of Qualcomm, Samsung & Nvidia to buy. Nvidia come out on their own and are reportedly ready to pay the £40b asking price for ARM, "by the end of the summer".

Quote

In April, Goldman approached Apple, which decided against buying the business. The bank then tried to put together a consortium including, Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia who would all take stakes in Arm, the Evening Standard understands.

 

But California based Nvidia has emerged as the sole interested buyer.

 

It is understood Softbank founder Masayoshi Son wants around £40 billion for the business, more than the £24 billion paid in 2016.

This could however end up being blocked in the UK since its current owners are under some operating restrictions from the UK government.

Quote

The deal may be looked harshly on by the British government who insisted Softbank keep Arm’s headquarters in the UK and increase the domestic workforce in 2016. It is unclear whether these measures would remain under Nvidia.

https://www.standard.co.uk/business/nividia-buy-chipmaker-arm-a4524761.html

 

I don't see this making it through the legal process. Allowing Nvidia to buy ARM gives them leverage over some of their competitors (Qualcomm, Samsung & Apple are all big ARM customers) and there would be nothing stopping Nvidia from hurting them by pulling supplies if they wished.

 

[mrchow19910319]

wow. how come no one is responing on this one..

[porina]

So the other rumoured buyers are either no longer interested or just not making progress?

 

The legal side can be overcome. I don't see it as a major barrier. One part is just job protection if what we call a government here is still doing what. Anti-competition is unlikely to be a problem since it isn't an area nvidia are already significantly in.

[Master Disaster]

29 minutes ago, porina said:

So the other rumoured buyers are either no longer interested or just not making progress?

 

The legal side can be overcome. I don't see it as a major barrier. One part is just job protection if what we call a government here is still doing what. Anti-competition is unlikely to be a problem since it isn't an area nvidia are already significantly in.

Can't say but it sounds like the others are not really interested.

 

My issue with Nvidia is that they're already infamous for ignoring open standards and doing their own proprietary versions. Instead of OpenCL they created CUDA and instead of adopting the open standard for VRR they created G Sync which uses a proprietary SOC, it took them 5 or so years to even support open VRR on their GPUs at all. I'm concerned about Nvidia trying to lock down ARM in some weird way more than them trying to be anti competitive.

 

I'm also wondering what Nvidia even want with ARM? They already have the Tegra which wipes the floor with ARM CPUs.

[mr moose]

Well, if that turns out to be true then that puts to rest a lot of the speculation about apples desires/fears.

 

It is weird that when apple are looking to base all their products on ARM IP that they wouldn't consider buying it.  It's not like they can't afford to. Maybe it just pays better in the long run to not own it.

 

 

 

 

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

My issue with Nvidia is that they're already infamous for ignoring open standards and doing their own proprietary versions. Instead of OpenCL they created CUDA and instead of adopting the open standard for VRR they created G Sync which uses a proprietary SOC, it took them 5 or so years to even support open VRR on their GPUs at all.

CUDA predates OpenCL by several years and G-Sync predates the open VRR standards. 

So it's not that Nvidia ignores open standards. It's that Nvidia invents something proprietary, the rest of the industry goes "oh that's cool. We need that", creates an open standard and then Nvidia keeps focusing on their proprietary stuff because, well, they spent money developing it. 

Same thing is happening now with raytracing. 

Nvidia does something proprietary, the rest of the industry thinks it's a good idea and develops an open standard for it. 

 

 

I mean. Nvidia does mostly focus on proprietary stuff, but I think it makes sense that they do it. Would be great if they were quicker with adopting open standards but at the same time it's understandable that they want to recoup their investments. 

[LAwLz]

I wonder if the US government will force Nvidia to stop supplying Chinese companies with ARM licenses and architectures if Nvidia buys ARM.

I think a US company buying ARM would be very bad politically. We have already seen that the US are not above forcing US companies to cut ties with Chinese companies and I am sure this would be a great asset to the US in their tradewars. 

 

Once a company is in the US they have to obey the will of the US government. 

 

 

That's why I think it would be best for ARM to become a consortium where for example Samsung, Apple, Nvidia and several other companies own ARM together. 

[yian88]

This is so bad :(  the end of ARM goodness as we knew it, its all on RISC-V from the moment they close the deal.

[porina]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

CUDA predates OpenCL by several years and G-Sync predates the open VRR standards. 

I was just looking at up. In a quick search, CUDA was from 2007, and OpenCL didn't exist until 2009. G-Sync came out in 2013, FreeSync 2015. 

 

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Same thing is happening now with raytracing. 

This is a little different though. Microsoft laid down the DXR as the basis of (Windows) interacting with raytracing. RTX is just one implementation on top of it. Not being a programmer, I don't know if DXR is generic enough that RTX isn't going to be a major fragmentation point for RT in general looking forwards. In that sense, I see RTX as a kinda potential superset of DXR, in that it may exceed or provide additional functionality than the minimum required.

 

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Once a company is in the US they have to obey the will of the US government. 

It's more complicated than that, in that already ARM has US IP in its designs, and that's sufficient for the US gov to say that the US IP can't be passed to China. Unless ARM is able to remove the use of US IP, that will remain the case going forward.

 

I find it comical that the current US gov throws around accusations of CN tech companies as being puppets of CN gov, when the US gov is essentially forcing US and other international companies to do the same.

[Arika]

4 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

and there would be nothing stopping Nvidia from hurting them by pulling supplies if they wished.

normally i would say anti-competition laws, but seeing how much the US just doesn't care about them as long as it benefits them...

[BuckGup]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

normally i would say anti-competition laws, but seeing how much the US just doesn't care about them as long as it benefits them...

You would be correct. HPE as products that compete with the DGX-1 and DGX-2 and NVIDIA will pry so hard and have even required a use case for the GPUs. If they find out it directly competes they will bump the price up significantly or refuse to sell to you. Nvidia are assholes I'm telling you

[dalekphalm]

Please no. I’m very concerned about long term consequences of NVIDIA owning ARM. 

 

A consortium is exactly what I think should happen. Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm and others. I wouldn’t mind if NVIDIA was part of the consortium, I just don’t want them having sole or majority ownership. 

[Zodiark1593]

16 hours ago, mr moose said:

Well, if that turns out to be true then that puts to rest a lot of the speculation about apples desires/fears.

 

It is weird that when apple are looking to base all their products on ARM IP that they wouldn't consider buying it.  It's not like they can't afford to. Maybe it just pays better in the long run to not own it.

 

 

 

 

I’d imagine a perpetual contract of sorts may already be in place, in which case, there’s little to fear of their in-house designs being jeopardized, even if Nvidia wants to cause Apple harm. 

[Video Beagle]

9 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

I’d imagine a perpetual contract of sorts may already be in place, in which case, there’s little to fear of their in-house designs being jeopardized, even if Nvidia wants to cause Apple harm. 

I saw speculation on a previous thread about this that Apple would likely have all sorts of issues owning ARM, and thus owning someting their direct competitors in the smart phone markets would need from them (as opposed to NVIDIA which is more on the side to all of that).   Likely, Apple has what it needs, and decided it didn't need the headaches trying to purchase it would cause.

[Zodiark1593]

1 hour ago, Video Beagle said:

I saw speculation on a previous thread about this that Apple would likely have all sorts of issues owning ARM, and thus owning someting their direct competitors in the smart phone markets would need from them (as opposed to NVIDIA which is more on the side to all of that).   Likely, Apple has what it needs, and decided it didn't need the headaches trying to purchase it would cause.

It also wouldn’t make a lot of sense for Apple to drop billions into their CPU designs without some means (via contractual provisions) of protecting their investment  

[Donut417]

On 8/16/2020 at 6:55 AM, porina said:

 

I find it comical that the current US gov throws around accusations of CN tech companies as being puppets of CN gov, when the US gov is essentially forcing US and other international companies to do the same.

China is an emerging Super Power and the US won’t stand for that. This is the new Cold War.