The UK Government has decided to intervene in NVIDIA's proposed acquisition of ARM

[Bombastinator]

44 minutes ago, avg123 said:

i would rather have nvidia acquire it now than some chinese firm down the line

How would there possibly National security concerns with the US but not China?  The US and UK are both five eyes countries. We already share a whole bunch of security stuff. Whereas China is China. 

[Kisai]

11 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

How would there possibly National security concerns with the US but not China?  The US and UK are both five eyes countries. We already share a whole bunch of security stuff. Whereas China is China. 

Probably because of how ARM lost control of it's subsidiary in China.

Y'know, this one

 

You know the story, you want to do business in China, so China makes you open a JV company, and just when you think everything is hunky-dory, the chinese company changes the locks on the front door so it's JV partners can't get in, and the Chinese partner loots the place of IP.

 

Metaphorically speaking, as this has happened to every business that has ever setup in China and subsequently no longer has a Chinese presence. It also happens every time you outsource your core business (customer-facing) rather than the non-core business (eg janitorial services.) There is literately nothing stopping an outsourcer from just downloading your entire client list and projects and going directly to that client and cutting you out of of the project.

 

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, avg123 said:

ARM provides 2 things: the instruction set and the architecture design right?

apple already dont use the architecture design provided by ARM, they make their own custom cores?

So if nvidia stops open nature of ARM, can apple just move away from the ISA and make their own ISA? it would break compatibility but does apple care?

So soon? Likely not. And takes good while to come up with your own ISA and ever longer to implement designs based from it.

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Probably because of how ARM lost control of it's subsidiary in China.

Y'know, this one

 

You know the story, you want to do business in China, so China makes you open a JV company, and just when you think everything is hunky-dory, the chinese company changes the locks on the front door so it's JV partners can't get in, and the Chinese partner loots the place of IP.

 

Metaphorically speaking, as this has happened to every business that has ever setup in China and subsequently no longer has a Chinese presence. It also happens every time you outsource your core business (customer-facing) rather than the non-core business (eg janitorial services.) There is literately nothing stopping an outsourcer from just downloading your entire client list and projects and going directly to that client and cutting you out of of the project.

 

That may have been what happened but it just makes a bigger threat rather than a smaller one, which was my point.  Is the statement that ARM no longer has any IP worth holding because it was already stolen?

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, whm1974 said:

So soon? Likely not. And takes good while to come up with your own ISA and ever longer to implement designs based from it.

My memory is Apple helped found arm and it’s questionable whether Nvidia COULD stop Apple from using the ISA they have.  Apple has so very old and specific to Apple licenses.  I’m not sure Nvidia could say “you can’t use the ISA you’ve been using anymore”. They might be able to force a fork of the ISA, and it would make apple do more work, but it wouldn’t stop them.

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

My memory is Apple helped found arm and it’s questionable whether Nvidia COULD stop Apple from using the ISA they have.  Apple has so very old and specific to Apple licenses.  I’m not sure Nvidia could say “you can’t use the ISA you’ve been using anymore”. They might be able to force a fork of the ISA, and it would make apple do more work, but it wouldn’t stop them.

Well the Apple Newton used a ARM Processor, but helped Found ARM?

[dalekphalm]

23 hours ago, whm1974 said:

Well the Apple Newton used a ARM Processor, but helped Found ARM?

Yeah no they are definitely misremembering.

 

Acorn Computers - the designers of the BBC Micro - were looking into a successor and were not pleased with any of the current market offerings, so they started an internal project to design a RISC based processor, vaguely based on (more inspired by) the Berkley RISC chip (which was more of a demonstration piece than something very functional).

 

That eventually lead to the ARM1 processor and the ARM architecture. ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine (now Advanced RISC Machines). This project was started in 1983 and the ARM1 chip would have been ready in '84 or '85.

 

Apple was brought into the picture in the late 80's to help with the ARM6 chip, which was eventually used in the Newton.

[whm1974]

2 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Yeah no they are definitely misremembering.

 

Acorn Computers - the designers of the BBC Micro - were looking into a successor and were not pleased with any of the current market offerings, so they started an internal project to design a RISC based processor, vaguely based on (more inspired by) the Berkley RISC chip (which was more of a demonstration piece than something very functional).

 

That eventually lead to the ARM1 processor and the ARM architecture. ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine (now Advanced RISC Machines). This project was started in 1983 and the ARM1 chip would have been ready in '84 or '85.

 

Apple was brought into the picture in the late 80's to help with the ARM6 chip, which was eventually used in the Newton.

How good was the ARM CPUs used in Acorn Computers? I'll double check, but I think that OS can be run on a Raspberry Pi.

[igormp]

On 4/20/2021 at 4:50 PM, avg123 said:

So if nvidia stops open nature of ARM, can apple just move away from the ISA and make their own ISA? it would break compatibility but does apple care?

Because making your own ISA is hard, and getting proper support from compilers and whatnot would be even harder.

Having a well established ISA such as ARM makes porting your software way easier since people can simply recompile their old softwares.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, whm1974 said:

How good was the ARM CPUs used in Acorn Computers? I'll double check, but I think that OS can be run on a Raspberry Pi.

I remember hearing a story once about the chip being so low power that they set it up to run tests, ram the tests, and realized they hadn’t turned the machine on yet.  It was running on ghost power.  This sounds cooler than it is because back the. MUCH higher voltages were used. Also iirc the thing wasn’t actually particularly fast.  To make it worse I don’t know WHICH area that story was even being told about completely ignoring whether or not it was true. 

[whm1974]

2 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I remember hearing a story once about the chip being so low power that they set it up to run tests, ram the tests, and realized they hadn’t turned the machine on yet.  It was running on ghost power.  This sounds cooler than it is because back the. MUCH higher voltages were used. Also iirc the thing wasn’t actually particularly fast.  To make it worse I don’t know WHICH area that story was even being told about completely ignoring whether or not it was true. 

If I can recall, the first CPUs were Cachless. And I think one of them run at ~8Mhz. Granted ARM was still faster then the 6502 Acorn was using.

[dalekphalm]

15 hours ago, whm1974 said:

How good was the ARM CPUs used in Acorn Computers? I'll double check, but I think that OS can be run on a Raspberry Pi.

Oh that's long before my time - I've never used the early gen ARM CPU's. At the time, they were revolutionary in comparison to most of the competition (for example the ARM2 was 7 times as powerful as the CPU in the BBC Micro - also made by Acorn - and twice as fast as the i386).