Monday, June 28th 2021
Three Major Arm Licensees Endorse the NVIDIA Takeover
NVIDIA's $40 billion takeover of Arm Holdings plc from SoftBank, got a shot in the arm, as three major licensees of the IP came out in support of the bid. These include Broadcom, MediaTek, and Marvell Technology Group. This development is key for NVIDIA to fight the perception built up by a rival faction, that the democratized nature of the Arm IP would get lost if a chipmaker like NVIDIA owns it. This rival faction is primarily led by Qualcomm.
It's interesting to note the individual backers of the NVIDIA takeover. There is nothing but love between Broadcom and Qualcomm, especially after the former's failed bid to acquire the latter. MediaTek is a major smartphone and IoT SoC maker, dominating the low-cost and mainstream smartphone segments. Marvell is big in datacenter and storage IP. Each of the three are results of huge IP consolidation over the past decade.
The rival faction appears to be led predominantly by players who feel insecure by NVIDIA holding the Arm IP, as they probably fear the company would withhold cutting-edge development to itself, affecting the competitiveness of new-gen products of these companies. These companies are Qualcomm, possibly Apple (which just made a power move ditching Intel x64 for homebrew Arm chips); Samsung, which makes in-house Exynos SoCs for its Galaxy smartphones, and extensively uses Arm in its storage products; and others. Microsoft is among the big firms that voiced apprehensions over the NVIDIA bid.
Japan's SoftBank is eager to get rid of Arm from its holdings, and has even gone as far as to seek a $7.5 billion loan for itself that uses proceeds from the Arm sale as security.
Source:
Bloomberg
It's interesting to note the individual backers of the NVIDIA takeover. There is nothing but love between Broadcom and Qualcomm, especially after the former's failed bid to acquire the latter. MediaTek is a major smartphone and IoT SoC maker, dominating the low-cost and mainstream smartphone segments. Marvell is big in datacenter and storage IP. Each of the three are results of huge IP consolidation over the past decade.
Japan's SoftBank is eager to get rid of Arm from its holdings, and has even gone as far as to seek a $7.5 billion loan for itself that uses proceeds from the Arm sale as security.
48 Comments on Three Major Arm Licensees Endorse the NVIDIA Takeover
This is about power and control over the ARM ecosystem, nothing else.
In fact, ARM was just one of several players until the Smartphone took off and the competition couldn't keep up.
See link below for a reply I wrote here about five years ago. I guess the new addition to that is RISC-V.
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/who-are-the-competitors-to-arm.231464/post-3618984
This sound like a, "Don't cut me loose" plea more than anything to me.
Keep in mind that you also have to pay a per chip royalty to ARM, so it's not exactly cheap making an ARM chip. There are of course different costs between say a Cortex-M0+ MCU and their latest flagship SoC architecture.
The licensing cost is also why we see so many chips out of china that are still based on the Cortex-A7 CPU core, as these companies have most likely bought a perpetual license, so they can keep churning out different chips on the same core. It obviously takes less engineering hours to reuse a CPU core you've designed for over and over and over again, compared to making something new and better.
It's easy to design great hardware when you have loads of money and can buy out companies that are already more than halfway there.
Annapurna was selling their Cortex-A15's to the NAS makers and there were even a couple of routers based on their SoCs before Amazon bought them.
www.annapurnalabs.com/
Amazon refused Nvidia, now they have to deal with them.
www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd
As with Apple, the chip has very good single core performance, but the only reason they "beat" Intel is because the chips that Annapurna/Amazon in the test Anandtech did, is because they have 64 cores, compared to the AMD and Intel systems they tested against have 64 threads, i.e. not real cores. It was also older AMD and Intel hardware, so although it was a fair comparison in terms of what Amazon offers its customers in terms of EC2 instances, it's not a fair comparison in terms of the actual hardware and core count.
So no, it's not an "Intel killer" as you claim, even though it is a very good chip.
I never said it was easy to design a chip, but when you buy out a company that has an already proven SoC design and you scale that up, you save a lot of time and most likely money too in the long run, while pretending like you started from zero, which you didn't do, then you did it easy way.
The first chip that Annapurna designed for Amazon wasn't nearly as impressive and the current chip is based on what is already an old ARM architecture, so we're likely to see even better performance from their next chip.
There's nothing really secret or very unique about the chip itself, as it's built on various technologies developed by ARM that Annapruna then used to design a chip to a set of requirements from Amazon.We don't know if they are as yet. However, Nvidia doesn't make CPUs today, so they're technically not doing anything anti-competitive, unlike what Intel would be doing if they tried to buy ARM.
I'm not a fan of Nvidia buying ARM if that's what you're thinking, instead I'm very much for the proposal Qualcomm put forth about ARM becoming something akin to a non-profit that is owned by the companies that build products based on the ARM architecture. I'm sure Qualcomm didn't want the consortium to be non-profit, but hey, one can only dream...
Arm IPof pretty much anything, you can't be serious.And, OMG, cheaper...
I'll tell you where it ends: do you see yourself where Nvidia oversees Amazon's cpu development?
Just like Centaur designs CPUs for VIA, they are owned by VIA, but they're a separate entity.
I don't really know what this has to do with anything, as the Annapurna/Amazon CPUs are ARM based.
I don't even understand what you're trying to say here. :confused::confused::confused:
Amazon is designing chips in a different market segment than Nvidia. If Nvidia gains jurisdiction on that, that would be patent trolling and even in the best of intentions, since Nvidia would have much larger corporations under its control without the patent protection, Arm's patents would lose their copyright.
Arm does not own their patents quite like the other companies. Arm restricts the exercise of exclusive use of the patent claim. Arm doesn't develop anything for the market. Even if Arm wanted, they couldn't sue others from using it, since they don't use it for marketshare, they only use their Arm IP for royalty.
Should Nvidia sue any of the licensees they cannot get anything because at the time of the patent, Arm wasn't actively in the market. Nvidia wouldn't be able to control them using Arm's IP thus defying any reason they might have by buying Arm.
Amazon is still not designing anything, they bought a company that is designing chips for them. What Nvidia has to do with it, I don't understand, beyond the fact that Nvidia is buying ARM, who's design Annapurna's chips are based on. Why would it be patent trolling? Nvidia itself makes ARM based products as of today, mostly for use in cars. I think you need to read up on what patent trolls are, as this is not and never would be a case of that. Sorry, but you're really confused here.
Also, you have clearly not understand how IP licensing works and ARM could sue companies that break the contract they signed with ARM.
Why did this become about lawsuits now? I thought this was a discussion about chip design :confused::confused::confused:
Sorry, but this ends here, as you're clearly discussing something you don't have any insight whatsoever into.