Saturday, August 21st 2021
NVIDIA-Arm Acquisition Raises "Significant Competition Concerns:" UK Competition Regulator
The proposed $40 billion acquisition of Arm Holdings Plc from SoftBank by NVIDIA raises "significant competition concerns," says the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The scathing report by the UK's competition regulator goes on to say that the merger will stifle innovation. "We're concerned that NVIDIA controlling Arm could create real problems for NVIDIA's rivals by limiting their access to key technologies, and ultimately stifling innovation across a number of important and growing markets. This could end up with consumers missing out on new products, or prices going up," it reads.
In its first reaction, NVIDIA sought time to address CMA's concerns. "We look forward to the opportunity to address the CMA's initial views and resolve any concerns the Government may have. We remain confident that this transaction will be beneficial to Arm, its licensees, competition, and the UK," the company said. Although a subsidiary of Japan's Softbank, the report by UK's competition regulator does have some bearing on the fate of Arm, which remains headquartered in the UK.
Sources:
UK Competition and Markets Authority (PDF), James Titcomb (Twitter)
In its first reaction, NVIDIA sought time to address CMA's concerns. "We look forward to the opportunity to address the CMA's initial views and resolve any concerns the Government may have. We remain confident that this transaction will be beneficial to Arm, its licensees, competition, and the UK," the company said. Although a subsidiary of Japan's Softbank, the report by UK's competition regulator does have some bearing on the fate of Arm, which remains headquartered in the UK.
78 Comments on NVIDIA-Arm Acquisition Raises "Significant Competition Concerns:" UK Competition Regulator
OLED was forged by the Gods and Titans working together.
To be honest, what is mentioned in this article is nothing surprising. It took them some time to get back with this conclusion just so they go through the motion of validating this claim. I guess their obstacle is probably insurmountable when seeking approval from the Chinese regulator because with ARM being acquired by a US company, any of the Chinese tech companies may be hit with a sanction, leaving them without any ARM chip to use.
So my comment stands.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.#Row_over_ownership_of_Arm_China
Lynx29 I hope you enjoy your 42 inch TV/monitor. My custom-designed furniture would possibly just allow a 42 inch monitor but the bottom bezel would have to be on the bench. I wouldn't enjoy using it because the pixels would be too big for my eyes.
Tardian
LOL
On a more serious note though, yes this LG 42" OLED coming next year is perfect size for my giant megadesk I bought at IKEA, 48" is just to a little too much. However, as long as I wall mount it directly in front of my desk, I can sit my desk back just an extra 2 inches (its already a very big desk compared to most, the biggest IKEA sells in fact to my knowledge), it's going to be glorious. I intend to hook up a PS5 to it while I wait to build my Ultima dream rig whenever AM5 socket and next gpu's come out.
This is how the picture looks on Firefox with my GeForce, BTW. You'll notice that it's sharper than the bottom image that you posted. And without any sharpening from the control tab
also that built in sharpening effect doesn't always improve the image quality, it can highlight pixels even more and to unwanted applications for example steam overlay which becomes absolute crap with extreme crispness .
They literally claimed that they both "already have it" and "need time to look at it".
NV did roll out own copypasta of Radeon anti-lag several month later though. :)
UK wants to protect its businesses from acquisitions across the spectrum, especially in terms of what they refer to as "national defense".
I'm just seeing lots of people who are painting that acquisition as a "do or die" situation for Nvidia, when acquiring them shouldn't have any consequence if they ever planned to make a serious ARM CPU/SoC
Jensen Huang has publicly pledged for that , so i'm 100% confident that such contracts can be signed.
If nVIDIA can ensure such thing , then those companies who are "screaming" against the deal , they could be using such an excuse out of pure malice intentions in order to limit/damage nVIDIA ,since for their own reasons they could probably wouldn't like to see nVIDIA evolve.
If i was in nVIDIA 's place i would probably sue those companies for using malice practices although contracts can easily ensure that Softbank's current business model will be maintained for those licencees.
2. Also ARM isn't a monopoly in the CPU sector. If certain licencees have "confidence" issues against nVIDIA ,although as i said ,contracts can be signed and easily prevent those "confidence" issues , they can always turn to Risc-V , or even x64 solutions. unlike nVIDIA , certainly Intel :rolleyes:
The vision for Nvidia is to be like intel and own IP in the CPU space. Intel has tried to block everything and everyone from accessing x86. The only other companies with access to x86 are/were AMD, Cyrix/VIA/Centaur.
In the data center there is little competition vs. x86 (intel/AMD). The reasoning is that Nvidia can inject money and R&D resources into ARM to make it a viable competitor to x86 in the future. There are reports that ARM's financials are not in great shape and even an IPO would actually value ARM at much lower levels than the current $40 billion USD offer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers
I guess you've never heard about the POWER range of high-end server CPUs from IBM then?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER_microprocessors
By now, there's also a handful of ARM licensees that are making server grade CPUs, with the most successful company being Annapurna who got bought out by Amazon and makes all their server chips. Just because you haven't heard of it, doesn't mean that there's no competition, although you are correct as far as Intel having a huge market share to date, but it seems like even that is slowly changing.
As for ARMs financials, wouldn't that also be SoftBank's financials? SoftBank has done a lot of bad investments in the past few years, such as WeWork, various strange investments in the PRC and so on. It's impossible to keep tabs on all the weird investments SoftBank has done, as it ranges from power plants in India to dog-walking startups...
So yeah, ARM is unlikely to be doing poorly, but its owner has been suffering badly from flawed investments.
This is why they want to offload ARM, so they can get a big fat paycheque in the mail so to speak, to cover all the bad investments.
One small negative comment about the 48 inch OLED. With one streaming service, it has a lip-synch problem that is really annoying. The image quality is superb. It scales really well. The new LG remotes are better. They have pause and play buttons down the bottom.
Right back at you on the thick skin issue. I was bullied at school but never on the internet. Trolls hate being ignored or exposed/reported.
I also want to build a new gaming rig for my son. However, I just can't bring myself to pay 3-5x the proper graphics card price. His GTX 1060 3GB rig is three years old but in Australia, they want $1000-$1500 for the 3060 card and silly money for anything better.
I'm just hoping companies wise up and start shipping more directly to stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy.
I went to Costco this morning to check right when they opened and no luck.
I'm hoping before winter I will get lucky. Cause I hate the cold weather, and I just want to sit back and game all winter, while the world continues to go crazy.