Tuesday, January 25th 2022
NVIDIA Arm Deal Said to be Over According to Bloomberg
It appears that NVIDIA is getting ready to give up on its acquisition attempt of Arm, at least if news coming via Bloomberg is correct. Due to a paywall we can't access the original story, but the reason for the possible end to the deal seems to be issues related to getting government approval. The US$40 billion deal has rubbed many of Arm's partners the wrong way as well, as they don't trust NVIDIA to continue to license future Arm based processor cores to them, had the deal gone through.
At the same time, Arm has tried to convince the UK government that it will suffer terribly if NVIDIA isn't allowed to buy them, as the company claims to have lost ground to Intel and RISC-V over the past year. What's also rather bizarre, is that Arm is claiming Qualcomm is one of its competitors, despite Qualcomm being one of its licensees. On top of that, Arm also claims that "Architectural licensees do not use Arm's CPU designs. Arm architectural licensees create their own proprietary CPU designs using their own engineering teams", as part of their reasoning as to why its customers are their competitors. We suggest reading the EE Times article linked in the sources below for more details with regards to the claims Arm has filed with the UK government. The deal with NVIDIA might not be quite over as yet, but it looks like Softbank might have to consider other alternatives for Arm, if it really falls through.
Sources:
Bloomberg (paywall), EE Times
At the same time, Arm has tried to convince the UK government that it will suffer terribly if NVIDIA isn't allowed to buy them, as the company claims to have lost ground to Intel and RISC-V over the past year. What's also rather bizarre, is that Arm is claiming Qualcomm is one of its competitors, despite Qualcomm being one of its licensees. On top of that, Arm also claims that "Architectural licensees do not use Arm's CPU designs. Arm architectural licensees create their own proprietary CPU designs using their own engineering teams", as part of their reasoning as to why its customers are their competitors. We suggest reading the EE Times article linked in the sources below for more details with regards to the claims Arm has filed with the UK government. The deal with NVIDIA might not be quite over as yet, but it looks like Softbank might have to consider other alternatives for Arm, if it really falls through.
49 Comments on NVIDIA Arm Deal Said to be Over According to Bloomberg
Very deep meta level of thinking.
"They pay us to use our designs but design their OWN, thus they aren't using our services, but they still pay us"
This release sounds like frat boys after smoking weed the first time and explaining how their family pays for their life but they deserve it.
What's also rather bizarre, is that Arm is claiming Qualcomm is one of its competitors, despite Qualcomm being one of its licensees. On top of that, Arm also claims that "Architectural licensees do not use Arm's CPU designs. Arm architectural licensees create their own proprietary CPU designs using their own engineering teams", as part of their reasoning as to why its customers are their competitors
That or they are deep into the opium den and in the middle of a existential crisis while they wrote this.
Really, you can stop now.
Hey!
:)
To my eyes ,this seems as creating unfair competition towards nVIDIA from the regulating authorities (FTC in particular who sued nVIDIA about this deal).
(I'm only comparing with AMD not Intel , since AMD made a clear GPU I.P. purchase with ATi ,while i think that Intel has developed their own GPU I.P. internally:confused: (??) ,not sure though ,so i can't speak about Intel.
Also , someone might argue that AMD or Intel , unlike ARM they don't license their I.P. , but this is even worse , since this how monopolies are being created.
On the other hand ,nVIDIA ,through Jensen Huang ,has already publicly commited that they won't change ARM's license-model , and also i'm sure that contracts can be signed in order for this possibility to be ruled-out )
Was ATI renting out any of their licenses/IPs, wholesale (no, console semi-custom doesn't count)? Especially by direct competitors?
And yes, for nVidia, their customers are also direct competitors on the big scale computing. Multiple customers have ether made their own chips and completly dropped nVidia (tesla for example) or is using a combination.
where's the logic in that ?
P.S. I'm speaking about the Regulating authorities( FTC ,etc... ) not companies such as Qualcomm who might have their own certain interests to block the deal...
ATI's size was just graphics. ARM is in a hell of a lot of units, including what a lot of governments consider critical. ALso at the time of aquisition vs now, "computer-stuff" have become much more important and integrated into everyones lives. And the general knowledge of what is using computers have increased.
Also regulators are not always the most knowledgeable
Out of ignorance(as i said ,that's what i also believe) ,a CPU company was allowed to obtain GPU I.P. while now a GPU company isn't allowed to acquire CPU I.P. ,being forced to remain at a dissadvantage in this aspect.
Incredible...
Please just remove these green glasses!
If Nvidia, who's historically known to be pretty anti-competitive, and anti-consumer at times, and aiming for a closed system much like Apple is working towards, was to take control of such a massive ecosystem that goes well beyond traditional computing, it threatens plenty of foreign governments and industries who rely on ARM-based systems. It also lets Nvidia potentially bias future ARM designs to working better with their own GPU blocks, as opposed to the standard and less-proprietary ARM GPUs or custom GPUs by other parties (like the custom AMD RDNA2 GPU that Samsung integrated with their ARM design, or Apple's own customs).
It also has a political issue; ARM is currently a UK-based and Japanese-owned tech company. As far as I'm aware, Softbank remained pretty neutral with ARM, only having attempted an IoT subdivision that they ended up splitting off and run separately (it's not included in the planned sale). If it came under Nvidia's umbrella, it may end up being stifled by US laws that limit certain levels of tech licensing and whatnot (or so those governments who don't want the merger to happen claim).
In comparison, ATI was floundering against the increasing competition from Nvidia, and was one of the last two major GPU designers (given that 3DFX and their Voodoo platform dropped out). AMD was mostly seen as rescuing ATI, and keeping the competition against a monopoly alive. As well, AMD also made ironclad guarantees that ATI products would remain compatible with any other system they're dropped into, even their competitor Intel, just like how they also guaranteed that they won't inhibit compatibility between AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Intel on the other hand, developed their own GPU from scratch, leveraging their own past failures to develop a proper GPU, and supposedly also promised the same guarantee that it will work in an AMD rig as well as an Intel one.
2) "neutral" . I see , and i agree with you but here is the question :
How can someone guarantee the future ? you say that Softbank remained neutral , but in order for this to be evaluated , we have to wait for the future !!! the day that ARM was sold to Softbank who could guarantee such a thing ? just like now with nVIDIA , noone !!! only the future can tell .
So noone can prove that nVIDIA will not honour their already spoken public commitments ,only the future can determine such a thing , and as i said before , that's why contracts exist , in order to ensure such things !!
3)So as i said before , bying an I.P. and keeping it to yourself ( AMD/ATi ) is better for competition than bying an I.P. and keep using its licence model ( nVIDIA/ARM) .
To me as i said , there is no logic in such things , the only thing i know for fact is that the regulators allowed in the past a CPU company to buy GPU I.P. (*for their own use) , while now they are not allowing a GPU company to buy a CPU I.P. (*not only for their own use but for licencing as well) . This way they leave nVIDIA in a serious disadvantage towards AMD(and Intel of course) , especially these days where every major company is obvious that they are looking to promote their all-in-one package.
I can't unsee it now. Damn it
However, I think Facebook, Google & Intel make my top 3, with nGreedia No4, then Apple, then Samsung.
Nvidia coudn't convice their own mothers of what they were giving as reasons to aprove the deal, it was a long shot anyway, i doubt they don't already had a plan B, C or D. Huang is a great CEO, they had to try it.