NVIDIA to Acquire Arm for $40 Billion, Creating World's Premier Computing Company for the Age of AI

[SIGSEGV]

It's time RISC-V to shine.

 

[bug]

Ngreedia owning ARM is not good for anyone but Ngreedia, hopefully government regulators find a legal way to axe this deal.

Super argument right there, how could anyone disagree with that?

 

[Vayra86]

Has it occurred to anyone that ARM might be leaving the sinking UK ship right now? They keep some legalese and R&D over there, and that's it. That money flow is going elsewhere.

Not directly something to get excited about... this whole deal.

 

[Zareek]

Super argument right there, how could anyone disagree with that?

Just a statement, an opinion based on their more recent history(last 5 years or so). If it was Apple, I would say/think the same thing. In my opinion any major tech company acquiring ARM cannot be good for the consumer. We shall see, hopefully Nvidia recognizes the part that ARM plays in the technology eco system and doesn't ruin it.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Nope. Intel has been doing everthing in their power so x86 remain on existing player. To the point they wiling to sour the initial cross licensing deal they made with nvidia in 2004 just because they saw some glimpse about nvidia interest in making their own x86 based cpu. If intel wiling to license x86 to nvidia they then the settlemen in 2011 would not mention "nvidia parmenently barred from any form of x86 licensing".

A statement completely ignorant to reality and devoid of facts.

The Cortex-X1 has nothing to do with NVIDIA’s Tegra X1. The Cortex-X1 is a recent high performance quad core architecture design to license from ARM. The Tegra X1 is still using ARM’s Cortex-A57 cores.

Oops, I saw "X1" and thought of the wrong part.

 

[Assimilator]

Just a statement, an opinion based on their more recent history(last 5 years or so). If it was Apple, I would say/think the same thing. In my opinion any major tech company acquiring ARM cannot be good for the consumer. We shall see, hopefully Nvidia recognizes the part that ARM plays in the technology eco system and doesn't ruin it.

Opinions are like assholes, anyone can have them. And in that poster's case, their opinion is about as useful as an asshole: it doesn't contribute to the discussion around this topic in any way shape or form, nor is it particularly funny or clever. In other words, it's just noise, which the world can very much do without.

 

[tajoh111]

This is probably good for ARM.

Arm barely makes any money and this has lead to layoffs of 10% of it's staff.

With softbank doing so poorly this year, this would have had even further negative impact on ARM's funding.

With ARM having 6000 employees while only spending 500 million on R and D, Nvidia will likely keep everyone employed while continue to hire as ARM progress has really stagnated over the years. We are still on ARM V8 which was released in 2011. The British government will be happy as long as Jobs are not lost. Not to mention the 1.5 billion in stock ARM employees are getting from this deal which is sure to please existing its workforce. Unlike most companies nowadays, including AMD, Nvidia has been mostly resistant about outsourcing it's workforce to countries like China and India in an effort to reduce labor costs.

For the workforce size, ARM is a bargain for Nvidia which is why it isn't a surprise they are expanding their UK headquarters.

This deal is also good for companies looking for a high performance GPU in the ARM space since most performance solutions are tied to a company because of vertical integration.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Seems strange that the Iot division is Not included in the deal, I mean wtaf are they going to do, license the license to license IP? Whhuut.

 

[Assimilator]

We are still on ARM V8 which was released in 2011.

No, we are on ARMv8.6-A which was released a year ago.

Seems strange that the Iot division is Not included in the deal, I mean wtaf are they going to do, license the license to license IP? Whhuut.

NVIDIA is already pretty deep into that space, presumably they looked at what Arm is doing there and didn't find it particularly great, so... snip. I imagine that any particularly good engineers from that department would be snapped up by big green after the fact.

 

[lexluthermiester]

MIPS is crying in a corner somewhere, if NVIDIA-ARM is mean they always have that option for cheap.

True, or Risc-V.

Ngreedia owning ARM is not good for anyone but Ngreedia

Opinion, and not a great one.

hopefully government regulators find a legal way to axe this deal.

Not going to happen, the deal is already done. Government regulators either had no problem with this deal or they had no input as NVidia is not big enough to warrant scrutiny.

 

[Grigor]

good news, Softbank just dont know what to do with ARM, even though i dont like arm

 

[moob]

In regards to the folks wondering about what Apple's going to do, they, along with several other notable companies, have Architecture licenses with ARM and there's an assumption it's in perpetuity. I've been looking for concrete information on that but I'm coming up dry. Hopefully a tech site does a deep dive on all of this so we can get some clarity. I'm willing to believe that they do, as it would be very unlike Apple to put all of their eggs into a basket that was at such a high risk of being thrown off a cliff.

 

[Zareek]

Not going to happen, the deal is already done. Government regulators either had no problem with this deal or they had no input as NVidia is not big enough to warrant scrutiny.

Actually that is what the 18 months is for, it's mentioned at the end of the article. Anti-trust and all that sort of thing...

Opinions are like assholes, anyone can have them. And in that poster's case, their opinion is about as useful as an asshole: it doesn't contribute to the discussion around this topic in any way shape or form, nor is it particularly funny or clever. In other words, it's just noise, which the world can very much do without.

And your rebuttal is not just more noise???

Sorry if I hurt anyone feelings saying something unkind about Nvidia. It personally pains me to see a company that I whole heartedly supported back in their early days take a turn for the worse over the past several years. GPP serves as a stellar example. Sorry if I don't feel confident in that same company taking control of ARM.

 

[bug]

good news, Softbank just dont know what to do with ARM, even though i dont like arm

I don't think Softbank was ever supposed to do anything with ARM, but let them do their job. Softbank is just an investor. They invested (presumably based on ARM's plans at the time), let ARM do their thing, and is now cashing in.

 

[awesomesauce]

Pretty sure softbank is happy with the deal

Too much of heat with china over USA wanting to slowing them down with right to use any intel properties

Anyone know if china had any bitter or any chance to buy ARM ? or Allies didn’t want to?

I wounder what nvidia will do with china now.


i think china does’nt give a f*** and nvidia will need/try to poursuit latter someone.

or think china will go solo and mayem over technology race with huawei

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

No, we are on ARMv8.6-A which was released a year ago.



NVIDIA is already pretty deep into that space, presumably they looked at what Arm is doing there and didn't find it particularly great, so... snip. I imagine that any particularly good engineers from that department would be snapped up by big green after the fact.

Yes so what are they going to. Do.

The Arm Iot spinoff I meant.

 

[Fluffmeister]

I don't think Softbank was ever supposed to do anything with ARM, but let them do their job. Softbank is just an investor. They invested (presumably based on ARM's plans at the time), let ARM do their thing, and is now cashing in.

And to think, it wasn't that long ago Softbank DUMPED it's entire Nvidia stock:

Softbank Dumps its Entire NVIDIA Stock Worth $3.6 Billion

Japan's Softbank is known for far-sighted strategic investments in the technology industry. It shook Silicon Valley this morning by announcing a sale of its entire NVIDIA shareholding, valued on December 31 at JPY 39.8 billion, or USD $3.6 billion. It's the worst possible time to be NVIDIA's...

www.techpowerup.com

Yes, I love reading the comments.

 

[steen]

...Nvidia has been mostly resistant about outsourcing it's workforce to countries like China and India in an effort to reduce labor costs.

They have strong engineering presence in India, China, & Russia.

 

[ValenOne]

They'll design an arm core specifically for HPC use, to compete with AMD and Intel.
Next thing is using their sh!tload of money to port as much x86 software as they can to arm and by owning Mellanox they can offer complete servers with CPU, GPU, interconnect, networking and software stack as fully fledged packages...

Regarding Mali, they will gut all the good parts the uarch has to offer, integrate it into their own and then offer Geforce cores as the default GPU IP for arm designs.

FYI, Mellanox Technologies's top competitors include Samtec, Broadcom, Peregrine Semiconductor, Qorvo and Arista Networks.

They have strong engineering presence in India, China, & Russia.

NVIDIA has 48 office locations across 22 countries. NVIDIA keeps its secret sauce.

 

[R0H1T]

Sorry if I hurt anyone feelings saying something unkind about Nvidia. It personally pains me to see a company that I whole heartedly supported back in their early days take a turn for the worse over the past several years. GPP serves as a stellar example. Sorry if I don't feel confident in that same company taking control of ARM.

Yeah I can't believe we're still having this debate

However, during yesterday's briefing, Timothy Prickett Morgan from TheNextPlatform asked Jensen Huang, "Will you actually take an implementation of something like Neoverse first and make an Nvidia-branded CPU to drive it into the data center? Will you actually make the reference chip for those who just want it and actually help them run it?"

"Well, the first of all you've made an amazing observation, which is all three options are possible," Huang responded, "[...] So now with our backing and Arm’s serious backing, the world can stand on that foundation and realize that they can build server CPUs. Now, some people would like to license the cores and build a CPU themselves. Some people may decide to license the cores and ask us to build those CPUs or modify ours."
"It is not possible for one company to build every single version of them," Huang continued, "but we will have the entire network of partners around Arm that can take the architectures we come up with and depending on what's best for them, whether licensing the core, having a semi-custom chip made, or having a chip that we made, any of those any of those options are available. Any of those options are available, we're open for business and we would like the ecosystem to be as rich as possible, with as many options as possible."

Nvidia already builds some ARM-based processors for lower-power applications, but having access to ARM's engineering talent will undoubtedly speed the process of designing custom Nvidia data center chips. The company will also have overall control of the ISA, and it's unclear if Nvidia would be compelled to share all of the future ARM architecture innovations with ARM licensees.

During the call, Huang also said he wants to speed up the Neoverse roadmap to bring innovations to ARM licensees faster. Naturally, it would also be in Nvidia's best interest (at least in the short term) to broaden the ecosystem of ARM server chips, and that would require multiple options from a variety of chipmakers.


Nvidia could also drive Nvidia GPU-specific optimizations like CPU/GPU memory coherence into the ARM architecture, which would then incentivize other chip makers to use Nvidia's GPUs in their solutions. That approach could help solidify Nvidia's position as the premier AI solutions provider in the data center.

Jensen Huang Says Nvidia-Branded ARM CPUs Are a Possibility

Buying Arm is just the beginning.

www.tomshardware.com

As far as I am concerned all profit marking companies cannot & should not be trusted on their "word" & some more than others ~ Nvidia, Intel, Apple come to mind.

 

[fynxer]

I expect to have a family and a career in next couple of years. My gaming time is going to basically vanish, so I imagine this rtx 3080 and zen 3 build will be my last. I probably will never get to experience ARM cpu's

Not to worry, after your divorce and shared custody of the kids you will have plenty of time for doing that ARM build for gaming.

Just so you know I am speaking from experience.

Okay but this has nothing to do with gaming.

Hmmm, short sighted are we, ARM is already a gaming CPU in billions of devices.

Don't you think nvidia that hold 80% of the discrete gaming market will make a big splash if it makes really good, cheap and fast desktop ARM 16 core gaming CPU.

They could even transform the market and make modular graphics chip with a built in ARM 16 core gaming CPU that shares the same GFX memory much like the PS5 and XBOX X.

You must understand that the GPU is packed with incredibly much more power than a CPU, the CPU is becoming less important each year going forward, soon GPUs will become thousands of times faster than CPUs.

The CPU will end up as a simple controller chip in the future dominated by GPUs, why do you think Intel is rushing in to the GPU market, they see the writing on the wall.

 

[Shatun_Bear]

ITT: people saying RISC-V is the future now that Arm is "dead". That's about as likely as Arm CPUs becoming competitive with x86 (sorry, Geekbench of Apple A13 beating Intel CPUs doesn't mean shit).



Rich coming from someone accusing others of not understanding how business works.



Because Apple hates competition.

So Apple would buy ARM in this hypothetical fantasy scenario of yours, then immediately cease all agreements for ARM partners to use its instruction set, somehow being allowed to do this by evading all laws against such practices. And the reason: because Apple hates competition.

Thanks, you've just proved to me you have the business understanding of a child.

 

[bug]

So Apple would buy ARM in this hypothetical fantasy scenario of yours, then immediately cease all agreements for ARM partners to use its instruction set, somehow being allowed to do this by evading all laws against such practices. And the reason: because Apple hates competition.

Thanks, you've just proved to me you have the business understanding of a child.

If Apple did buy ARM, I would expect them to go the way Microsoft went: insert undocumented instructions into future revisions of the arch, not covered by licensing.
But the point is moot now, no use speculating. Unless Apple buys Nvidia

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Apple was a original partner in the development of ARM. wonder if they still have any part ownership?

 

[R0H1T]

Hmmm, short sighted are we, ARM is already a gaming CPU in billions of devices.

Don't you think NVIDIA that hold 80% of the discrete gaming market will make a big splash if it makes really good, cheap and fast desktop ARM 16 core gaming CPU.

No there's two big barriers for NVIDIA ever gaining a stronghold in the PC sector i.e. mainly CPUs. That's MS+x86 ~ which back in the day was called Wintel. It's still true today & apart from Apple no one comes close to matching AMD nor Intel in the top end desktop or enthusiast grade CPUs. Why am I even including Apple ~ because they have by far the best IPC among non x86 chipmakers & are basically going full (custom) ARM on their desktops as well as notebooks.

To ever gain a foothold in this space Nvidia will not only have to get close to if not beat Intel, AMD+MS but also do it cheaper, much cheaper. The chances of them pulling this off in this decade are slim if not nonexistent, the only they come close is to spend hundreds of billions trying to win over MS & other software developers besides executing on their CPU roadmap without fail.

Now the server space is completely different so there's a chance they may get better traction there. On the PC side of things I see the AMD, Intel duopoly continue unchallenged at least for the first half of this decade.