NVIDIA Acquisition of Arm Collapses, UK Company to Seek IPO

[TheLostSwede]

I think I get it now, thanks for the explanation, much appreciated. You are correct, I really didn't know as much as I thought I did.

So if ARM licensed say... IP to make a chip to put on say the RGB of a gtx 1070, and this chip was made in China, how do we know that telemetry of some kind is not built in to that RGB arm chip on the gtx 1070? Just curious... a hypothetical scenario... if you will... I only ask because I remember reading something like this once:

China Used a Tiny Chip in a Hack That Infiltrated U.S. Companies

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies by compromising America's technology supply chain.

www.bloomberg.com

full disclose i only read like the first paragraph there, but yeah

You don't, but that Bloomberg story has been debunked several times, although they still claim its true. The issue with it isn't with regards to the possibility of doing something like that, but their claims of how small, yet advanced said chips are meant to be. The PRC couldn't make something like that, today.

On the other hand, if you buy a chip made by a company in the PRC, they could've put anything they want in there, just like a US, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, German, French or Italian chip maker could.

I presume you got the RGB controller example from the post above? Just FYI, Holtek is a Taiwanes company.

 

[Daven]

The funny thing is that those regulators said and did nothing when SoftBank purchased ARM a couple of years ago. Hypocrisy at its finest.

Jensen Huang’s past anticompetitive behavior is the specific reason the deal fell through. From the FTC complaint and pending lawsuit:

FTC Sues to Block $40 Billion Semiconductor NVIDIA and Arm Chip Merger | TechPowerUp}

“The FTC is suing to block the largest semiconductor chip merger in history to prevent a chip conglomerate from stifling the innovation pipeline for next-generation technologies," said FTC Bureau of Competition Director Holly Vedova. "Tomorrow's technologies depend on preserving today's competitive, cutting-edge chip markets. This proposed deal would distort Arm's incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia's rivals. The FTC's lawsuit should send a strong signal that we will act aggressively to protect our critical infrastructure markets from illegal vertical mergers that have far-reaching and damaging effects on future innovations.”

This is Nvidia’s chickens coming home to roast and Huang has egg all over his face. No one deserves worst when it comes to big business decisions in the chip industry.

 

[stimpy88]

I don't own any ARM products and have no need for them, so I could care less honestly, good luck to them.

What an odd and short sighted thing to say... There is most likely an ARM chip in your washing machine...

And the expression is "couldn't care less, as in it is impossible to care any less. Could care less means that you do care...

 

[azrael]

Finally some common sense prevailed!

The $1.25 billion "break-up" fee is an added bonus. Although I guess that means Geforce cards, when available, will be priced at least $100 higher than before. Gotta recoup that loss...

 

[Daven]

A great paragraph from Anandtech’s write-up:

“However, after 17 months, it has become increasingly clear that government regulators were not apt to approve the deal. Even with concessions being made by NVIDIA, European Union regulators ended up opening an investigation into the acquisition, Chinese regulators have held off on approving the deal, and US regulators moved to outright block it. Concerns raised by regulators centered around NVIDIA gaining an unfair advantage over other companies who use Arm’s IP, both by controlling the direction of its development and by their position affording NVIDIA unique access to insights about what products Arm customers were developing – some of which would include products being designed to compete with NVIDIA’s own wares. Ultimately, regulators have shown a strong interest in retaining a competitive landscape for chips, with the belief that such a landscape wouldn’t be possible if Arm was owned by a chip designer such as NVIDIA.”

NVIDIA-Arm Acquisition Officially Nixed, SoftBank to IPO Arm Instead

www.anandtech.com

 

[Garrus]

nVidia wanted to invest 10s of billions of dollars and bring ARM up to Apple and Intel and AMD's standard. Now they will continue to recede into becoming a bit player as they are now. Apple does the work for itself only. ARM the company itself doesn't do much of value except produce designs several years behind everyone else. Everyone wants nVidia to put their money elsewhere and make ARM fail. I guess that's what they should do now. Not sure how that is "good for ARM".

People seriously underestimating the money required to bring parity between ARM and Apple and Intel. Seems like that will never happen now. nVidia won't risk all their money on high performance designs that have to compete with dirt cheap standard ARM designs. It's always so easy to say "don't merge" but the reason the merger was being considered is because ARM has been completely failing for years. Softbank has done nothing with it and it is an embarrassment for them.

Most people here know nothing about the financial markets or valuations. Softbank bought ARM for $32 billion 6 years ago. nVidia offered $40 billion and it was gratefully accepted. That's a 25 percent improvement over 6 years. nVidia on the other hand has increased their market cap by 3750 percent or so in the last 6 years.

3750 / 25= 150. Yes, nVidia has been growing 150 times faster than ARM has.

Now Softbank will IPO the company and they will be owned by all the random pension funds and Chinese investment conglomerates. Not sure why everyone thinks that will be better. It will get a temporary massive boost in value and then fail as a stock after several years and not be relevant. Just watch. The ISA itself is not a company. What do people want ARM to do in order to get the funds to compete? Try to charge everyone twice as much money for licensing? The exact same thing people don't want nVidia to do with the company.

What a disaster for ARM.

 

[TheLostSwede]

both by controlling the direction of its development and by their position affording NVIDIA unique access to insights about what products Arm customers were developing – some of which would include products being designed to compete with NVIDIA’s own wares.

This.
I think this is also why Intel is going to have a tough time operating a foundry business, without spinning it off in a separate company.

 

[Garrus]

A great paragraph from Anandtech’s write-up:

“However, after 17 months, it has become increasingly clear that government regulators were not apt to approve the deal. Even with concessions being made by NVIDIA, European Union regulators ended up opening an investigation into the acquisition, Chinese regulators have held off on approving the deal, and US regulators moved to outright block it. Concerns raised by regulators centered around NVIDIA gaining an unfair advantage over other companies who use Arm’s IP, both by controlling the direction of its development and by their position affording NVIDIA unique access to insights about what products Arm customers were developing – some of which would include products being designed to compete with NVIDIA’s own wares. Ultimately, regulators have shown a strong interest in retaining a competitive landscape for chips, with the belief that such a landscape wouldn’t be possible if Arm was owned by a chip designer such as NVIDIA.”

NVIDIA-Arm Acquisition Officially Nixed, SoftBank to IPO Arm Instead

www.anandtech.com

ARM has no competitive designs. The Chinese didn't want nVidia involved because now they will just control the company through the stock market and regulatory pressure in China instead. ARM is basically becoming a giant patent troll, with royalty revenue, but the products they make themselves don't make them money.

Qualcomm is trying to build a Windows chip by buying those former Apple engineers. Notice I said Qualcomm is doing it, not ARM that is doing it.

Meanwhile thanks to Facebook's fall, nVidia is now worth more than Meta.

Now the entire management team including the CEO at ARM is out. Good luck to them. They'll need it.

 

[TheLostSwede]

nVidia wanted to invest 10s of billions of dollars and bring ARM up to Apple and Intel and AMD's standard. Now they will continue to recede into becoming a bit player as they are now. Apple does the work for itself only. ARM the company itself doesn't do much of value except produce designs several years behind everyone else. Everyone wants nVidia to put their money elsewhere and make ARM fail. I guess that's what they should do now. Not sure how that is "good for ARM".

People seriously underestimating the money required to bring parity between ARM and Apple and Intel. Seems like that will never happen now. nVidia won't risk all their money on high performance designs that have to compete with dirt cheap standard ARM designs. It's always so easy to say "don't merge" but the reason the merger was being considered is because ARM has been completely failing for years. Softbank has done nothing with it and it is an embarrassment for them.

Most people here know nothing about the financial markets or valuations. Softbank bought ARM for $32 billion 6 years ago. nVidia offered $40 billion and it was gratefully accepted. That's a 25 percent improvement over 6 years. nVidia on the other hand has increased their market cap by 3750 percent or so in the last 6 years.

3750 / 25= 150. Yes, nVidia has been growing 150 times faster than ARM has.

Now Softbank will IPO company and they will be owned by all the random pension funds and Chinese investment conglomerates. Not sure why everyone thinks that will be better. It will get a temporary massive boost in value and then fail as a stock after several years to move anywhere or be relevant. Just watch. The ISA itself is not a company. What do people want ARM to do in order to get the funds to compete? Try to charge everyone twice as much money for licensing? The exact same thing people don't want nVidia to do with the company.

What a disaster for ARM.

Sorry, what?

First of all, Apple's chips are based around Arm's original designs and are likely to continue to be so for the foreseeable future, unless Apple decides to fork off so far that they no longer are using Arm tech in their chips.

Arm is not behind anyone, they design the IP that most companies in the world are using. You're spinning the lies that Nvidia and Arm put in their government filings, to try and make it sound like Arm is being beaten by their competitors, left, right and centre, when nothing could be further from the truth.

And exactly how would there be parity between Arm and Intel (x86)? They are two very different CPU architectures, where Arm was designed for low power and it's still the main design focus today. Yes, we're starting to see some, but still fairly minor crossovers on the lower-end in the mobile computer segment and yes, Arm has made some server CPU core designs, but it doesn't mean they're meant to take on Intel 1:1, but instead are designed for applications where either power efficiency matters, or where 100's if not 1000's of cores make more sense than having a few very big, very fast cores.

Who gives a F*** about stupid financial analysts that understand nothing about the underlying technology? If Arm goes bust, then so does half, if not more of the technology companies out there, so that's never going to happen, at least not until there's a viable alternative, which there simply isn't for most of the product segments Arm designs for. On top of that, SoftBank is in a financial pickle and is trying to raise funds any which way possible, so selling Arm was a means to an end.

Since you clearly can predict the future, it's nice to know that none of Arm's partners are going to invest in them, as the likes of Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, ST, NXP and so on, wouldn't be interested in getting a slice of that action, right?

Seriously, please keep your financial analysis crap to yourself, this isn't the forum for that, it's a tech forum.

ARM has no competitive designs. The Chinese didn't want nVidia involved because now they will just control the company through the stock market and regulatory pressure in China instead. ARM is basically becoming a giant patent troll, with royalty revenue, but the products they make themselves don't make them money.

Qualcomm is trying to build a Windows chip by buying those former Apple engineers. Notice I said Qualcomm is doing it, not ARM that is doing it.

Meanwhile thanks to Facebook's fall, nVidia is now worth more than Meta.

Now the entire management team including the CEO at ARM is out. Good luck to them. They'll need it.

Arm DOESN't make products, they license IP. This shows how utterly and totally lost you are.

 

[Garrus]

Sorry, what?

First of all, Apple's chips are based around Arm's original designs and are likely to continue to be so for the foreseeable future, unless Apple decides to fork off so far that they no longer are using Arm tech in their chips.

Arm is not behind anyone, they design the IP that most companies in the world are using. You're spinning the lies that Nvidia and Arm put in their government filings, to try and make it sound like Arm is being beaten by their competitors, left, right and centre, when nothing could be further from the truth.

And exactly how would there be parity between Arm and Intel (x86)? They are two very different CPU architectures, where Arm was designed for low power and it's still the main design focus today. Yes, we're starting to see some, but still fairly minor crossovers on the lower-end in the mobile computer segment and yes, Arm has made some server CPU core designs, but it doesn't mean they're meant to take on Intel 1:1, but instead are designed for applications where either power efficiency matters, or where 100's if not 1000's of cores make more sense than having a few very big, very fast cores.

Who gives a F*** about stupid financial analysts that understand nothing about the underlying technology? If Arm goes bust, then so does half, if not more of the technology companies out there, so that's never going to happen, at least not until there's a viable alternative, which there simply isn't for most of the product segments Arm designs for. On top of that, SoftBank is in a financial pickle and is trying to raise funds any which way possible, so selling Arm was a means to an end.

Since you clearly can predict the future, it's nice to know that none of Arm's partners are going to invest in them, as the likes of Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, ST, NXP and so on, wouldn't be interested in getting a slice of that action, right?

Seriously, please keep your financial analysis crap to yourself, this isn't the forum for that, it's a tech forum.


Arm DOESN't make products, they license IP. This shows how utterly and totally lost you are.

Nothing in an Apple chip has anything to do with what ARM's employees are doing except the ISA. Don't say AMD's 2022 Ryzen chip is based on the work Intel did for the 386 computer I had as a child therefore Intel is in a great place in 2022. And my entire point was ARM doesn't have any profitable products. They are a glorified patent troll. That's my criticism. Their IP is a product, you are just splitting hairs. Their IP isn't wanted whether it is GPU IP (Samsung wants AMD, Qualcomm uses Adreno, Apple uses their own Imagination derived GPU) or their standard X2 designs which are several years behind Intel, AMD, and Apple CPU IP. Qualcomm is looking elsewhere for a reason.

I love your derision for financial analysts. When you manage a company doing 150 times worse than others, you bring that to your shareholders and see how they respond. Clueless. You are confused when you buy ARM ISA products and think "ARM is doing great, look at all these ARM products I am buying" as if ARM had anything to do with them. Softbank is desperate to get rid of them for a reason. The company is failing.

You should try to point at things that ARM the company is actually responsible for, not their partners, and tell me they are doing a good job. Try it. The financial results are a clue. You know technically nVidia is just a designer also. They are fabless, just like ARM.

You know AMD and Intel share an ISA. There's no problem at all that the x86 IP isn't in a seperate company, "x86 Holding Company". nVidia made concessions to allow ARM's ISA to be completely open in a way x86 isn't but it didn't matter to people The people meat-shielding ARM are also funny since ARM, the company ARM itself, wanted to merge. You're not doing ARM any favors in blocking what the company wanted and then pretending you are on ARM's side or something.

 

[catulitechup]

Officially Nvidia has been......disARMed

 

[trsttte]

nVidia wanted to invest 10s of billions of dollars and bring ARM up to Apple and Intel and AMD's standard. Now they will continue to recede into becoming a bit player as they are now. Apple does the work for itself only. ARM the company itself doesn't do much of value except produce designs several years behind everyone else. Everyone wants nVidia to put their money elsewhere and make ARM fail. I guess that's what they should do now. Not sure how that is "good for ARM".

People seriously underestimating the money required to bring parity between ARM and Apple and Intel. Seems like that will never happen now. nVidia won't risk all their money on high performance designs that have to compete with dirt cheap standard ARM designs. It's always so easy to say "don't merge" but the reason the merger was being considered is because ARM has been completely failing for years. Softbank has done nothing with it and it is an embarrassment for them.

Nvidia is free to produce a competing product without owning arm, apple did, nvidia also did in the past (see tegra k1/x1/etc and nintendo switch (custom tegra x1) as examples), as does qualcomm and samsung, and google now with tensor. If they can't it's because they're incompetent, and that shouldn't be rewarded with a dominant anticompetitive position on a silver platter.

If Arm eventually slows to a halt other competitors are there to pick up the slack, like Risc V for example, as always happens as technology iterates and evolves.

Most people here know nothing about the financial markets or valuations. Softbank bought ARM for $32 billion 6 years ago. nVidia offered $40 billion and it was gratefully accepted. That's a 25 percent improvement over 6 years. nVidia on the other hand has increased their market cap by 3750 percent or so in the last 6 years.

3750 / 25= 150. Yes, nVidia has been growing 150 times faster than ARM has.

What does that have to do with anything!? Let's see how long that inflated valuation lasts lol

Since you clearly can predict the future, it's nice to know that none of Arm's partners are going to invest in them, as the likes of Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, ST, NXP and so on, wouldn't be interested in getting a slice of that action, right?

I think every major company that depends on Arm (Qualcomm, Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.) will be all over this IPO to prevent a situation like this (a competitor trying to gobble up an important piece of the industry) from happening again without their aproval.

Nothing in an Apple chip has anything to do with what ARM's employees are doing except the ISA

Wow, you're so clueless it hurts Their designs are derived from the original ARM core designs, the shared ISA is the entire point! Same thing with qualcomm/samsung/google/etc - they derive the ARM core designs with more or less customization.

You know AMD and Intel share an ISA. There's no problem at all that the x86 IP isn't in a seperate company, "x86 Holding Company". nVidia made concessions to allow ARM's ISA to be completely open in a way x86 isn't but it didn't matter to people The people meat-shielding ARM are also funny since ARM, the company ARM itself, wanted to merge. You're not doing ARM any favors in blocking what the company wanted and then pretending you are on ARM's side or something.

There are problems, there simply hasn't been any solutions so far (discounting Apple emerging as big player in the scene and eventually Qualcomm when they figure things out and put the Nuvia engineers to work - all sharing the arm ISA as the common denominator). x86 has been stagnated for close to a decade exactly because there are only 2 companies who can produce processors with it, one of them went through a lot of financial hurdles by failing to deliver while the other sat on their ass as a market leader.

It's a great example of why Nvidia shouldn't be allowed to own ARM, not the other way around.

 

[Daven]

Nothing in an Apple chip has anything to do with what ARM's employees are doing except the ISA. Don't say AMD's 2022 Ryzen chip is based on the work Intel did for the 386 computer I had as a child therefore Intel is in a great place in 2022. And my entire point was ARM doesn't have any profitable products. They are a glorified patent troll. That's my criticism. Their IP is a product, you are just splitting hairs. Their IP isn't wanted whether it is GPU IP (Samsung wants AMD, Qualcomm uses Adreno, Apple uses their own Imagination derived GPU) or their standard X2 designs which are several years behind Intel, AMD, and Apple CPU IP. Qualcomm is looking elsewhere for a reason.

I love your derision for financial analysts. When you manage a company doing 150 times worse than others, you bring that to your shareholders and see how they respond. Clueless. You are confused when you buy ARM ISA products and think "ARM is doing great, look at all these ARM products I am buying" as if ARM had anything to do with them. Softbank is desperate to get rid of them for a reason. The company is failing.

You should try to point at things that ARM the company is actually responsible for, not their partners, and tell me they are doing a good job. Try it. The financial results are a clue. You know technically nVidia is just a designer also. They are fabless, just like ARM.

You know AMD and Intel share an ISA. There's no problem at all that the x86 IP isn't in a seperate company, "x86 Holding Company". nVidia made concessions to allow ARM's ISA to be completely open in a way x86 isn't but it didn't matter to people The people meat-shielding ARM are also funny since ARM, the company ARM itself, wanted to merge. You're not doing ARM any favors in blocking what the company wanted and then pretending you are on ARM's side or something.

Intel has strong armed, sued and threatened any company that tried to use x86 licensing including AMD. Intel’s behavior over x86 licensing is the EXACT reason and best example to block Nvidia acquiring ARM. They have bullied, denied and used anticompetitive behavior throughout their corporate history. While Intel has the gold medal for anticompetitive behavior, Nvidia most certainly has the silver and wants desperately to go gold (sorry for the olympic metaphors but its that time).

The huge consensus from analytical articles, news stories, government responses, etc to Intel and Nvidia buisness practices and planned acquisitions show the need to block any further industry consolidation under these two companies.

 

[Tbcg]

That is great news!

 

[Space Lynx]

You don't, but that Bloomberg story has been debunked several times, although they still claim its true. The issue with it isn't with regards to the possibility of doing something like that, but their claims of how small, yet advanced said chips are meant to be. The PRC couldn't make something like that, today.

On the other hand, if you buy a chip made by a company in the PRC, they could've put anything they want in there, just like a US, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, German, French or Italian chip maker could.

I presume you got the RGB controller example from the post above? Just FYI, Holtek is a Taiwanes company.

I was simply curious, appreciate the clarification. Yes, the example was from the post above mine the example they gave lol

I do think you underestimate the PRC though, they already have hypersonic missiles to my knowledge, and well EU and USA do not.

 

[Kanan]

This is Nvidia’s chickens coming home to roast and Huang has egg all over his face. No one deserves worst when it comes to big business decisions in the chip industry.

Exactly. Now finally we can breath in and out, let this boring dilemma rest and move on. If Nvidia wants to have a strong CPU for PC or completely own laptops they can still design a powerful CPU and do it, again, where's the hold up? Valve shows that it is possible to make Linux into a viable alternative compared to Windows, ARM cpus run excellent with a Linux/Unix derivative. Just follow the path Valve is going. And also, there is still the possibility to run ARM on Windows.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Nothing in an Apple chip has anything to do with what ARM's employees are doing except the ISA. Don't say AMD's 2022 Ryzen chip is based on the work Intel did for the 386 computer I had as a child therefore Intel is in a great place in 2022. And my entire point was ARM doesn't have any profitable products. They are a glorified patent troll. That's my criticism. Their IP is a product, you are just splitting hairs. Their IP isn't wanted whether it is GPU IP (Samsung wants AMD, Qualcomm uses Adreno, Apple uses their own Imagination derived GPU) or their standard X2 designs which are several years behind Intel, AMD, and Apple CPU IP. Qualcomm is looking elsewhere for a reason.

I love your derision for financial analysts. When you manage a company doing 150 times worse than others, you bring that to your shareholders and see how they respond. Clueless. You are confused when you buy ARM ISA products and think "ARM is doing great, look at all these ARM products I am buying" as if ARM had anything to do with them. Softbank is desperate to get rid of them for a reason. The company is failing.

You should try to point at things that ARM the company is actually responsible for, not their partners, and tell me they are doing a good job. Try it. The financial results are a clue. You know technically nVidia is just a designer also. They are fabless, just like ARM.

You know AMD and Intel share an ISA. There's no problem at all that the x86 IP isn't in a seperate company, "x86 Holding Company". nVidia made concessions to allow ARM's ISA to be completely open in a way x86 isn't but it didn't matter to people The people meat-shielding ARM are also funny since ARM, the company ARM itself, wanted to merge. You're not doing ARM any favors in blocking what the company wanted and then pretending you are on ARM's side or something.

Wow, just wow.

You clearly don't understand anything about Arm's business model or how licensing work. Let's just stop here, as you're making a fool of yourself.

 

[Kanan]

The people meat-shielding ARM are also funny since ARM, the company ARM itself, wanted to merge. You're not doing ARM any favors in blocking what the company wanted and then pretending you are on ARM's side or something.

That's so funny. Maybe they did, but for all the wrong reasons. Plus, I think a lot of people internally were against it. Nvidia got a payback by karma, shit happens if you're like that.

And my entire point was ARM doesn't have any profitable products. They are a glorified patent troll.

Mind blowing! Wow.

 

[medi01]

The funny thing is that those regulators said and did nothing when SoftBank purchased ARM a couple of years ago. Hypocrisy at its finest.

May I ask what makes SoftBank nVidia levels of filthy?

Arm is not a monopoly, since anyone can license their technology and use it in their chips

For how much?

 

[DrCR]

How so? Just because you go public doesn't mean that you have to put all the shares of a company on the market.
As long as SoftBank retains 51% of the voting shares, they're in control.
I presume you've never owned a business?

That's exactly my point. If the UK gov managed to convince SoftBank to change course and retain 51% instead of stepping away, that seems like a big, albeit temporary, win for them.

 

[trsttte]

For how much?

For cheap enough when compared to competing solutions

 

[medi01]

For cheap enough

When it is "for cheap enough" there goes your "not monopolist, cause free" argument.

 

[Chrispy_]

I don't own any ARM products and have no need for them, so I could care less honestly, good luck to them.

If you have an LCD or OLED TV, smart<anything> from the last decade (so watch, phone, fridge, washing machine, thermostat, lightbulb), router, switch, WiFi access point, AMD product, Apple product, Samsung product, you own ARM products.

 

[trsttte]

When it is "for cheap enough" there goes your "not monopolist, cause free" argument.

I see how one would arrive there but it's not quite like that. There are several other solutions, from MIPS to PowerPC to now Risc V among many others. ARM was able to distinguish them selves from the other by being cost effective, easy enough to work with and well support.

Risc V is posed to change that eventually, in any case there is some competition in the market. At the product level, companies are also not restricted to use the default ARM designs and can tailor and modify them to their own needs (like Apple does, or Qualcomm or Mediatek among many others).

 

[The Quim Reaper]

Not hard to spot all the scum parasite Nvidia shareholders in this thread, now uber salty that Nvidia shares have dropped ~30% & they're not going to make yet more undeserved money for doing nothing and adding absolutely nothing of value to society with their Casino economics.