It is a question on my part. With Nvidia's deal been off, how long before they take on more lucrative job offerings? I read Nvidia will be establishing new CPU R&D center.
Problem being? The designs continue to evolve with or without arm (example being Apple that already turned the standard arm cores inside out with their own designs). Anyone can continue to license and customise the cores and the ISA like they did before, whatever development capacity remains with ARM doesn't matter.
If they slow to a halt other competitors are there to pick up the slack, like Risc V for example. The issue here is having that change forced through anti-competitive behaviours from Nvidia or having it happen naturally and gradually as technology iterates and evolves.
ARM is not hyper competitive, they are now 3 years behind Apple with their stock designs. Nobody is freaked about AMD not owning the ISA for x86, or there not being an original company to control. Literally everything that is happening is fear, just an assumption that somehow things will be worse. The only issue with x86 is that more people can't get rights to the ISA and that isn't a problem with ARM now or in a hypothetical future with nVidia as the owner. They can make iron clad legal guarantees to that affect.
I see a lot of hypothetical "this will cause damage" with no-one actually suggesting any hypothetical specifics.
nVidia will not spend the 10 billion dollars required to make an Apple beating ARM chip if they cannot monetize it. That would require selling it to many many different people like ARM's stock designs, you can't design a chip and then not have a market to sell it in. They want to integrate the nVidia GPU IP as a standard ARM IP and they can't do that and make money from it as it currently stands competing against all the other ARM designs. Yes nVidia buying ARM will affect the quality (and PRICE) of ARM's own designs, but it won't affect Apple or anyone else with access to the ARM ISA.
I just find the whole populist "no company should merge with another company" nonsense to be absurd. The synergy between nVidia and ARM is obvious. We need another large CPU player besides AMD and Intel. NVidia HAS ALREADY TRIED multiple times and failed to make any money following the approaches people want here. "Just build it and it will sell" is not a solid business plan. Enhancing the stock ARM designs with nVidia IP and making them a new standard is.
I don't know if you're just naive or trolling for nvidia. Locking people out and segmenting the market has been nvidia's entire shtick. The question is simple and has been posed many times: what can't nvidia do without owning arm that it would be able to after acquisition?
A: controlling access to arm licenses. That's the only answer.
They can produce a competitve core and soc if they want, 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, among many others with more or less customization of the standard core designs - like from super custom like Apple for barely any changes like Unisoc or NXP etc etc etc.
They can make use of all the synergies they want without owning arm and compete in their own merits. Everyone else has. 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.
You guys need to remind yourselves that politicians are old farts who can barely use their phones, let alone understand what those "processory" thingies are. They only care about profit and control, and the fact they used the "national security" card should give you a pause for thought. To me, the thought of "forcing built-in provisions for government mandated backdoors" pops to mind. UK government has a long history of trying to strip any semblance of privacy from their citizens. Back when I lived there, they really wanted to make any form of cryptography illegal - they actually used SSH as an example of "potentially dangerous encryption scheme", which is just stupidity on several levels and shows their ignorance fairly well.
I'm not saying that ARM falling into American hands would be any better, those guys are even more corrupt, it it's at all possible. Well, there's China but let's not get into this kind of communist shithole. Just saying, ARM getting into spotlights might be a bad thing for everyone in the end. Now old farts know it exists and will try to use it to their advantage.
That's an odd tangent, don't know what that has to do with Nvidia purchasing arm. If anything having control centralized with Nvidia and on the US would pose a much greater risk in terms of hardware backed spyware than having arm split across adversary nations. Not that that's a safeguard either, imo we're fucked either way.
And regarding encryption, it's the same old argument everywhere - "think of the children" - this bullshit has been tried everywhere and until now hasn't (at least completely) succeded. Let's pray for the future when eventually it does (we're fucked basically)
