I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.)
But, on the plus side, it's the biggest opportunity RISC-V will ever get. Almost overnight anyone who was building ARM cores will suddenly see investments in RISC-V prudent as a hedge against nVidia's future core designs not being licenseable. SiFive will very quickly become a multi-billion dollar organization...
Apple’s ARM chips contain an awful lot of different components, some of which are highly customised. The neural engine stuff they use for image processing for example. The CPU cores are custom tuned, but I believe they are still 90% based on ARM CPU core designs. For example the Secure Enclave is actually an ARM developed CPU extension. Apple focuses their efforts vary specifically on areas that give them features that grant a competitive advantage. They don’t reimplement stuff for the sake of it. One of their big performance wins over other ARM licensees isn’t even really in the CPU, it’s the very well designed and generous cache memory systems.
Having said that, looking to the future I think Apple is clearly willing to pour more resources into their CPU programme than any of their competitors. This means the risk to them is probably a lot less than to say Qualcomm or Samsung as they have a much better capability to go their own way. As time goes on their designs will probably diverge more and more from main line ARM anyway.
I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. There's far too much at stake here. Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?
> "Apple ... could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice"
Could they really do this? Start making incompatible designs? I would have thought that Apple's ARM architecture license would include terms to preclude incompatible forks.
The Observer proposed an interesting solution last weekend:
"The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors — some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers — to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry..."
No, no, no. Government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers and this is more about denying someone else that benefiting the whole. Oh its wrapped up in pretty paper with a ribbon on it but the true reason is they don't want "those people" to have it. (being Nvidia but I am certain there are a few more suitors they don't like either)
He's absolutely right. Unless there is a 100% firewall between ARM and Nvidia then Nvidia will influence ARM to move in directions that help Nvidia's wider business and not the ARM ecosystem as a whole - and that will adversely affect everyone who uses an ARM CPU - and that's basically everyone.
I don't believe that such a firewall is possible in any event. Who will enforce it?
For those who are saying that it's great as it will give RISC-V a boost. Fine in principle, but how long will it take before the RISC-V ecosystem is anywhere near comparable to ARM in mobile?
One final point: the UK government is now considerably more interventionist than at any time in the recent past. Not completely impossible that they intervene in this in some way.
I agree that this deal is good for Nvidia only and will hurt ARM CPU usage.
Nvidia is right now not in the same league as Intel/Apple, but having the most successful consumer and corporate GPU business along with control of Arm architecture CPUs puts them in the same league in my opinion.
That kind of dominance is never good for consumers.
Having worked for a company that was acquired and became a daughter company, such a setup is not enough of a firewall.
Slowly, the acquiring company will modify internal systems and internal processes until there is not much left of the original company. And many key employees will leave as they don't identify with the way things are being done.
I would like to think that acquisitions can be a good thing, but that's not the case in my experience.
Seems like alarmist FUD to me. While I agree that having Arm owned by any one of its major customers creates some potential conflicts of interests, I think the notion that NVIDIA or any other company would start to drive licensees away with draconian terms/costs with some poor business planning pretty silly.
The more interesting question to me is what would any single (major customer of Arm) company gain from owning Arm? For instance, if NVIDIA wants to be competitive in data center CPUs (which would put them at equal footing with AMD and Intel, not more monopolistic), why couldn’t they go the Apple approach with a perpetual license and design it entirely custom (or not) as they see fit? (AFAIK they already design custom mobile CPUs.)
What do you gain by buying out an expensive, large licensing company that essentially makes no money that leaves you in a weird position with various rivals? Doesn’t quite click for me.
If they are buying the perpetual license and hiring the ARM expertise anyway, why not just get the company, which also includes giving nVidia majority control of the ARM roadmap as well.
You get the people who literally wrote the book on modern ARM, you get all the IP which builds up the patent chest (improving chances of counter-suit and cross-licensing in the event of patent infringement issues), you don't need to pay for the license, and you know you aren't going to get fucked by roadmap or licensing changes in future. And your competitors literally end up paying you for privilege of competing against you.
Not saying it's right, but there's certainly multiple arguments for it.
nVidia already owns Mellanox which today seems very monopolistic for any HPC-interconnect. Them buying ARM means, they could just stop supporting everything else someday.
I for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV.
That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at the spec level, we'd have real competition again from Samsung, Mediatek, and potentially others.
Samsung recently entered into a licensing deal with AMD to use their graphics technology in a mobile design. Early performance leaks/rumors are very promising (if true).
I don't see this as much of a problem, competition is already on the way.
It will be the end of Linux on ARM. They will choke platform with blobs until the inevitable death. NVIDIA and open-source is like matter and antimatter - they simply cannot coexist in the same place and time.
> since they only licence but don’t actual fab the chips
From the article: "It's one of the fundamental assumptions of the ARM business model that it can sell to everybody. The one saving grace about Softbank was that it wasn't a chip company, and retained ARM's neutrality. If it becomes part of Nvidia, most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia, and will of course then look for an alternative to ARM."
Implying NVidia's competitors who use ARM would fear losing their license.
> Also what’s the difference between ARM and RISC-V. Why chose one over the other ?
They have technical differences, but TBH I don't know them and I'm not sure they matter. However, conceptually they have two big differences IMO : RISC-V is open (don't need to buy a license to use it) but ARM is way more mature and supported (RISC-V based computers are still very rare).
I find it baffling that SoftBank isn’t simply taking ARM public. If ever there was a company that should be independent, it’s ARM. Is there a good explanation out there for why this isn’t the obvious choice?
There would be a certain symmetry if Apple took a (non controlling) stake in ARM to keep it independent given that sales of ARM shares in the 1990s were a significant factor in giving Apple financial stability in the 1990s.
NVIDIA's stock is so massively pumped up. They will simply make an all-stock offer that's pretty much impossible to refuse and that will be the end of it (most likely).
NVIDIA is the only hardware company that takes software serious.
In every hardware thread, someone complains about hardware people being behind on software technology. And then there is NVIDIA, the company that provides the best development environment for GPU development, the company that used chip simulation for their first processor.
AMD was kept alive by oil money and console contracts. NVIDIA made it on their own. They were innovative in the past, they can be innovate in the future. To me, that's an opportunity for much more future growths.
How much is too much if NVIDIA can take Intel's market? And we are only at the start of machine learning and product simulations.
Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity.
"most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia"
Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).
Competition breeds innovation they never should have sold in the first place. If an investment firm won't hold them they should start an IPO instead of seeking value validation from contending clients and players in the hardware industry.
I'm tired of the tech industry's standard duopolies. ARM breaks that trend by licensing to Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, MediaTek, & others; surrendering independence today could hurt the future of tomorrow.
I would dearly love for the industry sh1tstorm that would happen if Huawei would buy ARM (please!)
Would like to see Donny try to ban a Huawei ARM, or order Google to only supply to hot slow Intel Atom mobiles, with everyone of the asian makers walking away from the US market, while the world switches to an OSS Android fork.
Although I still for the life of me can't understand why Miyoshi son is holding on to wework and selling ARM.
That would never happen. Huawei has made their own bed by consorting and being inextricably tied to the Chinese Communist Party, they deserve everything they're getting, while on a personal level I despise Trump, I don't mind that he's sticking it to China on privacy and industrial imbalances between the USA and China, while also stating the obvious that it's bad to use Chinese state controlled hardware at the heart of your communications systems
Surely a sale would be allowed if regulatory compliance compliance is met? I was part of a private semiconductor company bought by a public American company and the buying company had to convince the US gov they would not turn the product line into a captive portal. I expect it's the same here?
I think he's right. A sale to Nvidia would be detrimental to ARM's current business model - now Nvidia may have other plans but the thought of that would certainly scare existing licensees even more.
Should the UK government intervene? Yes. Will they? Probably not.
The detail here is more nuanced than protectionist vs free market - but I don't think most people realise that and see it as just protectionism. It isn't I don't think.
Me too in agreement. NVIDIA got interested in ARM after the launch news of Japan Supercomputer. They want to suppress, I think.. as it's bad for their business. (Twice faster than First Supercomputer ) ...
[+] [-] awalton|5 years ago|reply
But, on the plus side, it's the biggest opportunity RISC-V will ever get. Almost overnight anyone who was building ARM cores will suddenly see investments in RISC-V prudent as a hedge against nVidia's future core designs not being licenseable. SiFive will very quickly become a multi-billion dollar organization...
[+] [-] simonh|5 years ago|reply
Having said that, looking to the future I think Apple is clearly willing to pour more resources into their CPU programme than any of their competitors. This means the risk to them is probably a lot less than to say Qualcomm or Samsung as they have a much better capability to go their own way. As time goes on their designs will probably diverge more and more from main line ARM anyway.
[+] [-] chongli|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frandroid|5 years ago|reply
Their new notebooks are still moving to an ARM-based CPU... Even if they enhanced the ARM design they still have an ARM licence.
[+] [-] Reason077|5 years ago|reply
Could they really do this? Start making incompatible designs? I would have thought that Apple's ARM architecture license would include terms to preclude incompatible forks.
[+] [-] xdavidliu|5 years ago|reply
Nit: fazed, not phased.
[+] [-] mud_dauber|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coreblocks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aj3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaphirplane|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MilnerRoute|5 years ago|reply
"The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors — some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers — to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry..."
https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/08/10/0358216/should-the-...
[+] [-] rpastuszak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jabirali|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klelatti|5 years ago|reply
I don't believe that such a firewall is possible in any event. Who will enforce it?
For those who are saying that it's great as it will give RISC-V a boost. Fine in principle, but how long will it take before the RISC-V ecosystem is anywhere near comparable to ARM in mobile?
One final point: the UK government is now considerably more interventionist than at any time in the recent past. Not completely impossible that they intervene in this in some way.
[+] [-] sharken|5 years ago|reply
Nvidia is right now not in the same league as Intel/Apple, but having the most successful consumer and corporate GPU business along with control of Arm architecture CPUs puts them in the same league in my opinion. That kind of dominance is never good for consumers.
Having worked for a company that was acquired and became a daughter company, such a setup is not enough of a firewall.
Slowly, the acquiring company will modify internal systems and internal processes until there is not much left of the original company. And many key employees will leave as they don't identify with the way things are being done.
I would like to think that acquisitions can be a good thing, but that's not the case in my experience.
[+] [-] valuearb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuixoticQuibit|5 years ago|reply
The more interesting question to me is what would any single (major customer of Arm) company gain from owning Arm? For instance, if NVIDIA wants to be competitive in data center CPUs (which would put them at equal footing with AMD and Intel, not more monopolistic), why couldn’t they go the Apple approach with a perpetual license and design it entirely custom (or not) as they see fit? (AFAIK they already design custom mobile CPUs.)
What do you gain by buying out an expensive, large licensing company that essentially makes no money that leaves you in a weird position with various rivals? Doesn’t quite click for me.
[+] [-] Nexxxeh|5 years ago|reply
You get the people who literally wrote the book on modern ARM, you get all the IP which builds up the patent chest (improving chances of counter-suit and cross-licensing in the event of patent infringement issues), you don't need to pay for the license, and you know you aren't going to get fucked by roadmap or licensing changes in future. And your competitors literally end up paying you for privilege of competing against you.
Not saying it's right, but there's certainly multiple arguments for it.
[+] [-] foota|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fock|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axaxs|5 years ago|reply
That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at the spec level, we'd have real competition again from Samsung, Mediatek, and potentially others.
[+] [-] dralley|5 years ago|reply
I don't see this as much of a problem, competition is already on the way.
[+] [-] worldismine2020|5 years ago|reply
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15963/oppos-reno3-vs-reno3-pr...
[+] [-] leeoniya|5 years ago|reply
care to elaborate?
the Panfrost project has reverse engineered a bunch of popular Mali ISAs and now there's hardware support on the kernel for VA-API on these chips.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Panfrost
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xvilka|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|5 years ago|reply
It has to do with their superior modem.
[+] [-] m4rtink|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nojvek|5 years ago|reply
Also what’s the difference between ARM and RISC-V. Why chose one over the other ?
[+] [-] progval|5 years ago|reply
From the article: "It's one of the fundamental assumptions of the ARM business model that it can sell to everybody. The one saving grace about Softbank was that it wasn't a chip company, and retained ARM's neutrality. If it becomes part of Nvidia, most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia, and will of course then look for an alternative to ARM."
Implying NVidia's competitors who use ARM would fear losing their license.
> Also what’s the difference between ARM and RISC-V. Why chose one over the other ?
They have technical differences, but TBH I don't know them and I'm not sure they matter. However, conceptually they have two big differences IMO : RISC-V is open (don't need to buy a license to use it) but ARM is way more mature and supported (RISC-V based computers are still very rare).
[+] [-] georgewfraser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klelatti|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/06/09/how-arm-has-alrea...
[+] [-] H8crilA|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvn9|5 years ago|reply
In every hardware thread, someone complains about hardware people being behind on software technology. And then there is NVIDIA, the company that provides the best development environment for GPU development, the company that used chip simulation for their first processor.
AMD was kept alive by oil money and console contracts. NVIDIA made it on their own. They were innovative in the past, they can be innovate in the future. To me, that's an opportunity for much more future growths.
How much is too much if NVIDIA can take Intel's market? And we are only at the start of machine learning and product simulations.
[+] [-] enos_feedler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 01100011|5 years ago|reply
"most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia"
Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).
[+] [-] MangoCoffee|5 years ago|reply
Softbank doesn't want ARM anymore. what do Hermann Hauser proposed? Let ARM holding die(?). He offer no solution.
[+] [-] 2mylesaway|5 years ago|reply
I'm tired of the tech industry's standard duopolies. ARM breaks that trend by licensing to Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, MediaTek, & others; surrendering independence today could hurt the future of tomorrow.
[+] [-] guiriduro|5 years ago|reply
Although I still for the life of me can't understand why Miyoshi son is holding on to wework and selling ARM.
[+] [-] disgruntledphd2|5 years ago|reply
It's a cash-crunch driven deal, nothing else.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinktank|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leeoniya|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarym|5 years ago|reply
Should the UK government intervene? Yes. Will they? Probably not.
The detail here is more nuanced than protectionist vs free market - but I don't think most people realise that and see it as just protectionism. It isn't I don't think.
[+] [-] maxdo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pecker458|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokowueu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgbrenner|5 years ago|reply