Other companies have, such as Nvidia and Western Digital, who are using RISC-V in shipping products to do the job of ~Cortex M0-M4/R series and some lower end A series tasks, if even that.
Common myth is that current architectures and CPUs manufactured by AMD and Intel are "x86"...that term is only used to denote backwards compatibility with the x86 instruction set. The truth is that "x86" cpus haven't been "x86" cpus in many, many years. They are CISC-RISC hybrids that incorporate "x86 instructions" but they process data far differently from the original x86 CPUs of yore. "X86" is literally long dead--long live "x86"...;) Things haven't been as simple a RISC vs. CISC in many years. Back in the 90's it was thought that RISC was taking over from CISC--(Intel, and others.) Then came the original Pentiums--then the original Athlons, and everything since has put the old CISC-RISC argument to rest conclusively, imo.
You're right and you're wrong at the same time: By "x86" we refer to the frontend of execution, no the backend. It doesn't matter how the given x86 implementation is effective underneath – ARM64 instruction set being well-developed, mature RISC frontend paired with equally effective backend will always win due to lack of overhead, and better alignment of the compiler's output with CPU's execution engines. "x86" alone is just a convenient shortcut to express all of that.
No it is Nvidia idiotic. They already have the ISA, same Intel, AMD, Samsung and dozens of big firms. They all have a multidecennial licensee on ARM present and future extensions. They can maintain the license of the ISA for an easy price and do all cpus they want right now. What is the relevance of ARM ?, the staff?? ummmm $ 40B are too much for few hundreds engineers not well trained in developing high level cores. It is far cheaper hire a good staff of great engineer on the market.
ARM is only cash for patents and to sell patents in upcoming years, nothing more. ARM acquisition will not speed up any datacenter adventure, the acquisition is only a manner to give a sense to a overvalued stock price. Mellanox was a great thing, this one is only a big yawn.
Nvidia does not have a CPU presence so it's not like they're creating a monopoly. And there are plenty of competitors in AMD, Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, etc.
AMD+Radeon, Intel+Xe and Via+S3, MIPS+PowerVR, IBM+Whatever/Mentor Graphics? would actually the real competitor to nVidia+ARM across the tech industry.
The Intel part is true but most of that is due to the recent string of acquisition they've had over the past several years. For example, Intel's recent FPGAs have ARM cores inside of them as those designs originated when Altera was a separate company. 'Classic' Intel shed their business when they sold off Xscale and promoted an 'x86 everywhere' agenda where it can internally. When was the last time Intel used an ARM core in a project that started life as an internal Intel design, not from an acquisition?
The problem here is Softbank didn't manufacture (or even own a company that manufactures) chips that use ARM. nVidia owning ARM is a real conflict of interest and sets them up to be a monopoly of ARM supplied silicon.
That's why I don't see this actually clearing regulators without some substantial conditions.
When is the last time that a major merger was stopped because of conflict of interest? I'm not being snarky, I'm curious because I'm not aware of any mergers that failed for that reason.
Which is different how from Intel licensing x86 to amd/cyrix?
Sure I see some conditions, but not many as trump would want this. A USA controlled ARM is much easier to push around in a trade war than brit/jap owned/operated ARM. No brainer for trump, he'll force it through and I think with less concessions from NV than many would hope for (yeah! No handcuffs- bring it!). No conflict of interest with others having lifetime lics etc. The most they can do is delay access to IP and raise prices. Both of which will do damage, how much we'll have to wait to see.
I expect trump to make this as easy as possible for NV as it's a direct poke in China's eye shortly after the deal with more trade regs on parts no doubt with more power over the company and who it deals with. Yeah, I like this from all angles. China plans to overtake us in 2050 or less (own everything pretty much), so take it to them now before they can afford to win.
nVidia does (did?) have a CPU design team that made a VLIW core with binary translation to ARM a few years back. While Project Denver didn't set the world on fire in terms of benchmarks or performance per watt, it wasn't a clear failure either which by itself is impressive given that it used binary transition in an ecosystem that is dominated by perf/watt characteristics. The SoC's nVidia has developed have seen some success in the embedded market, just not phones. This is small enough that I don't see regulators have an issue with nVidia's own internal team being displaced.
ARM has their Mali graphics wing. This is indeed an issue as many smaller SoC players will leverage both ARM and Mali IP. (The most notable being Xilinx for their single chip SoC + FPGA line up). I can see the Mali unit being spun off and sold to keep it into the market as part of this deal.
The biggest concern is how nVidia would handle both 3rd party ISA and core IP licensing. Basically boils down how nVidia would have to provide reassurances would continue as business as normal. This is very important in the context of ARM v9 looming. It is unlikely that nVidia could impact any of the pre-existing agreements already in place waiting to 'go live' when the ARM v9 announcement takes place. There will be a flood of new licenses coming in for the new ISA and core IP that were not prevy to NDA pre-launch. That is something nVidia *could potentially* stomp out. Further down the road, there is also ARM v10 which is something nVidia would have full control over. This is something I hope regulators would certainly inquire about.
MALI business is practically dead thanks to uncle Sam. Kamel whose so unification and not performing all that stellar so they decided to stop there. Nv does need a good designer's, a querying ARM includes & three partially independently working design labs. Making another one more centralised would speed up the things a bit in a short terms. Which Nv certainly do have their own GPUs they still lack in house made DSP's, FPGA's... & are fables. I am certain Nv would wipe out word MALI out of the existence as they did with many other's (90's). Ability to produce most of the IP's on your own and manufacture them would be two more steps up in better ecosystem, better & faster verification system and cetera. So another fallen CPU architecture company is the best/worst contender in being given control over ARM and that's Samsung of course everything needs to be manufactured in China until better deal emerges. This opinion is based upon what would be good in accelerating progress in mid term predictions and nothing else.
Only if you ignore the fact that Arm already has a monopoly in mobile and the embedded space.
But you're right, I don't think they will meet many hurdles, mostly because governments of the world are so corrupt these days and/or don't care much about stopping large corporations from becoming even larger. If anything, they encourage it.
It gives NVIDIA power over all companies that use ARM, which is pretty much all companies. It could demand that Apple use NVIDIA GPUs or, that Samsung stop the RDNA 2 integration, make a bit of trouble for AMD, which has an ARM core in each Ryzen CPU, and so on.
NVIDIA isn't well known for its marketing subtlety, so it's certainly not out of the question for it to use that leverage the best it can.
This is my biggest worry. Nvidia has a substantial track-record of promoting lock-in to their products that doesn't *quite* meet the technical standards of being anti-competitive, but clearly is not conducive to the health of the market overall. PhysX was a perfect example.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if they started offering "incentives" for third parties to take their graphics IP along with ARM that would, in practice and "entirely by coincidence" - result in those third parties being unable or unwilling to do business with AMD's graphics division. Just look at the notebook GPU market for a preview on how that might shake out.
I think he's referring to the open-source physics SDK Nvidia blocked from taking advantage of GPU or dedicated AIB acceleration if there was an ATI GPU in the computer.
nVidia makes the SoC for the switch, which is ARM based. nVidia making this purchase shows they want int on the CPU side of things. They would not spend $40B if they weren't going to get something out of it.
You are misguided in thinking China has enough soft power to dictate terms to Nvidia. China has already been cut off from new Arm core designs. They will miss out on ARMv9, plus they are going to be stuck on EUV lithography for the foreseeable future because ASML can’t sell any of the lasted Deep EUV scanners due to Trump’s ban. Those scanners are full of American technology. It’s starting to look like China poached all those TSMC engineers for nothing. At least the engineers got good compensation.
How could they reject the deal? China doesn't have any skin in the game. ARM is currently owned by Softbank, a Japanese company and Nvidia is American. The only thing China has to do with ARM is there is a Chinese office which has gone rogue in the last year. If anything that would weaken any sway they may have as they've shown to be acting in bad faith.
I'm pretty sure despite everything the Chinese government does have say in this matter, and they could say no out of spite, like the Qualcomm-NXP deal and a decade ago when they threatened Motorola with it when Moto was trying to sue Huawei for IP theft.
NO say, not even in the deal or part of any side of it. They can whine. Deal is 100% done. Trump wants it. DONE. FTC won't even blink on this one. You're fired ;) Who's next? I don't like this deal...You're fired...Who's next? I really like this deal mr president. You're hired. This is what he should do for ever person that blocks a document at FBI/DOJ/CIA/DNI/ etc etc when asked for by congress, Judicial Watch etc. Fire them until a guy sits and says I'll give you every document they ask for because USA citizens own them ALL. You all serve at the pleasure of the president. IF you're not on his agenda, if you had any honor you'd already have stepped down. But since you're a bunch of jerks trying to overturn an election, he should just start mass firings Nov4th of ANY person in ANY division that blocked a doc, FBI 302, etc etc...Never thought I'd see an ongoing attempted coup in USA right in front of my face and they just keep going. All these traitors would have disappeared already in lovely CHINA (er, slaveville).
When ARM China went rogue and the CCP did absolutely nothing to try and rein them in, while they're actively protecting Bytedance and TikTok, China's position on ARM's sale means nothing to Softbank, Nvidia, or the US government.
Even if they wanted to buy it, Softbank would likely reject it in favor of Nvidia. There's also the issue of the sale being authorized by the SEC. If Nvidia's going to face a tonne of scrutiny, imagine what would happen when the Chinese want to buy it.
The Chinese can whine all they want. Softbank is definitely not going to consider them for the sale of ARM. Softbank want a clean sale, going as smoothly as possible. The ARM China fiasco probably threw a lot more wrenches than Softbank would have liked during negotiations.
We can pretend that China's the victim of the trade deal with Bytedance, but the reality is that they're also just as guilty when it comes to IP infringements and copyright violations on a massive scale. There's no smoke without a fire, and the China stereotype as copycats is more fire than actual smoke.
AMD bought ATI, which was a Canadian company. Here's its the opposite, where a GPU company is buying a CPU company. I think the deal will happen, just like the AMD+ATI deal occurred. This deal is better because the jobs will be retained, unlike the ATI one where the ATI employees in Canada were gutted, and the ones in California were absorbed into the AMD HQs.
Given how poorly much of the world economy is doing, ANY company that's currently turning a profit, or looks to be able to in the short term in the current COVID environment, is being seriously bid up as investors hungrily buy up anything they can that seems like it MIGHT yield positive numbers.
"Or maybe ARM is reasonably priced, and the boader technology industry is kinda nuts."
Either/or. Arm was purchased as an investment; it's not about how well Arm does on its own, but how well it does versus the other purchases SoftBank could have made. SoftBank could have put that $32B in NASDAQ index funds instead, and they would have come out well ahead.
That said, SoftBank was in this for the long run. Selling after 4 years was not the plan, and is being driven by external factors.
Hmmm, I suppose its hard to argue with an investment underperforming an index fund by so much. Looking at them now, their earnings aren't as remarkable as I thought.
Still, I would feel much safer holding ARM than holding NASDAQ right now. I can't believe I'm saying that...
Softbank was damaged heavily by the WeWork collapse, their first investment fund lost 50% of it's assets on WeWork (about $50 Billion written off). Softbank was in big trouble after this, investors started demanding their money back and they needed something to bring a LOT of money (cash) very fast. That's why they are selling ARM, not the made up reasons softbank claimed.
But I'd expect China and possibly Europe will make this acquisition very painful for nVidia. It's going to cost nvidia a lot of money to push this acquisition through, including possibly abandoning both nvidia and arm assets in china. A lot of people are predicting this won't go through in the end because of the bone china has to pick over Huawei.
Who cares? Apple has an architectural license and all they care about are Instruction Sets. Nothing in this deal effects Apple's course with Apple Silicon CPUs.
But Apple can't change the ISA at all. Just look at AMX. Apple have to work with ARM to include new instructions (such as SVE2). They really want the new instructions to the point they did AMX while waiting for ARM.
This is the death of Mali graphics most likely as that is a clear overlap.
However, who is left in mobile graphics?
After Apple pulled out of Imagination Technologies, they effectively collapsed with them putting themselves up for sale. Apple did comeback to Imagination for a cross licensing deal earlier this year so that revenue stream still exists, but what is left there? Caustic ray-tracing development has basically stopped last I checked, though what Imagination did have was promising. Likely scenario is that Apple came back to the table for license as they're be tried up too long in the courts otherwise given how many engineers Apple poached.
Samsung has tapped AMD for mobile graphics and Qualcomm has their own internal development which wouldn't be directly impacted by this move. The ones to complain would be all the copy/paste SoC vendors would would have to look else where (which would actually help Imagination oddly enough if they didn't want to go to nVidia).
The one exception would be Xilinx which uses Mali in some of their Zynq SoC + FPGA line up. Though with nVidia's current direction, I can see them purchase Xilinx to capture that market segment too now that Intel/Altera are floundering with their foundry problems.
I can rephrase the facts you presented re: Imagination in a way that may be enlightening: Their mobile GPU IP is sufficiently valuable that Apple tried to bulldoze the entire company just to get out of their licencing fees, and they still went back for another licence (presumably on terms more favourable to them) even after they damn-near succeeded in that plan. They may be down, but they aren't yet entirely out.
As for whether or not Qualcomm would be impacted - that would depend on a lot of things. For example: Nvidia, at some future point in time, might perhaps decide to start licencing its own graphics IP to ARM customers at loss-leader prices, giving those customers a leg-up in the market in terms of development costs and perf/Watt, thereby undercutting the revenue stream Qualcomm use to fund their own GPU development (see Intel's contra-revenue practices with Atom and the destruction it wrought on AMD's tablet CPU business).
They could also decide to revive their Tegra business, which would provide a clear conflict of interest - their own design team would have access to the new designs first, giving them a crucial advantage in a market that still operates on yearly cycles.
The bigger question is who is currently using Imagination outside of Apple today. They may have nearly crushed Imagination but in that period of time, who stuck with them and/or signed up to use their IP? From a business standpoint, Imagination was not seen a wise choice given the company's uncertainty. Who is left using them?
In addition, Tegra is still alive in the embedded market for automotive usage. It wasn't that long ago (2018) that they also paired their most recent iteration of Project Denver CPU family to their automotive designs.
Qualcomm and Samsung wouldn't be impacted on the GPU side of things (and for clarification they certainly would on the CPU side). The example you give really is no different on how ARM operates today with Mali and respect to Qualcomm. nVidia obviously has far more GPU development resources than ARM does but from an operations and business-to-business relations, I'm really not seeing much of a difference.
The biggest concern I see is that Mali is critical for a lot of smaller SoC designers, most notably Xilinx as a hard IP GPU for their Zynq platform. I can see objections being raised about the death of Mali under nVidia that regulators may force that division to be sold or spun off for the rest of the deal to go through. Personally I would favor Mali being its own company for a bit as well as granted its own ARM CPU architectural license with the ability to sell their own IP cores to 3rd parties. It'd be an easy way to ensure competition remains in the market by essentially forcing its presence in the short term.
I'm pretty sure Imagination are barely being used at all - but it's their patents that make them impossible to count out.
Re: Qualcomm and Samsung, I'm specifically suggesting that there would be two factors involved: the improvement in the GPU tech itself (Mali has always been designed to a budget) that would make it more competitive, and the possibility of Nvidia effectively discounting the *core itself* in licencing when combined with their GPU tech. ARM have always sold Mali as a sort-of pre-ratified, minimal-area, low-cost design - but that's not the same as negative cost, something Nvidia could conceivably afford to do. This IS pretty wild speculation, though.
The best solution would probably be what you've suggested in that last paragraph. That, and a bunch of legally-binding agreements for Nvidia to sign up to!
They will get 33 billion. Price is 35 billion total, with a possibility of additional 5 billions if they reach aggressive future targets. And 1.5 billion will go to ARM employees, this is all in the article. So, Softbank is selling at a loss compared with investment loss of just buying bonds for 33 billion.
Even at $40 Billion total, this feels like a loss to SoftBank, let alone $33B. So something is up.
Japan plays very well with USA's intentions. So I'm thinking the Nvidia deal was asked as a favor, and agreed by the Japanese authorities. In return, Japan benefits from China being blocked to ARM without their doing. I think that's the whole point. China's now put into a difficult position because they rely on Nvidia, and Nvidia doesn't rely on them, and they have no reasons to object to this. That means they will have to double-down on AMD, since their own GPU efforts have failed.
I would say, this is going to increase AMD stocks higher, more than anything. So look out for that ; )
Tax is on the profit. So if you buy something for $32 and sell it at $40, your capital gain is $8. You get taxed on that amount. So if you pay, say, a 25% tax, you have $6 left.
I owned one of Arm’s first ever home-use CPUs, the Acorn Electron 32K, brought for me by a kindly and proudly nerdy uncle when I was a wee nipper. It was a swiftly eclipsed by other home computers including the (American) Commodore 64, so being British and weedy, I didn’t think the Electron / Arm would go anywhere.
How the turntables have tabled. The C64 and others of its ilk are dead, while Arm has become a colossal foundation of the post-PC age. I still have my Acorn Electron in the attic. I wonder if it’s worth anything.
FYI (!) the Electron wasn't an arm powered computer - the Acorn Electron was 6502A powered. It was developed as a cheaper alternative to the Acorn/BBC Micro computer that used to fill all our schools. I think you're getting confused between Acorn, the arm risc processor that Acorn developed for the Archimedes and what it morphed into as ARM Holdings (formed by Acorn, VLSI and Apple).
As an aside, that was a golden age for British home computer development. Between Acorn, Amstrad, Sinclair and others the UK had a significant home grown industry. Of course as is usual with the UK it was all thrown away and received little in the way of government backing because they just don't "get it" - by get it I mean the politicians cannot make money for themselves from it. And now we're seeing the same thing happen with Imagination, Deepmind and ofc ARM.
While I agree with your summary, there is definitely something to be said for the ability of British industry to very capably mismanage itself into the ground - I'm thinking of Amstrad in particular here.
The Chinese will probably block this deal, not sure if it can clear South Korean authorities either. China will develop their own CPU designs, they will not depend on British or US tech in future, the "decoupling" already started anyway. The rest /Soutn Korean like Samsung, Xilinx/ will likely move to RISC-V.
China can block the deal because both Nvidia and ARM do business in China. If they ignore China's objection then they have to pull all their products and cancel all outstanding contracts in China.
South Korea probably has more legal ground to object the deal than China. Trump has already cut ARM off from China's domestic supply chain (pun intended) while Samsung has gone from knee deep with ARM to now waist deep with Nvidia/ARM.
Nvidia would cut ties with China before giving up on the ARM deal. China has no leverage here. They need access to Nvidia hardware more than Nvidia needs China. Plus, the minute China tried to ban Nvidia, the US will reciprocate by removing one of their US traded businesses like ten cent or alibaba.
They can't, but it makes me uneasy that TSMC is on "Chinese" soil. China could start exerting more authority over Taiwan and could play embargo games or whatever with TSMC's customers.
No, if they were to switch ISA again, they'd either go with RISC-V or design their own ISA. There's no point in paying for an ISA, it's of no value by itself. The only reason Apple is paying ARM to keep using their ISA is to avoid having to recompile the existing iPhone apps.
Another big problem for some ARM customers will be that once they're owned by Nvidia they'll fall under the CFIUS regulations, which mean the decisions about where their products will be allowed to be sold -- including China -- will be made in Washington, which right now means by the orange idiot.
This applies not just to end customers in China (like Huawei) but any products made in China by ODMs like Foxconn for Western companies to sell across the world, which is an *enormous* market, and one that would be killed stone dead if ARM sales were blocked.
Son made a big mistake, because of this Corona virus chinese attack BS issue they lost a lot of value and on top wework disaster, this is just like Toshiba US Nuclear deal and selling out Memory to Kioxia. Shame. Japan lost another big player this time it's even bigger stake, the ARM in mobiles is very valuable and it was neutral but now it's all in the hands of Ngreedia. But they managed to get a small stake in Nvidia corporation.
Would be interesting to see if it gets all regulatory approval, ofc Apple is having perpetual ISA license it won't impact them now but maybe in the long run ? Gotta see how this unfolds.
"Corona virus chinese attack BS issue" Why pepper your posts with bilge like this? You don't even seem to be able to decide which conspiracy theory you're aligning yourself with.
Quantumz0d has some acute mental health issues which have been discussed over in the message boards by people more qualified than I. Site ownership can’t be arsed to even address the spam posts in the comments, much less something more sensitive like this, so best thing to do is as you suggest, just ignore the posts and move on.
I expect an enormous increase in design and use of RISC-V based designs. Many companies out there won't like the idea of NVIDIA knowing that much about their business and design plans. Open source hardware design suddenly sounds so much better.
If NVIDIA becomes too much of an asshole with ARM licensing, someone will just create a competing architecture and everyone aside from NVIDIA will move over to that. Not something that happens overnight, but it would happen.
I think it would take a long time for a company to fulfill arms role. And who say that company doesn't get bought as well and you start over. At least for the next 5-10 years I don't there's anywhere else to go for most customers.
The ground work has already been laid with RISC-V for this scenario. Western Digital has been a big proponent of the new platform in an effort to remove the ARM licensing fees they pay for microcontrollers in their hard drives.
VR, AI, and automotive markets are new enough that a fresh platform can emerge in popularity. Any market that doesn't have significant legacy software can be a venue for a new platform to take off in.
I doubt we'd see the smart phone market shift in the short term as they now have a legacy code base that'd take time to port and validate.
That would be a bad idea IMHO. If even Intel are struggling to develop new process technology, I'm not sure how Nvidia acquiring a foundry that is an entire technology level behind the curve would help them.
Seriously guys, RISC-V is never going to happen. Arm have a 30 year head start in terms of technology and IP, and Nvidia isn't going to do anything to jeopardise Arm's future viability
It's just an instruction set. The buy-in with developers and tooling and existing platforms is what gives it its value. Apple created a first-class ARM implementation in short order (was it even 2 years' effort?). I am sure they could do the same thing with a RISC-V implementation. But it will take some time for a shift away from ARM by enough devs/platforms to make such a move worthwhile. But once enough momentum is built, "30 years head start" by ARM will mean NOTHING.
I pretty much agree. All these people preaching RISC-V forget that the latest and greatest processor that's yet to be released (2021?) is still inferior to the ARM v8 Cortex A73 (more power, less speed, less features).
With that said, if RISC-V could have eaten a chunk out of ARM's marketshare if: - the latest (2021?) was actually sold inside products back in 2014, so it had a few years head start - the prices/licences were absurdly cheap bordering on free - had a GPU implementation like Mali-Graphics - there were official forks of Android, Debian, Windows10 that worked on this new ISA/processor - then we could've seen under $200 TV Boxes, Tablets, Phones that had performance as good as the $600 flagships... causing a goldrush race of developers from Android 5.1, Windows10, and Debian v7 (and so other distros) to port over their Apps, Games, and even Emulators.
> Apple created a first-class ARM implementation in short order (was it even 2 years' effort?).
Apple started working with ARM SoCs in 2007. It took them 3 years before creating their own SoC (A4) with licensed core designs. It took an additional 2 years (5 total) before their own semi-custom core debuted (Swift in A6), and another 5 for their 'own' GPU (A11, though it's debatable how much it differs from their previous semi-custom PowerVR cores). It's unknown just how far their own CPU cores deviate from the ARM Cortex cores they have access to, but it;s pretty safe to say they are far from a clean-sheet design.
RISC-V is going to take a long time to reach the same level of maturity in both hardware design and software ecosystem. If Nvidia through it could reach there quickly, it would make more sense to plough $40bn into RISC-V development (and likely become the de-facto RISC-V design supplier) than into acquiring ARM.
Data centers, Oculus/AR, new ways of harvesting and utilizing user data (ML and DE stuff in that regard), etc. Having a massive, connected website actually be performant and flexible is a massive task that many people completely overlook.
This is huge. It is difficult to predict what type of changes this will lead to. It is really crazy how the power dynamic can shift so suddenly and abruptly in such a short period of time. Unbelievable.
Words, letters to the public and promises are cheap, they mean nothing and are legally unenforceable, as the recent AT&T buyout of Time Warnet showed (the CEO or some other high level exec of AT&T blatantly lied in their Congress deposition, "promising" that they will not exclude competitors from their resulting platform because "it would make no business sense" and a while after the deal was approved they did exactly that..; and the authorities cannot do anything about it because the "promise" was oral, not written down in the buyout contract...).
Only watertight contract clauses guaranteeing ARM's independence, i.e. that they are free to license their IP to whomever they want (save China for the time being) at a fair and reasonable price might convince EU regulators to green-light this deal. I say "EU" because the American ones are largely toothless, particularly the last few years, and even when they (rarely) do take action US courts tend to block it.
If ARM's core business model gets disrupted to a non insignificant degree (say if Nvidia orders a doubling of the cost of the licensing fees or starts excluding certain customers, either arbitrarily, or because they compete with them, or because Jensen Huang just doesn't like them) then ARM will be done. Their licensees will switch to RISC-V en masse, with which quite a few are already playing with.
For many reasons, this merger will not help Nvidia nor hurt AMD. For example, AMD chips are made from a completely different manufacturing process, and from a different node. Apple and AMD are not partners, nor does Apple compete against AMD in their present markets. Now with ARM, AMD won't have to worry about Nvidia having better graphics performance. Everything comes together and this should help AMD in the long run. Furthermore, I feel that while NVidia is a far superior company to AMD, I will continue to be a fan of AMD. AMD are good at making us all feel good about ourselves. Whenever I am using my ATI branded graphics card from the 90's, I think that, just wow, I can't believe that this can still play Age of Empires or the original Diablo so fluidly. What can ARM do that my AMD system can't?
This is certainly a big deal for Nvidia. I see that not only will this help them diversify into mobile markets, but diversify their engineering potential to expand their data center and supercomputer products. High wattage, high performance ARM is inevitable. Expanding CUDA instructions for accelerators products that contain not only GPU but also CPU. It might be interesting to see a new high end gaming product that offers CPU and GPU capabilities on one accelerator board. It's a reality that semiconductors foundries, without a massive change in fundamental materials (move away from silicon?), are creeping up on a limitations of physics. Intel are having massive difficulties with their foundries, Global Foundries has decided to stick with old nodes, TSMC have the best foundry currently, with high demand and low supply, costs I assume are climbing, so much so that Nvidia are using an inferior Samsung node on their latest GPUs. All this points to chip makers need to diversify, start focusing more on their IP, better designs, and new markets, stop counting on the forever benefit of more transistors for the same cost and wattage.
Nvidia are the largest chip maker in the world, overtaking Intel by significant margin, as a consumer I can't say I'm happy to see them acquiring ARM. A diverse market place without massive monopolies are in the best interest to society. but, ehh, what are ya gonna do?!
That's the end of Chinese companies getting ARM licenses next year. Nvidia will squeeze them dry and anyone wanting to license a core will have to pay through the nose for one. RISC-V or bust for China?
This fear seems irrational. Just because Nvidia is a US company doesn't mean they are the hand of the Trump administration. Nvidia wants customers, China represents a massive market to them. If the US government wants to prevent Arm licenses being sold to China, they will need to outright ban it through legal channels.
For many reasons, this merger will not help Nvidia nor hurt AMD. For example, AMD chips are made from a completely different manufacturing process, and from a different node. Apple and AMD are not partners, nor does Apple compete against AMD
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Wreckage - Sunday, September 13, 2020 - link
x86 is dead.nandnandnand - Sunday, September 13, 2020 - link
ARM is dead.Yojimbo - Sunday, September 13, 2020 - link
Nietzsche is dead.nathanddrews - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Weeesa gonna die?mrvco - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
RISC-V will save us.Ithaqua - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
Bring back AlphaJedi2155 - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
How wuude!GreenReaper - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
And we have killed him.Lord of the Bored - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Nietzsche is dead, God is now Nietzsche.ZolaIII - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Only the man from mountain still stands as human stupidity is indestructible.PaulHoule - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
RISC-V is alive.If RISC-V were a penny stock it would have closed on friday at 2 cents and will open this Monday at 2 dollars.
Eliadbu - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
The open source nature of RISC-V works against it as it takes long time for changes to take place.sharath.naik - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Move on to risc-vname99 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Ah yes, RISC-V. The company that still hasn't shipped its supposed A72 equivalent and won't do so for what, another eighteen months?This deal is about ARM competing at the high end; you think Jensen cares that future washing machines will be powered by RISC-V?
WJMazepas - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Yeah because RISC-V is only SiFive. No other company whatsoever has done any research on RISC-Vjeremyshaw - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Other companies have, such as Nvidia and Western Digital, who are using RISC-V in shipping products to do the job of ~Cortex M0-M4/R series and some lower end A series tasks, if even that.Santoval - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
That's far more likely.Great_Scott - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
ARM is indeed dead. Nvidia has little to no ability to work with other companies.Which raises questions about what's going to happen to the Android ecosystem.
Peskarik - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
In the long run we are all dead.PandaBear - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
ThisStuka87 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Schrodinger's cat might be dead.TeXWiller - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Lets hope NVidia doesn't apply the many-words interpretation on licensing agreements.GeoffreyA - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
They might just get entangled.WaltC - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Common myth is that current architectures and CPUs manufactured by AMD and Intel are "x86"...that term is only used to denote backwards compatibility with the x86 instruction set. The truth is that "x86" cpus haven't been "x86" cpus in many, many years. They are CISC-RISC hybrids that incorporate "x86 instructions" but they process data far differently from the original x86 CPUs of yore. "X86" is literally long dead--long live "x86"...;) Things haven't been as simple a RISC vs. CISC in many years. Back in the 90's it was thought that RISC was taking over from CISC--(Intel, and others.) Then came the original Pentiums--then the original Athlons, and everything since has put the old CISC-RISC argument to rest conclusively, imo.RK7 - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
You're right and you're wrong at the same time: By "x86" we refer to the frontend of execution, no the backend. It doesn't matter how the given x86 implementation is effective underneath – ARM64 instruction set being well-developed, mature RISC frontend paired with equally effective backend will always win due to lack of overhead, and better alignment of the compiler's output with CPU's execution engines. "x86" alone is just a convenient shortcut to express all of that.Great_Scott - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
Correct. The last CISC implementation I'm aware of is the IBM-Cyrix MII series.Gondalf - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
No it is Nvidia idiotic. They already have the ISA, same Intel, AMD, Samsung and dozens of big firms. They all have a multidecennial licensee on ARM present and future extensions.They can maintain the license of the ISA for an easy price and do all cpus they want right now. What is the relevance of ARM ?, the staff?? ummmm $ 40B are too much for few hundreds engineers not well trained in developing high level cores.
It is far cheaper hire a good staff of great engineer on the market.
ARM is only cash for patents and to sell patents in upcoming years, nothing more. ARM acquisition will not speed up any datacenter adventure, the acquisition is only a manner to give a sense to a overvalued stock price.
Mellanox was a great thing, this one is only a big yawn.
danzig - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
Long live the 6502Someguyperson - Sunday, September 13, 2020 - link
I really don't see how this could ever go through all the regulatory bodies considering ARM's role in technology today.senttoschool - Sunday, September 13, 2020 - link
Why not?Nvidia does not have a CPU presence so it's not like they're creating a monopoly. And there are plenty of competitors in AMD, Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, etc.
StevoLincolnite - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Apple and Qualcomm license ARM....AMD+Radeon, Intel+Xe and Via+S3, MIPS+PowerVR, IBM+Whatever/Mentor Graphics? would actually the real competitor to nVidia+ARM across the tech industry.
Lord of the Bored - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
AMD and Intel both license ARM as well.Kevin G - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
The Intel part is true but most of that is due to the recent string of acquisition they've had over the past several years. For example, Intel's recent FPGAs have ARM cores inside of them as those designs originated when Altera was a separate company. 'Classic' Intel shed their business when they sold off Xscale and promoted an 'x86 everywhere' agenda where it can internally. When was the last time Intel used an ARM core in a project that started life as an internal Intel design, not from an acquisition?Samus - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
The problem here is Softbank didn't manufacture (or even own a company that manufactures) chips that use ARM. nVidia owning ARM is a real conflict of interest and sets them up to be a monopoly of ARM supplied silicon.That's why I don't see this actually clearing regulators without some substantial conditions.
Great_Scott - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
When is the last time that a major merger was stopped because of conflict of interest? I'm not being snarky, I'm curious because I'm not aware of any mergers that failed for that reason.TheJian - Wednesday, September 16, 2020 - link
Which is different how from Intel licensing x86 to amd/cyrix?Sure I see some conditions, but not many as trump would want this. A USA controlled ARM is much easier to push around in a trade war than brit/jap owned/operated ARM. No brainer for trump, he'll force it through and I think with less concessions from NV than many would hope for (yeah! No handcuffs- bring it!). No conflict of interest with others having lifetime lics etc. The most they can do is delay access to IP and raise prices. Both of which will do damage, how much we'll have to wait to see.
I expect trump to make this as easy as possible for NV as it's a direct poke in China's eye shortly after the deal with more trade regs on parts no doubt with more power over the company and who it deals with. Yeah, I like this from all angles. China plans to overtake us in 2050 or less (own everything pretty much), so take it to them now before they can afford to win.
Kevin G - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
nVidia does (did?) have a CPU design team that made a VLIW core with binary translation to ARM a few years back. While Project Denver didn't set the world on fire in terms of benchmarks or performance per watt, it wasn't a clear failure either which by itself is impressive given that it used binary transition in an ecosystem that is dominated by perf/watt characteristics. The SoC's nVidia has developed have seen some success in the embedded market, just not phones. This is small enough that I don't see regulators have an issue with nVidia's own internal team being displaced.ARM has their Mali graphics wing. This is indeed an issue as many smaller SoC players will leverage both ARM and Mali IP. (The most notable being Xilinx for their single chip SoC + FPGA line up). I can see the Mali unit being spun off and sold to keep it into the market as part of this deal.
The biggest concern is how nVidia would handle both 3rd party ISA and core IP licensing. Basically boils down how nVidia would have to provide reassurances would continue as business as normal. This is very important in the context of ARM v9 looming. It is unlikely that nVidia could impact any of the pre-existing agreements already in place waiting to 'go live' when the ARM v9 announcement takes place. There will be a flood of new licenses coming in for the new ISA and core IP that were not prevy to NDA pre-launch. That is something nVidia *could potentially* stomp out. Further down the road, there is also ARM v10 which is something nVidia would have full control over. This is something I hope regulators would certainly inquire about.
ZolaIII - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
MALI business is practically dead thanks to uncle Sam. Kamel whose so unification and not performing all that stellar so they decided to stop there. Nv does need a good designer's, a querying ARM includes & three partially independently working design labs. Making another one more centralised would speed up the things a bit in a short terms. Which Nv certainly do have their own GPUs they still lack in house made DSP's, FPGA's... & are fables. I am certain Nv would wipe out word MALI out of the existence as they did with many other's (90's). Ability to produce most of the IP's on your own and manufacture them would be two more steps up in better ecosystem, better & faster verification system and cetera. So another fallen CPU architecture company is the best/worst contender in being given control over ARM and that's Samsung of course everything needs to be manufactured in China until better deal emerges.This opinion is based upon what would be good in accelerating progress in mid term predictions and nothing else.
Krysto - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Only if you ignore the fact that Arm already has a monopoly in mobile and the embedded space.But you're right, I don't think they will meet many hurdles, mostly because governments of the world are so corrupt these days and/or don't care much about stopping large corporations from becoming even larger. If anything, they encourage it.
ET - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
It gives NVIDIA power over all companies that use ARM, which is pretty much all companies. It could demand that Apple use NVIDIA GPUs or, that Samsung stop the RDNA 2 integration, make a bit of trouble for AMD, which has an ARM core in each Ryzen CPU, and so on.NVIDIA isn't well known for its marketing subtlety, so it's certainly not out of the question for it to use that leverage the best it can.
Spunjji - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
This is my biggest worry. Nvidia has a substantial track-record of promoting lock-in to their products that doesn't *quite* meet the technical standards of being anti-competitive, but clearly is not conducive to the health of the market overall. PhysX was a perfect example.It wouldn't surprise me at all if they started offering "incentives" for third parties to take their graphics IP along with ARM that would, in practice and "entirely by coincidence" - result in those third parties being unable or unwilling to do business with AMD's graphics division. Just look at the notebook GPU market for a preview on how that might shake out.
jeremyshaw - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Physx, the open source physics SDK that is still actively developed by Nvidia?Daeros - Wednesday, September 30, 2020 - link
I think he's referring to the open-source physics SDK Nvidia blocked from taking advantage of GPU or dedicated AIB acceleration if there was an ATI GPU in the computer.https://www.geeks3d.com/20090928/hardware-physx-ac...
dotjaz - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
For one thing China might not want ARM to fall into the hands of a US company considering the abusive and bullying practice from the US.prophet001 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
lolStuka87 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
nVidia makes the SoC for the switch, which is ARM based. nVidia making this purchase shows they want int on the CPU side of things. They would not spend $40B if they weren't going to get something out of it.vladx - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Yep can't see why China would accept this when US will still ban Chinese companies whenever they feel like itPixyMisa - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
China can ban the sale of Arm chips in China. I mean, if they really wanted to.dotjaz - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Why would they do that when they can simply reject the deal?Morawka - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
You are misguided in thinking China has enough soft power to dictate terms to Nvidia. China has already been cut off from new Arm core designs. They will miss out on ARMv9, plus they are going to be stuck on EUV lithography for the foreseeable future because ASML can’t sell any of the lasted Deep EUV scanners due to Trump’s ban. Those scanners are full of American technology. It’s starting to look like China poached all those TSMC engineers for nothing. At least the engineers got good compensation.zmatt - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
How could they reject the deal? China doesn't have any skin in the game. ARM is currently owned by Softbank, a Japanese company and Nvidia is American. The only thing China has to do with ARM is there is a Chinese office which has gone rogue in the last year. If anything that would weaken any sway they may have as they've shown to be acting in bad faith.s.yu - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
I'm pretty sure despite everything the Chinese government does have say in this matter, and they could say no out of spite, like the Qualcomm-NXP deal and a decade ago when they threatened Motorola with it when Moto was trying to sue Huawei for IP theft.TheJian - Wednesday, September 16, 2020 - link
NO say, not even in the deal or part of any side of it. They can whine. Deal is 100% done. Trump wants it. DONE. FTC won't even blink on this one. You're fired ;) Who's next? I don't like this deal...You're fired...Who's next? I really like this deal mr president. You're hired. This is what he should do for ever person that blocks a document at FBI/DOJ/CIA/DNI/ etc etc when asked for by congress, Judicial Watch etc. Fire them until a guy sits and says I'll give you every document they ask for because USA citizens own them ALL. You all serve at the pleasure of the president. IF you're not on his agenda, if you had any honor you'd already have stepped down. But since you're a bunch of jerks trying to overturn an election, he should just start mass firings Nov4th of ANY person in ANY division that blocked a doc, FBI 302, etc etc...Never thought I'd see an ongoing attempted coup in USA right in front of my face and they just keep going. All these traitors would have disappeared already in lovely CHINA (er, slaveville).willis936 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
US is just playing catchup in this regard.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall
Things have been slowing heating up since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Squar...
Droekath - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
When ARM China went rogue and the CCP did absolutely nothing to try and rein them in, while they're actively protecting Bytedance and TikTok, China's position on ARM's sale means nothing to Softbank, Nvidia, or the US government.Even if they wanted to buy it, Softbank would likely reject it in favor of Nvidia. There's also the issue of the sale being authorized by the SEC. If Nvidia's going to face a tonne of scrutiny, imagine what would happen when the Chinese want to buy it.
The Chinese can whine all they want. Softbank is definitely not going to consider them for the sale of ARM. Softbank want a clean sale, going as smoothly as possible. The ARM China fiasco probably threw a lot more wrenches than Softbank would have liked during negotiations.
We can pretend that China's the victim of the trade deal with Bytedance, but the reality is that they're also just as guilty when it comes to IP infringements and copyright violations on a massive scale. There's no smoke without a fire, and the China stereotype as copycats is more fire than actual smoke.
webdoctors - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
AMD bought ATI, which was a Canadian company. Here's its the opposite, where a GPU company is buying a CPU company. I think the deal will happen, just like the AMD+ATI deal occurred. This deal is better because the jobs will be retained, unlike the ATI one where the ATI employees in Canada were gutted, and the ones in California were absorbed into the AMD HQs.NoodlesK - Sunday, September 13, 2020 - link
Welcome to ARMVIDIAphoenix_rizzen - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
NvidiArm sounds better. :)Bluetooth - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Why is the headline saying 40 billion, when it’s actually 35 billion, with the rest as bonus if they hit certain targets?Yojimbo - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Because the NVIDIA press release said $40 billion in the headline.tamalero - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Probably the type of deal. Sometimes money is not the complete payment.Sometimes they offer shares or something else to balance the full price.
brucethemoose - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
"Their Arm investment has significantly underperformed relative to the broader technology industry"Or maybe ARM is reasonably priced, and the boader technology industry is kinda nuts.
It feels like we're in another dotcom bubble... except a little more surreal. Like the shoe has already dropped, but stock prices are going up anyway.
Adramtech - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
The dot.com bubble had no earnings. That was surreal. These companies have been killing it the last decade.brucethemoose - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
They do, but at eye watering P/E ratios. Nvidia is currently at 90.Spunjji - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Indeed - they very clearly aren't worth 10x what they were 5 years ago in anything but imaginary terms, and yet, The Market Has Spoken.AMD are also looking decidedly lopsided in this regard.
lightningz71 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Given how poorly much of the world economy is doing, ANY company that's currently turning a profit, or looks to be able to in the short term in the current COVID environment, is being seriously bid up as investors hungrily buy up anything they can that seems like it MIGHT yield positive numbers.Ryan Smith - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
"Or maybe ARM is reasonably priced, and the boader technology industry is kinda nuts."Either/or. Arm was purchased as an investment; it's not about how well Arm does on its own, but how well it does versus the other purchases SoftBank could have made. SoftBank could have put that $32B in NASDAQ index funds instead, and they would have come out well ahead.
That said, SoftBank was in this for the long run. Selling after 4 years was not the plan, and is being driven by external factors.
brucethemoose - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Hmmm, I suppose its hard to argue with an investment underperforming an index fund by so much. Looking at them now, their earnings aren't as remarkable as I thought.Still, I would feel much safer holding ARM than holding NASDAQ right now. I can't believe I'm saying that...
rahvin - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Not necessarily.Softbank was damaged heavily by the WeWork collapse, their first investment fund lost 50% of it's assets on WeWork (about $50 Billion written off). Softbank was in big trouble after this, investors started demanding their money back and they needed something to bring a LOT of money (cash) very fast. That's why they are selling ARM, not the made up reasons softbank claimed.
But I'd expect China and possibly Europe will make this acquisition very painful for nVidia. It's going to cost nvidia a lot of money to push this acquisition through, including possibly abandoning both nvidia and arm assets in china. A lot of people are predicting this won't go through in the end because of the bone china has to pick over Huawei.
Spunjji - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
This. 👆nicolaim - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
"Or maybe ARM is reasonably priced, and the boader technology industry is kinda nuts."This
Morawka - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Now Apple will finally have to work with Nvidia again! lolseriously though, It's almost a forgone conclusion that Nvidia will start integrating their graphics IP into ARM designs.
mdriftmeyer - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Who cares? Apple has an architectural license and all they care about are Instruction Sets. Nothing in this deal effects Apple's course with Apple Silicon CPUs.dotjaz - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
But Apple can't change the ISA at all. Just look at AMX. Apple have to work with ARM to include new instructions (such as SVE2). They really want the new instructions to the point they did AMX while waiting for ARM.Meteor2 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
I'd be surprised if any of Nvidia's GPU IP works in the power envelope of a mobile phone.MarcusMo - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
“NVIDIA is pitching the deal as being complementary, combining two companies that otherwise have minimal overlap.”I’m guessing that Imagination Technologies, and other companies investing in mobile graphics will feel differently.
Kevin G - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
This is the death of Mali graphics most likely as that is a clear overlap.However, who is left in mobile graphics?
After Apple pulled out of Imagination Technologies, they effectively collapsed with them putting themselves up for sale. Apple did comeback to Imagination for a cross licensing deal earlier this year so that revenue stream still exists, but what is left there? Caustic ray-tracing development has basically stopped last I checked, though what Imagination did have was promising. Likely scenario is that Apple came back to the table for license as they're be tried up too long in the courts otherwise given how many engineers Apple poached.
Samsung has tapped AMD for mobile graphics and Qualcomm has their own internal development which wouldn't be directly impacted by this move. The ones to complain would be all the copy/paste SoC vendors would would have to look else where (which would actually help Imagination oddly enough if they didn't want to go to nVidia).
The one exception would be Xilinx which uses Mali in some of their Zynq SoC + FPGA line up. Though with nVidia's current direction, I can see them purchase Xilinx to capture that market segment too now that Intel/Altera are floundering with their foundry problems.
mdriftmeyer - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Apple is fully invested back in ImgTec and their Ray Tracing tech as of Jan 2020.Kevin G - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
I do mention that Apple came back to Imagination for a license and in particular it was to include Caustic RT.Spunjji - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
I can rephrase the facts you presented re: Imagination in a way that may be enlightening:Their mobile GPU IP is sufficiently valuable that Apple tried to bulldoze the entire company just to get out of their licencing fees, and they still went back for another licence (presumably on terms more favourable to them) even after they damn-near succeeded in that plan. They may be down, but they aren't yet entirely out.
As for whether or not Qualcomm would be impacted - that would depend on a lot of things. For example: Nvidia, at some future point in time, might perhaps decide to start licencing its own graphics IP to ARM customers at loss-leader prices, giving those customers a leg-up in the market in terms of development costs and perf/Watt, thereby undercutting the revenue stream Qualcomm use to fund their own GPU development (see Intel's contra-revenue practices with Atom and the destruction it wrought on AMD's tablet CPU business).
They could also decide to revive their Tegra business, which would provide a clear conflict of interest - their own design team would have access to the new designs first, giving them a crucial advantage in a market that still operates on yearly cycles.
Kevin G - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
The bigger question is who is currently using Imagination outside of Apple today. They may have nearly crushed Imagination but in that period of time, who stuck with them and/or signed up to use their IP? From a business standpoint, Imagination was not seen a wise choice given the company's uncertainty. Who is left using them?nVidia did try to license their GPU designs to the mobile sector without success:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/7083/nvidia-to-lice...
I do see nVidia re-emphasizing their own GPU designs again over Mali.
In addition, Tegra is still alive in the embedded market for automotive usage. It wasn't that long ago (2018) that they also paired their most recent iteration of Project Denver CPU family to their automotive designs.
Qualcomm and Samsung wouldn't be impacted on the GPU side of things (and for clarification they certainly would on the CPU side). The example you give really is no different on how ARM operates today with Mali and respect to Qualcomm. nVidia obviously has far more GPU development resources than ARM does but from an operations and business-to-business relations, I'm really not seeing much of a difference.
The biggest concern I see is that Mali is critical for a lot of smaller SoC designers, most notably Xilinx as a hard IP GPU for their Zynq platform. I can see objections being raised about the death of Mali under nVidia that regulators may force that division to be sold or spun off for the rest of the deal to go through. Personally I would favor Mali being its own company for a bit as well as granted its own ARM CPU architectural license with the ability to sell their own IP cores to 3rd parties. It'd be an easy way to ensure competition remains in the market by essentially forcing its presence in the short term.
Spunjji - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
I'm pretty sure Imagination are barely being used at all - but it's their patents that make them impossible to count out.Re: Qualcomm and Samsung, I'm specifically suggesting that there would be two factors involved: the improvement in the GPU tech itself (Mali has always been designed to a budget) that would make it more competitive, and the possibility of Nvidia effectively discounting the *core itself* in licencing when combined with their GPU tech. ARM have always sold Mali as a sort-of pre-ratified, minimal-area, low-cost design - but that's not the same as negative cost, something Nvidia could conceivably afford to do. This IS pretty wild speculation, though.
The best solution would probably be what you've suggested in that last paragraph. That, and a bunch of legally-binding agreements for Nvidia to sign up to!
sonny73n - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
“ The $40 billion transaction means that SoftBank will come out ahead on their investment” (acquired for $32)What about taxes?
Ananke - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
They re-invest. Big Capital doesn't pay taxesSpunjji - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
There's always a loss somewhere to write them off against.If not, make one up!
Bluetooth - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
They will get 33 billion. Price is 35 billion total, with a possibility of additional 5 billions if they reach aggressive future targets. And 1.5 billion will go to ARM employees, this is all in the article. So, Softbank is selling at a loss compared with investment loss of just buying bonds for 33 billion.Kangal - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Even at $40 Billion total, this feels like a loss to SoftBank, let alone $33B. So something is up.Japan plays very well with USA's intentions.
So I'm thinking the Nvidia deal was asked as a favor, and agreed by the Japanese authorities. In return, Japan benefits from China being blocked to ARM without their doing. I think that's the whole point. China's now put into a difficult position because they rely on Nvidia, and Nvidia doesn't rely on them, and they have no reasons to object to this. That means they will have to double-down on AMD, since their own GPU efforts have failed.
I would say, this is going to increase AMD stocks higher, more than anything. So look out for that ; )
fred666 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Tax is on the profit. So if you buy something for $32 and sell it at $40, your capital gain is $8. You get taxed on that amount. So if you pay, say, a 25% tax, you have $6 left.Tomatotech - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
I owned one of Arm’s first ever home-use CPUs, the Acorn Electron 32K, brought for me by a kindly and proudly nerdy uncle when I was a wee nipper. It was a swiftly eclipsed by other home computers including the (American) Commodore 64, so being British and weedy, I didn’t think the Electron / Arm would go anywhere.How the turntables have tabled. The C64 and others of its ilk are dead, while Arm has become a colossal foundation of the post-PC age. I still have my Acorn Electron in the attic. I wonder if it’s worth anything.
Drae - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
FYI (!) the Electron wasn't an arm powered computer - the Acorn Electron was 6502A powered. It was developed as a cheaper alternative to the Acorn/BBC Micro computer that used to fill all our schools. I think you're getting confused between Acorn, the arm risc processor that Acorn developed for the Archimedes and what it morphed into as ARM Holdings (formed by Acorn, VLSI and Apple).As an aside, that was a golden age for British home computer development. Between Acorn, Amstrad, Sinclair and others the UK had a significant home grown industry. Of course as is usual with the UK it was all thrown away and received little in the way of government backing because they just don't "get it" - by get it I mean the politicians cannot make money for themselves from it. And now we're seeing the same thing happen with Imagination, Deepmind and ofc ARM.
Spunjji - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
While I agree with your summary, there is definitely something to be said for the ability of British industry to very capably mismanage itself into the ground - I'm thinking of Amstrad in particular here.Meteor2 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Amstrad, GEC, the entire British car industry... It's a long and sad list.Tbf ARM was and is the exception.
Spunjji - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
That Rover "buyback" was a monumental farce.Ananke - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
The Chinese will probably block this deal, not sure if it can clear South Korean authorities either. China will develop their own CPU designs, they will not depend on British or US tech in future, the "decoupling" already started anyway. The rest /Soutn Korean like Samsung, Xilinx/ will likely move to RISC-V.Dribble - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
How can China block a deal between a Japanese and an American company?wr3zzz - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
China can block the deal because both Nvidia and ARM do business in China. If they ignore China's objection then they have to pull all their products and cancel all outstanding contracts in China.wr3zzz - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
South Korea probably has more legal ground to object the deal than China. Trump has already cut ARM off from China's domestic supply chain (pun intended) while Samsung has gone from knee deep with ARM to now waist deep with Nvidia/ARM.Morawka - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Nvidia would cut ties with China before giving up on the ARM deal. China has no leverage here. They need access to Nvidia hardware more than Nvidia needs China. Plus, the minute China tried to ban Nvidia, the US will reciprocate by removing one of their US traded businesses like ten cent or alibaba.bji - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
They can't, but it makes me uneasy that TSMC is on "Chinese" soil. China could start exerting more authority over Taiwan and could play embargo games or whatever with TSMC's customers.wr3zzz - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
ARM going to Nvidia ought to boost the future prospect of RISC-V, no? ARM can't claim neutral party anymore.Xajel - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
A price increase in ARM licensing and fees is incoming.Kurosaki - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
1200usd per mobile 4080-gpu license...RaduR - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Will Apple buy MIPS now ?factual - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
No, if they were to switch ISA again, they'd either go with RISC-V or design their own ISA. There's no point in paying for an ISA, it's of no value by itself. The only reason Apple is paying ARM to keep using their ISA is to avoid having to recompile the existing iPhone apps.factual - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
I should have said: there's no value in paying for a new ISA. As the value of an old/existing ISA is the apps that were compiled for it ...IJD - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Another big problem for some ARM customers will be that once they're owned by Nvidia they'll fall under the CFIUS regulations, which mean the decisions about where their products will be allowed to be sold -- including China -- will be made in Washington, which right now means by the orange idiot.This applies not just to end customers in China (like Huawei) but any products made in China by ODMs like Foxconn for Western companies to sell across the world, which is an *enormous* market, and one that would be killed stone dead if ARM sales were blocked.
mantikos - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
Foxconn is Taiwanese and is moving massive amounts of manufacturing to India and Vietnam - they know the world we decouple from ChinaQuantumz0d - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Son made a big mistake, because of this Corona virus chinese attack BS issue they lost a lot of value and on top wework disaster, this is just like Toshiba US Nuclear deal and selling out Memory to Kioxia. Shame. Japan lost another big player this time it's even bigger stake, the ARM in mobiles is very valuable and it was neutral but now it's all in the hands of Ngreedia. But they managed to get a small stake in Nvidia corporation.Would be interesting to see if it gets all regulatory approval, ofc Apple is having perpetual ISA license it won't impact them now but maybe in the long run ? Gotta see how this unfolds.
Spunjji - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
"Corona virus chinese attack BS issue"Why pepper your posts with bilge like this? You don't even seem to be able to decide which conspiracy theory you're aligning yourself with.
Meteor2 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
At least he/she does it nice and early in their posts, so we can immediately skip the rest of itThe Garden Variety - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Quantumz0d has some acute mental health issues which have been discussed over in the message boards by people more qualified than I. Site ownership can’t be arsed to even address the spam posts in the comments, much less something more sensitive like this, so best thing to do is as you suggest, just ignore the posts and move on.Spunjji - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
I see. That's most unfortunate.wrkingclass_hero - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Goddamn I wish I could afford Nvidia stock. They are going to be an absolute juggernaut.eastcoast_pete - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
I expect an enormous increase in design and use of RISC-V based designs. Many companies out there won't like the idea of NVIDIA knowing that much about their business and design plans. Open source hardware design suddenly sounds so much better.DigitalFreak - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
If NVIDIA becomes too much of an asshole with ARM licensing, someone will just create a competing architecture and everyone aside from NVIDIA will move over to that. Not something that happens overnight, but it would happen.andrewaggb - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
I think it would take a long time for a company to fulfill arms role. And who say that company doesn't get bought as well and you start over. At least for the next 5-10 years I don't there's anywhere else to go for most customers.Kevin G - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
The ground work has already been laid with RISC-V for this scenario. Western Digital has been a big proponent of the new platform in an effort to remove the ARM licensing fees they pay for microcontrollers in their hard drives.VR, AI, and automotive markets are new enough that a fresh platform can emerge in popularity. Any market that doesn't have significant legacy software can be a venue for a new platform to take off in.
I doubt we'd see the smart phone market shift in the short term as they now have a legacy code base that'd take time to port and validate.
vol.2 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
So I guess that Future ARM designs will all be proprietary Nvidia Chips?edzieba - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Speaking of vertical integration: how is GloFo doing at the moment, and how are Nvidia's cash reserves looking?Spunjji - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
That would be a bad idea IMHO. If even Intel are struggling to develop new process technology, I'm not sure how Nvidia acquiring a foundry that is an entire technology level behind the curve would help them.IGnatius T Foobar - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Part of ARM's value prop is that it wasn't owned by a single manufacturer. I wonder if this will breathe new life into RISC-V.Meteor2 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Seriously guys, RISC-V is never going to happen. Arm have a 30 year head start in terms of technology and IP, and Nvidia isn't going to do anything to jeopardise Arm's future viabilitybji - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
It's just an instruction set. The buy-in with developers and tooling and existing platforms is what gives it its value. Apple created a first-class ARM implementation in short order (was it even 2 years' effort?). I am sure they could do the same thing with a RISC-V implementation. But it will take some time for a shift away from ARM by enough devs/platforms to make such a move worthwhile. But once enough momentum is built, "30 years head start" by ARM will mean NOTHING.Kangal - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
I pretty much agree.All these people preaching RISC-V forget that the latest and greatest processor that's yet to be released (2021?) is still inferior to the ARM v8 Cortex A73 (more power, less speed, less features).
With that said, if RISC-V could have eaten a chunk out of ARM's marketshare if:
- the latest (2021?) was actually sold inside products back in 2014, so it had a few years head start
- the prices/licences were absurdly cheap bordering on free
- had a GPU implementation like Mali-Graphics
- there were official forks of Android, Debian, Windows10 that worked on this new ISA/processor
- then we could've seen under $200 TV Boxes, Tablets, Phones that had performance as good as the $600 flagships... causing a goldrush race of developers from Android 5.1, Windows10, and Debian v7 (and so other distros) to port over their Apps, Games, and even Emulators.
edzieba - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
> Apple created a first-class ARM implementation in short order (was it even 2 years' effort?).Apple started working with ARM SoCs in 2007. It took them 3 years before creating their own SoC (A4) with licensed core designs. It took an additional 2 years (5 total) before their own semi-custom core debuted (Swift in A6), and another 5 for their 'own' GPU (A11, though it's debatable how much it differs from their previous semi-custom PowerVR cores). It's unknown just how far their own CPU cores deviate from the ARM Cortex cores they have access to, but it;s pretty safe to say they are far from a clean-sheet design.
RISC-V is going to take a long time to reach the same level of maturity in both hardware design and software ecosystem. If Nvidia through it could reach there quickly, it would make more sense to plough $40bn into RISC-V development (and likely become the de-facto RISC-V design supplier) than into acquiring ARM.
Zingam - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
How to spot a Nuewb? Watch for out of context uses of:1. Rust
2. RISK-V
Zingam - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
What exactly are R&Ding at Facebook? Coz all I can see is a shitty web site?!jeremyshaw - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Data centers, Oculus/AR, new ways of harvesting and utilizing user data (ML and DE stuff in that regard), etc. Having a massive, connected website actually be performant and flexible is a massive task that many people completely overlook.Sychonut - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
This is huge. It is difficult to predict what type of changes this will lead to. It is really crazy how the power dynamic can shift so suddenly and abruptly in such a short period of time. Unbelievable.Samus - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
I guess this makes up for the massive loss Softbank had buying Sprinthalcyon - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
Can't wait for the red tape and anti-trust clearing on this. Can't be fast or cheap. EU is scared of US controlling everything.Santoval - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
Words, letters to the public and promises are cheap, they mean nothing and are legally unenforceable, as the recent AT&T buyout of Time Warnet showed (the CEO or some other high level exec of AT&T blatantly lied in their Congress deposition, "promising" that they will not exclude competitors from their resulting platform because "it would make no business sense" and a while after the deal was approved they did exactly that..; and the authorities cannot do anything about it because the "promise" was oral, not written down in the buyout contract...).Only watertight contract clauses guaranteeing ARM's independence, i.e. that they are free to license their IP to whomever they want (save China for the time being) at a fair and reasonable price might convince EU regulators to green-light this deal. I say "EU" because the American ones are largely toothless, particularly the last few years, and even when they (rarely) do take action US courts tend to block it.
If ARM's core business model gets disrupted to a non insignificant degree (say if Nvidia orders a doubling of the cost of the licensing fees or starts excluding certain customers, either arbitrarily, or because they compete with them, or because Jensen Huang just doesn't like them) then ARM will be done. Their licensees will switch to RISC-V en masse, with which quite a few are already playing with.
Spunjji - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
This.529th - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
My company, Leg, is selling some of it's IP to Nvidia.vozmem - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
When will Softbank receive the money from NVIDIA? After the regulatories are clear?AMDSuperFan - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
For many reasons, this merger will not help Nvidia nor hurt AMD. For example, AMD chips are made from a completely different manufacturing process, and from a different node. Apple and AMD are not partners, nor does Apple compete against AMD in their present markets. Now with ARM, AMD won't have to worry about Nvidia having better graphics performance. Everything comes together and this should help AMD in the long run. Furthermore, I feel that while NVidia is a far superior company to AMD, I will continue to be a fan of AMD. AMD are good at making us all feel good about ourselves. Whenever I am using my ATI branded graphics card from the 90's, I think that, just wow, I can't believe that this can still play Age of Empires or the original Diablo so fluidly. What can ARM do that my AMD system can't?Hixbot - Wednesday, September 16, 2020 - link
This is certainly a big deal for Nvidia. I see that not only will this help them diversify into mobile markets, but diversify their engineering potential to expand their data center and supercomputer products. High wattage, high performance ARM is inevitable. Expanding CUDA instructions for accelerators products that contain not only GPU but also CPU. It might be interesting to see a new high end gaming product that offers CPU and GPU capabilities on one accelerator board. It's a reality that semiconductors foundries, without a massive change in fundamental materials (move away from silicon?), are creeping up on a limitations of physics. Intel are having massive difficulties with their foundries, Global Foundries has decided to stick with old nodes, TSMC have the best foundry currently, with high demand and low supply, costs I assume are climbing, so much so that Nvidia are using an inferior Samsung node on their latest GPUs. All this points to chip makers need to diversify, start focusing more on their IP, better designs, and new markets, stop counting on the forever benefit of more transistors for the same cost and wattage.Nvidia are the largest chip maker in the world, overtaking Intel by significant margin, as a consumer I can't say I'm happy to see them acquiring ARM. A diverse market place without massive monopolies are in the best interest to society. but, ehh, what are ya gonna do?!
tkSteveFOX - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
That's the end of Chinese companies getting ARM licenses next year.Nvidia will squeeze them dry and anyone wanting to license a core will have to pay through the nose for one.
RISC-V or bust for China?
Hixbot - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
This fear seems irrational. Just because Nvidia is a US company doesn't mean they are the hand of the Trump administration. Nvidia wants customers, China represents a massive market to them. If the US government wants to prevent Arm licenses being sold to China, they will need to outright ban it through legal channels.Kipii45 - Thursday, July 29, 2021 - link
For many reasons, this merger will not help Nvidia nor hurt AMD. For example, AMD chips are made from a completely different manufacturing process, and from a different node. Apple and AMD are not partners, nor does Apple compete against AMD