Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster
bbc.com
bbc.com
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...
You could say that: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
I think it's very clear that the framework was important here. Because you were pointing out that they don't open source much, I pointed out that they do, then you nitpicked by saying it's cuda.
There's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers. Supposedly this is because they throttle workstation GPUs to create a market for higher-end versions while reducing the manufacturing diversity, but I haven't heard a definitive source for this.
Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured out and the next version of the driver would detect them...
Of course it's market segmentation by obscurity so it only lasted a few weeks and it's trivial to work around, but still it's quite shady since there's absolutely no ill effect from the work around.
* sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher: Fixes "Bug" in Nvidia Driver preventing "Unsupported Configurations" from being used on KVM
> nVidia
FYI, a few years ago, nVidia has officially changed their name to "Nvidia"...
[0] IOMMU is not only a virtualization feature, it's also an important security feature to protect the host from DMA attacks of malicious peripherals (e.g. 1394, ExpressCard, Thunderbolt, USB 4). Fortunately Intel no longer cripples IOMMU (VT-D) since Skylake, but ECC is another story.
http://international.download.nvidia.com/partnerforce-us/Bra...
> "From the mid 90s to early-mid 2000s, stylized as nVIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products. Now officially written as NVIDIA, and stylized in the logo as nVIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA".
I think this is because they were outcompeted by AMD in the GPU crypto days, so they didn't want to get in the way of that (nor were they likely to succeed in blocking this use).
It was about NVidia wanting to make it so their 3rd party GPU partners, (EVGA, Asus etc.), could only sell their popular GPU brands with NVIDIA in them, so for AMD they'd have to come up with something customers are entirely unfamiliar with.
> here's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers.
It's not just that. AMD didn't open-source their original Linux driver, presumably there could have been some 3rd party licensing issues, but they wrote a new one that is open-source.
NVIDIA doesn't even let others write an open-source driver for them, they make it purposely difficult to reverse-engineer, sign their firmware that they only release with a massive delay and generally refuse to cooperate.
Even further than this, they created such a healthy environment for it that there are now two competing open source Vulkan drivers, and the third party one (RADV) is usually winning by a bit, and is now directly supported (with staff) by Valve.
Since 2014, apple has almost exclusively used AMD graphics cards in computers that do have discrete GPUs, and I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest this was motivated with their terrible experience with Nvidia.
(I'm aware I'm not really backing this up with evidence, but I think the publicly available facts about the whole situation support this narrative)
In 2010, Apple wasn’t exactly a beleaguered company. It wasn’t like NVidia not reimbursing Apple would break the bank. Apple should have repaired it just to protect its reputation.
Jobs himself was famous for saying to high level employees that at a certain level of authority, you don’t get to make excuses.
Again, I agree with you, apple should have launched the program much, much earlier.
But, I mean, that's besides the point because this isn't a post about how Apple handled these failing GPUs, it's about Nvidia's inability to work with others.
To be fair, the issue was mainly caused by Apples form-over-function thermal design.
To best of my knowledge, Nvidia GPUs works just fine in all other laptops.
Laptops were only affected en masse because they have far more heat-cool thermal cycles than the average desktop computer.
Nvidia bumpgate says hello.
It's really not hard to find a company that nVidia's pissed off with its dealings.
In many projects that support both, OpenCL and CUDA often give similar performance, and in some, OpenCL is faster than CUDA. So CUDA isn't about getting more performance - it's about excluding everything non-NVIDIA.
I suspect that NVIDIA's gameplaying is what led to Apple deciding to not use NVIDIA in any Macs for the last several years.
C++ support only came to OpenCL after it was clear to Khronos that it was time to move beyond C only vision of the world, yet almost no one bothered to implement OpenCL 2.x, which is why OpenCL 3.0 is basically OpenCL 1.2 to make all those OEM compliant, and SYCL is now moving into an backend agnostic C++ stack.
So the competition did not move a finger to make OpenCL eco-system beat CUDA tooling, Google did not cared one second to make OpenCL available on Android instead pushed for their own Renderscript C99 dialect, but it is easy to blame NVidia when competition isn't up to their stuff.
Just like Apple, after creating OpenCL and offering it to Khronos, moved away from their own creation after disputes on how OpenCL roadmap should be managed. Ironically, just like with CUDA, Metal Compute happens to be multiple language aware and having a modern API.
The fundamental failing Khronos made was repeating the GLSL mistake and not specifying a compiled IR that would decouple OpenCL kernel code from program execution. This was clearly known to be a mistake at the time, given ample evidence from CUDA and HLSL that an IR was possible and could greatly improve the developer experience.
To be fair, I recently bought a new Thinkpad, and with Ubuntu 20.04 and Nvidia CUDA just worked, with absolutely no tuning (I didn't even need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which I found pretty odd). So things seem to be improving, because there's money in it for Nvidia.
Both Intel and AMD do have an official FLOSS Linux driver and regularly work with the wider community.
I had an SH-3 PDA in 2001, but Microsoft dropped support for SH-3 and MIPS in Windows CE by the time “Windows Smartphone 2002” came out (my 2002 HTC Canary runs ARM, IIRC) so it’d have to be a non-CE platform. What did the Palm Handspring use?
Source: I maintained the compiler test infra for it.
What’s the current roadmap for CE? I saw there’s a new CE environment in Win10 IoT, but it feels like too-little-too-late to save the myriad of embedded enterprise CE systems.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things/mo...
No clue sorry! I left many many years ago.
CE7 was incredibly good, the minimum image size we had it running on was ~20MB on disk.
Oh how naive I was!
(I assume the push for WPF-like XAML in CE7 was because at the time (2011-2012?) there was still hope of a CE7-based Windows Mobile competing with iOS and Android, and Microsoft realized the mistake of not modernizing CE's UI system at-all between 2002 and 2012? Windows Mobile 6.5 was a hideous eyesore (and all the pretty home-screen functionality was literally just skin-deep).
At some point in time it got then renamed in embedded compact.
Source: worked in the automotive together with a couple of supplier which built those systems.
I seriously doubt it, Broadcom - Qualcomm sale was blocked because there were concerns that the former would inhibit the telecom technologies development of the latter, resulting in strategic disadvantage to U.S. But, in the case of supposed Nvidia-ARM sale I see the quite opposite i.e. huge strategic advantage to U.S. and so I feel the anti-trust might not be at least State initiated.
But, would other U.S. Big Tech who have invested heavily in the ARM ecosystem oppose this is what to be seen. But even there, I wonder whether their fear could be substantiated? What if Nvidia just signs a good agreement with them to alleviate their fears? After all Apple and Qualcomm were strangling each other throats, now see where they are now.
In the end, I think the deal would just go through and it's us who are worried about the future our Raspberry Pis among others things who would feel lost(and actually loose).
I don’t see this being much liked by those authorities, either. nVidia is clearly interested in doing this deal because it will give them competitive advantages, and it’s pretty clear by their behaviour versus other firms (including Apple!) that they have so much of that already that they don’t have to “play nice”. Giving them further purview to do as they please is basically what anti-trust is designed to prevent, whether you focus on industry relations or the ascendant on consumers.
British resistance caused American Pfizer to walk away from a potential merger with British AstraZeneca.
There are countless examples where country 1 has stopped a merger between a company from country 2 and one from country 3.
> There are countless examples where country 1 has stopped a merger between a company from country 2 and one from country 3.
From what I've seen, the only method of enforcement for a third-party country is to ban the sale of goods in their respective markets following the merger (like GE/Honeywell in the early 2000s). Would that even be possible in this case?
Don't forget that these are public companies and a stopped merger can affect their stock. Besides, major investors would eat the board alive if they put the company in such situation.
Antitrust regulators for big markets like the US, EU can effectively block mergers from any internationally operating company. Both AMD and Nvidia need access to EU - their customers certainly do.
> Antitrust regulators for big markets like the US, EU can effectively block mergers from any internationally operating company. Both AMD and Nvidia need access to EU - their customers certainly do.
They could block the merger and if the companies decided to go ahead with it anyway, the EU would ban imports. But, wouldn't that further consolidate the market?
This has never happened, because the profit loss from both parties from losing access to a market with 400M+ people has always made investors blanche.
What I'm trying to get at is, with a sufficiently large merger, the emerging company may produce products so ubiquitous that it would be impractical to bar them from your economy, due to the widespread use of their products and their integration into other products.
> Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?
Well, technically, yes ;-) This does not change anything to your point though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_ZenFone#Second_generation...
There were some annoying software aspects (the Play Store only allowed me to download x86 apps even though it could run ARM apps), and the device was 100% a battery hog - but cool tech.
Surprised Intel gave up on that effort.
Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former...
> Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former...
MIPS SoCs simply fell too much behind. They kept presence in the STB, and router boxes for some time, but even there they lost due to overall "deadness" of the entire ecosystem:
Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM
Want to not to have to support your own Linux fork? Go for ARM
Want more IP coming from a single vendor that just core, interrupt, controller, and DMA? Go for ARM
Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM
When MIPS understood that they are losing, they simply gave up on competing, and improving.
And in the end, the lunch went to MediaTek because it was the only SoC vendor that was ready to ship competitive SoCs with 4G baseband without rapacious licensing deals like Qualcomm do.
But then everything suddenly stopped and they left the market altogether.
Edit: Regarding this:
> Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM
One of the founders of OpenCores (RIP) told me that ARM lawyers contact him _within hours_ of someone pushing a design they dont like. While MIPS has a bad rep, ARM is probably more aggressive.
Interested in this comment: were MIPS/Imagination known for being particularly litigious around licensing?
> Want to not to have to support your own Linux fork? Go for ARM
But that's also true for MIPS.
Making a Linux port for a given MIPS based SoC is a known pain. They should've worked towards not requiring any hardcoded configuration for each SoC at all, like Linux on ARM does these days.
I thought all major kernel archs were on device trees now...
So every vendor had to upstream their own soc in its own
So their MIPS stuff might be consigned to the past at this point.
Er... not convinced about this one.
ARM has been quite lawyerish sometimes.
For a while, parts of QEMU could not be published, at ARM's request, because they implemented instructions ARM did not permit a software emulator to emulate.
At least one non-commercial design on opencores.org was removed at ARM's request.
By comparison, for a while MIPS ISA was completely open for anyone to implement, software or hardware. That's been retracted now, but it was nice while it lasted. ARM has never done that as far as I know.
Even before, I used devices based around MIPS without a licence a long time ago, so long as they avoided implementing one or two "special sauce" instructions that was fine. The instructions weren't necessary, just a neat, patented optimisation, and I have a GCC patch somewhere for building the target without those instructions.
So I don't know about today, but until recently I would have consistently regarded MIPS as much less lawyerish than ARM.
Intel makes both CPUs and GPUs.
AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs.
nVidia would make both CPUs and GPUs.
What would be the difference?
Actually, as long as there are a number of arm design licensees, the situation would be way better than it currently is for x86: beyond Intel and AMD there is basically no other player in that field (Via? Transmeta? are they even noticeable?).
They need to pay $30bn to buy ARM which means they want to maximize the return for that purchase, which would be selling more and not disrupt for competitors to look elsewhere.
Nit: fazed, not phased.
...I can barely bring myself to type and submit that...
"Dear America..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw
I wouldn't call it a corruption though, because I've never actually heard it in Britain; just American film and television, and even on HN.
The intended meaning is obvious. There's plenty of colloquial phrases which say one thing but mean another: "I could murder him", for example, doesn't literally mean that. That is how language works.
And, if you saying "there's beer in the cup" was understood by everyone as meaning "there's no more beer in the cup", professional linguists and dictionaries would be A-OK with that interpretation.
The fact that "I could care less" is now clearly understood is not intentional. It's an adaptation to a mistake. It's similar to how people say "irregardless", which is clearly an error. It's unambiguous, and everyone knows what you mean. It's still a mistake, and using "regardless" is strictly better.
Yes, that's what language is. Will you be complaining about "apron" as an adaptation to a mistake?
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/how-a-na...
> It's similar to how people say "irregardless", which is clearly an error.
It's an error that's been being made since 1795, though, and people have been understanding it which pretty much qualifies it as being incorporated into the language.
(I should note that I am strongly descriptivist and think that prescriptivists are silly people.)
> using "regardless" is strictly better.
I think "regardless" is better, yes, because it's a lot easier to say but that's just my opinion, not a Gilt Edged Rule Of English.
Now I learned not one but two important correct spellings. Thanks!
Their new notebooks are still moving to an ARM-based CPU... Even if they enhanced the ARM design they still have an ARM licence.
Apple supposedly pays intel more for their CPUs than other OEM to avoid having their sticker on Macs; So I don't see this as odd, it's usual Apple branding tactic and from the looks of it(ARM being under threat of sale) it seems to be a wise decision as an average Apple customer wouldn't mind if it switches the architecture for its silicon.
It would be more accurate to say Apple does not receive the Marketing Discount from Intel.
In reality i seriously doubt those discount dont materialise. Intel could have given the TB3 controller for free as part of the deal. Likely less than the Sticker Discount, but still a decent cost saving.
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.
This would have to be the case, because Apple still uses many of their earlier ARM designs in products, which we know used ARM designed cores and would definitely require core design licenses.
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.
For an ordinary licensee you might think so, but Apple may well have special terms, given that they co-founded ARM
?????
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-28-fi-4993-s...
Apple went on to use ARM in the Newton and other devices....
"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-...
I can easily see the man now running the UK (Dominic Cummings) deciding to take a stake in ARM. Maybe other ARM customers would also be willing to take (non controlling) stakes to keep it away from Nvidia (Apple of course used to be a big shareholder).
It seems perfectly valid for the UK government to step in to protect its most successful technology firm.
tHe MaRkEt WiLl ReGuLaTe ItSeLf!!!
If the UK owns ARM, over time every investment decision they made will be required to benefit the party in charge, it’s supporters and their districts. That will certainly destroy ARM.
I don't like state ownership either. No one is suggesting that UK govt should buy ARM outright - just that it takes a stake alongside other long term investors so that ARM can remain independent.
NVidia will be contractually obligated to support ARM customers. If over time they do a poor job, they just flushed $32B down the drain.this is an imaginary problem that requires zero preemptive government action. It’s like trying to stop someone from buying an expensive car they can afford on the unsupported theory they won’t take care of it.
It's not just an assumption that they will manage their investment poorly (although that wouldn't surprise me), it's what the likely behaviours of other market participants would be if a key supplier was controlled by a competitor.
In the US that’s the type of thinking that’s given us the SLS, an $20B launch system that will cost more than twenty times as much as commercial alternatives, and is required by law to use obsolete 50 year old components from key congressional districts.
The point made in the article is that that absence of influence will be better than the negative influence that nvidia would apply.
Norwegian sovereign fund is an investment fund that holds a tiny fraction of each public companies stock in its fund. For the UK to engineer a purchase of ARM would require raising $32B, offering to kick in 1.3% would go nowhere. Anyone with 99% of $32B doesn’t need the UK.
An alternate deal is only possible if the UK offered to kick in a large part, probably at least $10B, and taking a large minority stake. At that level they’d have to have significant influence, or the politicians who engineer it will get run right out of office. What if the new owner moves R&D from the UK?
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.
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.
In October 2019 the market cap was 226B vs 108B in favor of Intel. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/10/10/ho...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...
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.
Because the perpetual license is much much cheaper than $32B.
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.
Huh?? ARM is probably the most popular CPU architecture in use today -- unlike x86, which is largely limited to desktop/laptop and server computing, ARM is used in a lot of embedded applications.
Even if you're only looking at mobile phones, the cellular baseband is often implemented on ARM as well, and it definitely isn't a Linux system either. (Nor is it open source.)
Source
Compare that with https://www.slashgear.com/the-2019-global-smartphone-sales-t..., which says about 1,5 billion smartphones were sold in the four quarters of 2019.
Also, Android, I think, by now is an edge case of open source. The kernel is, but there’s a thick proprietary layer on top of it without which it wouldn’t be Android.
I tried to get real stats and didn't get far. The most I could find was that ARM was actually declining somewhat in embedded, and that embedded was less than half of revenues. Also, that ARM had 90 percent of the 'phone/tablet/laptop' market, but nothing amounting to close to a majority anywhere else.
I think I was incorrect saying that it isn't close, it likely is. I still think more go to supporting a Linux device than not, but am happy to be proven wrong if such data exists.
Also, the more are sold, the more hardware costs become important relatively to development costs, making Linux a poorer choice than smaller OSes or even bare metal.
(And the smallest really are small. https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/processors/cortex-m/co... tells me you can get a 0.0066 mm² 32-bit CPU. That one doesn’t have a MMU)
Need to play the "Blob" song by OpenBSD.
https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39
> Blob was popular at school he was helpful too / He could get your motor runnin' / with a drop of goo / He was givin' it away never charged a dime / But by the time he graduated / Blob was business slime!
> He was a blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah
> He's givin' you the Evil Eye!
> Now everybody had it / they was drivin' around / They was givin' up their freedoms / for convenience now / Blobbin' up the freeway, water black as pitch And somehow little Blobby was a growin' rich!
> He was a blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah
> It's linkin' time!
> Now it was out of control / n' fishy's came to depend / on Blobby's Blob Blah, seemed to be no end / Then his empire spread and to their surprise / Blobby been a growin' to incredible size!
> He's a blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b
> Then along came a genius Doctor Puffystein / And he battled the Blob / who had crossed the line / He was 50 feet tall — Doctor said "No fear" / I got a sample of Blob I can reverse engineer!
> But it was too late! / Blob was takin' over the world! / He wants your video! / Ya he wants your net! / He wants your drive! / He wants it all!!
> Somebody help us! / Noooooooo!
> NVIDIA! / Intel! / Atheros! / 3-Ware! / VIA! / ATI! / Broadcom! / TI! / Myricom! / HighPoint! / Adaptec! / Mylex! / ICP Vortex! / and IBM!
> Takin' over the world!
Also in case you haven't noticed, the IoT domain where ARM thrives is getting full of BSD/MIT POSIX clones, guess why.
ARM mbed, Zephyr, RTOS, NuttX, Azure RTOS ThreadX, ...
> the way copyleft licenses have been managed has brought us back to the commercial licenses with source code, just under a different name to make them more appealing to younger generations.
I think, I'm following along (&agree), but to be sure, could you perhaps elaborate a bit on that? (Also for other? readers)
And not everything gets upstream, in name of keeping the main business at the company's soul, for example those optimizations used by clang on PS4? Sure all of those that don't reveal PS4 architecture features that could eventually be "misused".
The large majority of those business have moved into clang, thus reducing GCC usage to copyleft hardliners, Linux is visible on ChromeOS and Android but not on a context that it can fully profit from and then there is Fuchsia waiting on the backstage.
So in a couple of generations, when copyleft software is just a memory in digital books, we will have gone full circle to the days when buying developer software would entitle you to an extra floppy with a partial copy the source code.
The only difference is how that partial copy gets delivered, which will be just the upstream of non-copyleft software.
I can't discern from your writing tone, if you think the above is desirable or a train_wreck_in_slow_motion coming.
I think, it's the latter, not necessarily by direct effect, but by all the bad behavior this will enable in corporations for generations to come.
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.
As a FOSS user and developer, this is already a big problem to me. Although the situation of Nvidia's mobile GPUs (e.g. Tegra) is a bit better than desktop GPUs, but not much better.
AFAIK, all embedded GPU drivers have to be reverse engineered and none are open source.
as you mentioned, it looks like Tegra might have some open-source contrib from the mfg.
I don't see this as much of a problem, competition is already on the way.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15963/oppos-reno3-vs-reno3-pr...
It has to do with their superior modem.
Also what’s the difference between ARM and RISC-V. Why chose one over the other ?
ARM is a "known" situation. They have TrustZone, we know it exists, but buyers/end-users do not get full control of it (outside of some niche products, or dev-boards). That situation will not change. With ARM, get already got used to the idea, that you'll never "own" the machine, you are merely allowed to execute some code in a walled-off area of your Telescreen.
So, with RISC-V, you have even less assurance, that the processor IC really contains what you expect, and nothing more.
Most people will keep using closed systems because they don't care about computer architecture, but us hackers will finally have a chance at having a (small) portion of the market. A small industry of open hardware.
True, but can you recall any moment in history, where market forces did not actually make producing "open" devices unprofitable? So, (imo) in theory, you are right, but in practice, (successful) companies will use the technology to create "even more closed" system, and worse: Make systems, where the user can't even tell, if he got an "open" system.
> A small industry of open hardware
That you will only be able to use in a lab/isolated_env, or illegally, because mandatory signing of FWs/BLs/OSs/APPs is just around the corner for consumer devices capable of speaking to the internet.
And I have not reason not to believe, that somebody somewhere is waiting for a pre-text to implement full vertical stack control in law for his (region/country/domain). Perhaps "so that we can ensure, that the contact-tracing app gets installed everywhere, otherwise we'll all die!!11!". Or protecting us from Terrorism; that usually does the trick. This argument also works surprisingly well to argue against backdoor-less encryption protocols. See e.g. Australia (iirc)
Do you not perceive a similar evolution?
Note, TP,SB,ME could in theory be used to build "secure" systems, but currently they are (also) used to secure the PC against you, the buyer/user.
I'd say that the early era of personal computers proved it. The Apple II and IBM PC were very open platforms-- thoroughly documented, developer friendly and made with very few parts you couldn't buy out of your favourite electronics distributor catalogue.
They were riotous successes in large part because the open platform meant they didn't have to guess or corral the entire market. Remember that most of the killer apps of the era (VisiCalc, WordPerfect, dBase, 1-2-3, etc.) were third party, and it was largely aftermarket firms selling "six-in-one" cards, Sound Blasters, and Hercules graphics cards that patched the gaping holes in the PC's hardware design.
Conversely, look at a machine like the TI-99/4 series: while on paper a decent machine for the time, it was as "closed" as a machine of the era could be: an unusually limited built-in development platform, and many of the desirable upgrades involved buying a very expensive expansion chassis.
It's interesting to consider what the business tradeoffs of today's walled garden model are. Apple could choose to do a "pure hardware" play, or emulate the early 1980s IBM, where they offered some popular software via their own product line as a trusted source. The result would probably be a marginally larger total addressable market, as it would bring some customers and developers to the platform who needed something that could never clear the App Store before. But would the growth in market size compensate for the reduction in the average cut they can command from the market?
What about the whole debacle around the IBM BIOS?
You could argue it was imperfect (not exposing every feature it could, and having performance costs, sent a lot of software to bypass it and pound hardware registers directly, creating that weird world of early clones that would run MS-DOS but not 1-2-3 or Flight Simulator) but it doesn't seem like a hostile gesture to external developers.
Now it was definitely a legal hurdle if you wanted to make an outright clone, but by 1984 or so, Compaq and Phoenix had solved that problem.
I fail to see how this is different from today's situation. What's stopping targetted attacks via custom modifications of ARM or x86 chips?
Nothing, if you have power over the manufacturers. (Usually governments)
But now, with RISC-V, anybody with deep enough pockets to spare a few million can create fake silicon, where you'd need an electron microscope to prove, that you got an "enhanced by TAO" chip.
Which for all intents is ... governments.
So no real difference.
See India's Shakti
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/10/03/india-is-trying-to...
... where they will fab their own cpu chips for, eg, military use starting from inspectable, verifiable open source Risc-V HDL.
If you have the time/money/infrastructure/knowledge/trusted_personnel to design/make/test/etc entire processors, then now with RISC-V you can in theory make secure systems.
Also remember, that your effort needs to already start at the level of tool-chain, and other tooling, all the way down to the transistor. Otherwise you'll have a trust problem with regards to your compilers/synthesizers/etc.
But that is quite a high barrier for entry for anybody smaller than a decent sized country.
What you wrote, quoted above, has it completely backwards.
You seem to care, and claim to be wise, so please, do enlighten me, where I'm wrong. We may be misinterpreting, what the other one is trying to say.
I'll try to re-word what I mean: If your "system" uses standard off-the-shelf parts (CPU/SOC/Mem/...), then the fact, that you can go out to the shop, and buy standard replacements, means that you can be reasonably sure to be able to thwart/detect a targeted attack on your supply-chain easier, than if your device contains a e.g. custom, specific CPU for that device, that could contain god knows what extensions to the instruction set, and that you can only get a replacement for from that one specific vendor.
Or where do I have dent in my logic?
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).
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/06/09/how-arm-has-alrea...
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.
"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).
Should've thought of that before they sold it to a Japanese fund.
Yeah, so? If the 21st century taught us anything, is that protectionism makes sense for many products/services (not that big countries really forgot it - they only "forgot" it when for the time that their products was the only game in town).
The big powers that profited most in the 20th century, weren't following free trade - they were colonial and post-colonial overlords, enforcing their trade deals and terms on lesser countries.
Free trade was OK for those big countries like the US, UK, France, Germany, etc they were running the shots, and were net top exporters themselvess...
And even at that, they themselves could not care less about "free trade" doctrines. Sponsoring your own country industries, using your political force to get global deals, subsidies, etc, were OK for the mid-20th/early 21st century, when they had done it.
When that changed, and their trade partners got increasingly bigger, "free trade" got too much for them and pressured their partners countries (like with the Plaza Accord).
Now that the US can't do the same to China (due to its sheer size and power), old globalization and free trade flag-bearers discovered suddenly that free trade might not be the "be all end all".
This is one of the main reason why US is fighting China.
[Sidenote: this has resulted in the hilariousness of taking an Android kernel and development infrastructure and them slowly trying to make it back into something that looks like a normal Linux system. Their board support package is a hot mess, but gets used in real products because the hardware actually works well. A software company NVidia is not.]
Softbank doesn't want ARM anymore. what do Hermann Hauser proposed? Let ARM holding die(?). He offer no solution.
Why would ARM die? it's very healthy and financially stable right now. it's softbank who's bleeding money.
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.
Although I still for the life of me can't understand why Miyoshi son is holding on to wework and selling ARM.
It's a cash-crunch driven deal, nothing else.
Wework is definitely a loser, ARM is a winner - its completely upside down. If he wants cash, he should sell his trash. And avoid future losses by not buying trash in the first place.
Selling ARM lets Softbank keep WeWork living for a couple more years, enough time to bring the non-japan markets into cashflow positive status. Japan by some miricle was cash flow position from the start, he must think the model can work overseas.
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.
There is no evidence the UK government could run ARM better than NVidia. In fact the opposite is true.
If Nvidia does buy ARM it’s time to buy stock in anyone who does RISC-V
That is of course, to protect their own interests as opposed to making it into a successful business in its own right.
Edit: His concern was far more muted when it came to SoftBank in 2016 https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/690588/ARM-Holdings-...
Or maybe you should just admit that your original comment was not well founded?