Comment by QuixoticQuibit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by QuixoticQuibit | Hacker News Reader

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Seems like alarmist FUD to me. While I agree that having Arm owned by any one of its major customers creates some potential conflicts of interests, I think the notion that NVIDIA or any other company would start to drive licensees away with draconian terms/costs with some poor business planning pretty silly.

The more interesting question to me is what would any single (major customer of Arm) company gain from owning Arm? For instance, if NVIDIA wants to be competitive in data center CPUs (which would put them at equal footing with AMD and Intel, not more monopolistic), why couldn’t they go the Apple approach with a perpetual license and design it entirely custom (or not) as they see fit? (AFAIK they already design custom mobile CPUs.)

What do you gain by buying out an expensive, large licensing company that essentially makes no money that leaves you in a weird position with various rivals? Doesn’t quite click for me.

If they are buying the perpetual license and hiring the ARM expertise anyway, why not just get the company, which also includes giving nVidia majority control of the ARM roadmap as well.

You get the people who literally wrote the book on modern ARM, you get all the IP which builds up the patent chest (improving chances of counter-suit and cross-licensing in the event of patent infringement issues), you don't need to pay for the license, and you know you aren't going to get fucked by roadmap or licensing changes in future. And your competitors literally end up paying you for privilege of competing against you.

Not saying it's right, but there's certainly multiple arguments for it.

> If they are buying the perpetual license and hiring the ARM expertise anyway, why not just get the company, which also includes giving nVidia majority control of the ARM roadmap as well.

Because the perpetual license is much much cheaper than $32B.

The most cynical view would be that they could not reup licenses for competitors.

Wouldn't they be forced into RAND?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...

Afaict that seems to be an agreement that a patent holder enters into a third party with to promise to license their patents to implementors of the standard. In this case there is no standard, just the patents and associates technology, so I'm not sure that applies. I would be shocked though if big players didn't have similar long term agreements with Arm.

No one is going to pay $32B for a business, then cut off its key customers and revenues.

nVidia already owns Mellanox which today seems very monopolistic for any HPC-interconnect. Them buying ARM means, they could just stop supporting everything else someday.

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