I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. There's far too much at stake here. Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.