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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia already has the ability to build world beating data-center products using the three 'legs' of GPU (where it already dominates), the Mellanox technology it's acquired and Arm CPUs (where of course with an architecture license its free to improve on existing Arm designs). It already has a potential moat by virtue of its unique access to these three technologies together.

So why would it pay $30bn+ to own Arm? Because it would have the ability to directly hinder the businesses (and customers) of its current and potential competitors who have invested in the development of Arm based products. Not just in the data center but in mobile and in products that are used by billions of people around the world. That can't be right.

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> it would have the ability to directly hinder the businesses

They have extensive contracts in place. It's not like ARM instruction set is provided to nVidia and then they can just revoke it because they don't like nVidia.

I think the parent is saying that the only value add for Nvidia to purchase ARM itself rather than just purchasing an architectural licence is to use ARM in an anticompetitive way.

> to use ARM in an anticompetitive way

If so Nvidia will surely buy ARM.

That's not much of a value gain it would just push the industry further away from ARM. x86 has a lot of legacy power and it enjoyed being the only relevant platform for a long time in a lot of markets so there's a lot of cost in making stuff that was architecture specific cross platform. ARM doesn't really have that, people that deal with ARM already have to worry about infrastructure set portability (all of them also have x86 support) once you add ARM the way is open for other ISA

> That's not much of a value gain it would just push the industry further away from ARM.

I think that's the big irony here. It's taken ARM decades to break out of embedded/mobile and get to the point where they're seriously considered for workstation or server use. If Nvidia were to acquire ARM it would likely antagonize everyone to the point where they'd rush back to x86 and Nvidia would gain nothing.

That ship sailed already, Apple selling laptops with ARM processors is a sign of the times here.

Arm is the last instruction set that mattered. X86 and Arm are dead. It is always the third choice that wins.

Apple is still a very small part of the market when it comes to laptops and desktops. Their ARM-based computers will be a tiny drop in the bucket when stacked against mobile ARM chipsets. Sure, I expect PC vendors to jump on the ARM train as well, but if the sale to Nvidia happens, that could stop before it gets into full swing, or not happen at all. I'm sure PC makers who are thinking about ARM are watching this deal very carefully, and are avoiding jumping too soon.

> That's not much of a value gain it would just push the industry further away from ARM

It's enough for a short term gains, which is enough for a nifty bonus to a CEO.

He founded the company and has been CEO for 27 years, so that he could extract short-term gains?

Right, but they can neglect it, or even just signal the intention to neglect it, and everyone smaller than, say, Apple will have to skate to where that puck will lead.

I'm not so sure that would be the play. Wouldn't it make more sense to bundle their GPU/Cuda IP with new processors like how Qualcomm bundles their SoCs with their modems or Intel chipsets with their CPUs? I think the end goal here is to build a bigger moat with CUDA.

They can already do that without having to buy ARM.

I think they would be expending the money to grow their CPU team. The ARM engineers would be working on making Nvidia CPUs better, neglecting “public” ARM cores.

This would hurt small fish, but Apple, Amazon, Google, Tesla, Facebook, etc already have their own in house ARM teams.

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