SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B

Well that’s the theory; nobody has actually been able to reproduce Silicon Valley except arguably in SF (it’s more like the valley grew a tentacle is the peninsula, though the distance is far enough that the culture is slightly different).

As far as Cambridge goes, I don’t see that this purchase makes any difference for those factors, except bragging rights in Whitehall.

Being able to say "we control the architecture in seventy trillion and counting devices" gets you a seat at the tech industry grown-ups' table (next to the US, China, Japan, Korea).

They spent a lot of time and money first building motherboard chipsets[1] with on-board GPUs for AMD CPUs only to have CMD buy ATI.

Then they started a program to build their own x86 CPU[2] which Intel sued them over[3]. There was a counter suite, and the EU settlement around the same time and Intel ended up paying NVidia $1.5B3[3] which was often read a win for NVidia. Of course in retrospect it gave Intel another 10 years of CPU domination.

So then NVidia announced they were building a desktop ARM processor[5]. That went pretty much nowhere. So then there was their mobile play (the Tegra)[6]. That was supposed to let them dominate mobile phones, and went just about as well as their launch partner phone (the Microsoft Kin). It has found use in robotics (the NVidia Jetson series) and cars (the Telsa model 3) though.

So they've lost a bunch of fights, and outside GPUs it really has been cut throat.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/828

[2] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/11570/nvidia_announces_x86_cp...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-intel-nvidia/intel-pays-n...

[4] https://www.anandtech.com/show/4122/intel-settles-with-nvidi...

[5] https://www.engadget.com/2011-01-05-nvidia-announces-project... arm-cpu-for-the-desktop.html

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra

At least that's the theory of capitalism..

if that's the case, then the people who stand to lose from this _should_ be pushing the gov't to standardize and prevent fracturing of ecosystems from happening.

If NVIDIA treats ARM poorly, that benefits alternative ISAs and may ultimately undermine NVIDIAs investment. If NVIDIA treats ARM well, then that benefits the platform as a whole. The reality is going to be somewhere in the middle.

Market equilibrium does not imply maximum benefit for any one interest group. "Consumers" or "end-users" are often conflated with "society".

only if you are not already under the thumb of the US gov't. Otherwise, it's a non-issue.

Publicly traded companies allow shareholders to limit their risk - when things start to go wrong you sell your shares to a bigger fool, and it's not your problem anymore. Also, as shareholders are not personally responsible for wrongdoings of their companies it also limits the risk to the buyer.

In short: publicly traded companies are enablers for moral hazard that we constantly observe in financial markets.

Sure! But that code is generally core OS code written by a small number of people and deployed widely. If Apple or Microsoft or Google decided that OpenPOWER was the way to go, we'd be able to switch over at least some use cases. ALL of the above have current Arm offerings. Arm has reached "good enough" performance - the snapdragon 855 is as fast as a i5-8630U, and uses half the power.

The primary barrier to processor migration is compatibility with user-mode programs. Since the vast majority of programs are now using primarily ILs, such as JS or C#, once the runtimes are ported (and they have been), there's not a lot of lasting incompatibility since programs bind to APIs, not ISAs. Apps for Work (CAD, Photoshop, dev tools) are traditionally the last to port, but there has been no better time to switch architectures than now, and it's only getting easier.

Therefore there is no surprise that it is an efficient ISA.

The only significant flaw in its first version was the lack of atomic instructions, but that was corrected in the subsequent versions.

The 32-bit POWER was a very nice ISA, but it was not designed to be extendable to 64-bit. It had blocks of the encoding space reserved for future extensions, but various details of the instruction word formats depended on the fact that the size of the registers was 32 bit.

When POWER was extended to 64-bit, much earlier than IBM expected, i.e. only 5 years after the introduction of the 32-bit variant, the extension was constrained because IBM has chosen to not have a mode switch like ARM but they have chosen to make a compatible ISA extension, i.e. which has the original POWER ISA as an instruction subset.

This has constrained the instruction encodings, so the 64-bit POWER ISA has some parts that seem more clumsy that in ARMv8 and the result is that programs for POWER are usually slightly larger than their ARMv8 equivalents. However, the hardware implementation effort for equivalent performance levels should be very similar for POWER and ARM and significantly less for both than for x86.

POWER also had a compressed encoding variant, but that was implemented in very few chips. Now the latest ISA variant has introduced 2 instruction word lengths, i.e. both 64-bit and 32-bit long instructions, instead of just 32-bit long instructions.

This allows the embedding of large immediate constants in the instructions, which is an important advantage of x86 vs. traditional RISC ISAs. This might help to reduce the sizes of many POWER programs.

The summary is that RISC-V is inefficient because it requires more instructions to do the same work as other ISAs and it does not have any advantage to compensate for this flaw.

Those extra instructions appear especially in almost all loops and the most important reason is that RISC-V has a worse set of addressing modes than the the vacuum-tube computers from more than 60 years ago, which were built only with a few thousands tubes, compared to the millions or billions of transistors available now for a CPU.

Because of this defect of the RISC-V ISA, the Alibaba team who designed the RISC-V implementation with the highest current performance (Xuantie910, which was presented last month at Hot Chips) had to add a custom ISA extension with additional addressing modes, in order to be able to reach an acceptable speed.

Whenever the designers of the RISC-V ISA are criticized, they reply that the larger number of instructions is not important, because any high-performance implementation should do instruction fusion, to be able to reach the IPC of other ISAs.

Nevertheless, that is wrong for 2 reasons, instruction fusion cannot reduce the larger code size due to the inefficient instruction encoding and the hardware required for decoding more instructions in parallel and for doing instruction fusion is much more complex than the hardware required for decoding less instructions with a better encoding as in other ISAs.

https://userpages.umbc.edu/~vijay/mashey.on.risc.html

If you look at things here in 2020 it looks like it was essentially the RISCiest of the CISC architectures, x86, and the CISCiest of the RISC architectures, ARM that succeeded in the modern day while architectures more tied to an ideological camp like Alpha or SPARC or VAX have all died out in our current era. That makes me think that another very ideologically RISC architectures like RISC-V will, at the very least, have a tough row to hoe in getting widespread commercial acceptance.

Any other compatibility with Apple devices tends to be a matter of coincidence. When they moved to x86 hardware, running Windows on Macs became so easy that building Boot Camp — effectively an install wizard and a few driver packs — was easy, therefore Apple giveth. However Apple Silicon Macs will drop without Boot Camp for the obvious reasons and Apple won’t apologise as they taketh away.

The only people I’ve ever met that actually love nVidia, are enthusiast PC gamers and that’s because the games are optimised for nVidia due to nVidias anticompetitive efforts in the game development space.