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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, you are correct. This is what Nvidia was looking for since out of the big 3 US semiconductor manufacturers, it doesn't have its own IP on CPUs. Now it will soon be able to control ARM to its advantage against the competition. This will indeed push the urgency for RISC-V to be worth looking at in the next few years to be used by hardware vendors soon. But it will be a long wait.

As for the UK now realizing SoftBank's expensive 'pass the parcel game' with ARM since 2016, I'd say you only appreciate something until it is gone. [0][1] In terms of technology, the UK simply didn't know what they had.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54122692

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24362846

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> This is what Nvidia was looking for since out of the big 3 US semiconductor manufacturers, it doesn't have its own IP on CPUs. Now it will soon be able to control ARM to its advantage against the competition.

In all fairness, consider the market from Nvidia's perspective: they've spent a few decades being a stone's throw from Intel eating them. They started as one of many add-on card manufacturers and have turned into a dominant player by innovating, iterating, and being ruthless.

Some here might not remember how cutthroat the early-GPU days were. Nvidia survived.

Now, an opportunity to become a technical peer to Intel at the CPU level? To control their own destiny?

They'd be insane not to take this opportunity.

I don't remember it being all that cutthroat tbh. 3dfx was arguably the only game in down and ATi was it's whipping boy. Matrox was over in the corner saying "look nah two monitors at once!"

3dfx stumbled right as nVidia dropped the GeForce and blew everything away.

ATi became nVidia's whipping boy and Matrox just added the ability to drive more monitors.

I mean aside from not knowing if Matrox is still around, not much has changed from what I can see.

You just described a space with 4 competitors fighting for the same market. How could it be anything other than cutthroat? GPUs are not the kind of space where it’s easy for new companies to enter. It very much was a winner takes all market.

> It very much was a winner takes all market.

Of course. The multi billion dollar market is just too small for more than one company. Nvidia is just biding it’s time on ~20% market share until it can put the finishing moves on the other 9 major vendors.

Cutthroat usually means something like unprincipled or ruthless competition. When 3DFX and now Nvidia were on top, there was no assailing them. You exist in a position they allow you to exist.

Perhaps the competition between 3DFX and ATi or Nvidia and AMD could be described as cutthroat but the other "competitiors" in the space couldn't even compete and eventually they all just pivoted into other things without anyone noticing or caring.

It's not unlike the x86 processor market. Companies like Via and Transmeta existed but they never were any serious competition to Intel or AMD.

ATI/AMD remains nearly the only competitor nvidia has in the discrete GPU space. But we started out with 3dfx, S3, nvidia, ati.

PowerVR, Matrox, Trident, Bitboys Oy, 3Dlabs, Rendition, Intel740...

SiS also had 3D graphics chips. Tseng Labs was probably one of the earliest victims of the 3D GPUs wars, having developed but never completed the ET6300.

PowerVR still exists and is seems successful in the mobile market (having provided Apple's GPUs until A10).

Oh wow I had a Tseng Labs T4000(?) on my second Linux computer! I forgot about them!

Imgtech/PowerVR was successful in the mobile market until Apple stopped buying their GPUs. Now they have practically no mobile customers though they're still reasonably successful in the automotive market.

PowerVR died when Mali became a viable GPU, it was also much less Apple than Qualcomm switching to Mali and then to reference ARM cores in general.

That was the gist of my comment. Nvidia could have easily been PowerVR, if Intel had shown earlier interest (~00s) in developing a serious graphics product.

As it was, it seems they made the Microsoft/Internet and Microsoft/Mobile mistake and saw market evolution only as a threat to their existing portfolio, rather than as an opportunity.

I'm not sure that's correct, one of the main reasons why NVIDIA succeeded is that they actually pushed technology and they always seem to have a much longer term vision than for the next 1-2 iterations.

I'm also not sure if you are suggesting NVIDIA made the same mistake as Microsoft regarding mobile, but them buying ARM is anything but that.

Them buying ARM is a way for them to offer a fully vertically integrated solution for the enterprise, pushing their existing initiatives such as NVDLA (https://github.com/nvdla/) being able to exert more control over the future of ARM architectures and designs for specific fields especially automotive as well as potentially getting their graphics and compute IP into billions of devices.

Anyone who thinks NVIDIA is buying ARM to simply trash it or to mess up with their competition is wrong, I'm not saying NVIDIA would necessarily be successful but most of the so called competitors that people are point at aren't their competitors at all.

NVIDIA is also buying a lot of talent with this acquisition, specifically the likes of ARM Austin which were responsible for the A76-78 cores.

NVIDIA + ARM + Mellanox has the potential to be a player on an unprecedented level for the hyperscaler and HPC markets, especially if the likes of Apple and Amazon (and to lesser extend Cloudflare etc.) do a lot of the heavy lifting for them. Apple going with ARM is probably the best thing NVIDIA could've asked for.

Intel was the intended antecedent for "they". I should have been clearer.

> Qualcomm switching to Mali

When did that ever happen?

Qualcomm used to license AMD's handheld GPUs (IP), then acquired that whole business unit from AMD. They've never used either Mali or PowerVR in any products that I know of.

Source: worked at PowerVR 2006-2007, then worked at AMD's handheld division including during the acquisition by Qualcomm, and stayed there until 2017.

> Source: worked at PowerVR 2006-2007, then worked at AMD's handheld division including during the acquisition by Qualcomm, and stayed there until 2017.

David, you're entirely too qualified to be speaking about these things.

Yeah there's a lot more fights NVidia has had.

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

Note that Tesla does not use NVIDIA anymore.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/nvidia-takes-aim-at-teslas-cus...

FYI, Nintendo Switch is Tegra based as well. 61 million units isn't bad, and there are significantly more Tegras in use in Switch consoles than in Jetson boards or even Telsas (~1 million).

Yeah and a bunch of NVIDIA products too (the Shield, etc).

But it hasn't really seen the broad based success in mobiles they were hoping for, yet.

(By comparison, a midsize mobile company like Oppo sold 115M units in 2019)

> Now, an opportunity to become a technical peer to Intel at the CPU level? To control their own destiny?

> They'd be insane not to take this opportunity.

It made financial sense for ARM's board to sell to SoftBank; it makes financial sense for SoftBank to sell to NVIDIA; it makes financial and strategic sense for NVIDIA to buy ARM; it makes financial and strategic sense for NVIDIA to radically change the way the ARM ecosystem works to benefit themselves.

And yet, the world will lose out massively by having the ARM ecosystem radically changed to benefit NVIDIA.

Capitalism certainly does a lot to create value for society as a whole, but this is just one of many examples of where capitalism also destroys value for society as a whole.

Why stop there ? It'll make financial sense for previous users of ARM license to start looking for alternatives ( such as riscV) and create more competition in the field. Which ultimately benefits to the people as a whole.

At least that's the theory of capitalism..

> the world will lose out massively by having the ARM ecosystem radically changed to benefit NVIDIA.

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.

This is a premature judgement.

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".

Looking through the doomsayers in this thread, this is the result I believe to be most likely. If ARM goes belly up through gross mismanagement, then the laurels will be taken up by someone else. I think another aspect to consider is the perpetual license agreements ARM holds with several other businesses. I think this may muzzle Nvidia to some extent.

ARM also has well-funded competition in many spaces in the form of Intel and AMD. And to a lesser extent in Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung.

And while people may grouse about many things, chiefly paying a perceived Nvidia tax, I don't think anyone would accuse Nvidia of being strategically incompetent.

The more likely negative outcome seems to be that Nvidia would steer future ARM development so that their CPU+GPU solutions are more performant than anything anyone else can afford to produce.

Which seems like a negative... but far from the worst negative.

TBH, I think ARM's non-GPU business isn't interesting enough to Nvidia to screw with.

Very well put

The biggest thing if you have been in prolonged vicious competition, is to Control Your Own Destiny and leave the basket of crabs behind

For Nvidia this is a MASSIVE win

Softbank are @#$@#$ idiots for selling ARM

Right when ARM is finally taking over the world

For what?

So they can fund the next bunch of charlatans - add more disasters like WeWork and Uber?

Softbank probably has a bunch of NVIDIA options that it needs to be worth money

The techies here including myself did, it was a deal the government should have looked into.

It was a crown jewel of a company, hard to imagine the French government letting it slide or the US government letting a intel be sold to a foreign company.

Even though I've long followed Arm (I went to a presentation in Cambridge from Steve Furber about the Arm 1 in 1985ish even before the first commercial chips shipped) I'm a bit sceptical about how much value would ever be generated for the UK economy by Arm. The business model is about low margins and selling to everyone around the world so its hard to see how being next door to Arm (geographically) would be a big advantage.

The theory is that clusters form around “anchor tenants”; Cambridge has the University (and its excellent CS departments), ARM and some others, and is close to he largest capital marketplaces in the world, grandiosely bundled into a so-called “silicon fen”. So school leavers can get jobs, network, start companies, develop other tech in a virtuous circle.

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.

This is a bit of an aside, but it never ceases to amaze me how many would be tech hubs try variations of Silicon Valley in their (maybe informal?) branding. Silicon hills, Silicon fern.. (I knew a couple more but I’m forgetting atm). It’s not like it’s the name which made it what it is.

Silicon Beach. I live in one that claims the title. I suspect there are many.

Silicon slopes as well I've heard for Boulder and Salt Lake City.

Me too. But I moved here from the Silicon Prairie!

I love that name because of course all beaches are by definition made of...silicon!

An area in London was also amusingly called Silicon Roundabout.

This cracks me up I had to google and check it wasn't a made up joke. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_London_Tech_City

It's not even a roundabout any more.

You can find all the places on Wikipedia with the "Silicon something" name here[1]. Look under "S".

I live in Silicon Peach.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Information_technolog...

My personal favourite is Silicon Glen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Glen

"Silicon Valley North" checking in.

I've heard people at the wafer manufacturing facilities in South Portland, Maine refer to that little cluster as "Silicon Tundra" but I don't think anybody from outside there calls them that.

> Well that’s the theory; nobody has actually been able to reproduce Silicon Valley

Shenzhen and Israel have been pretty successful.

> The theory is that clusters form around “anchor tenants”

Yes. Largest technology hub in Europe sits in Eindhoven (Veldhoven), Netherlands where you have a technical university, but the real anchor was Philips who were headquartered there. Eindhoven is home to ASML and Signify (formerly Philips Lighting) among others.

ASML is also a Philips spun-off

It was a joint-venture between Philips and ASMI.

I think the value is a soft-power and positioning play.

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).

>hard to imagine the French government letting it slide or the US government letting a intel be sold to a foreign company

You mean something like GE buying off Alstom Énergie using corruption and government pressures ? Or the Chinese getting a piece of all our ports and nuclear tech ?

> it doesn't have its own IP on CPUs

NVIDIA does design their own CPU cores.

Using the ARM ISA for application processors.

and RISC-V for for some smaller ones too

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