This is not good
Would you rather have TSMC in control of ARM? Maybe have access to new architectures bundled with a mandate that you have to build them on TSMC's processes?
How about Samsung? All of the fab ownership concerns of TSMC plus they also make basically any tech product you care to name, so all the integration concerns of NVIDIA.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Key-Apple-suppli...
Microsoft? Oracle? None of the companies who could have afforded to pay what Son wanted for Softbank were any better than NVIDIA.
There are a lot of good things that will come out of this as well. NVIDIA is a vibrant company compared to a lot of the others.
ARM as an independent company, has been profoundly "neutral", allowing many companies to benefit from the ARM instruction set. It has been run very well: slightly profitable and an incremental value to all parties involved (be you Apple's iPhone, NVidia's Tegra (aka Nintendo Switch chip), AMD's EPYC, Qualcomm's Snapdragon, numerous hard drive companies, etc. etc.). All in all, ARM's reach has been because of its well-made business decisions that have been fair to all parties involved.
NVidia, despite all their technical achievements, is known to play hardball from a business perspective. I don't think anyone expects NVidia to remain "neutral" or "fair".
Yes, absolutely.
NVIDIA's not going to burn the ARM ecosystem to the ground. They just paid $40 billion for it. And they only had $11b of cash on hand, they really overpaid for it (because SoftBank desperately needed a big win to cover for their other recent losses).
Now: will everybody (including AMD) probably be paying more for their ARM IP from now on? Yes.
Or more recently, when Facebook bought Oculus for $2 Billion, did you expect Facebook to betraying the customer's trust and start pushing Facebook logins?
The Oculus / Facebook login thin just happened weeks ago. Companies betraying the promises they made to their core audience is like... bread-and-butter at this point (and seems to almost always happen after an acquisition play). We know Facebook's modus operandi, and even if its worse for Oculus, we know that Facebook will do what Facebook does.
Similarly, we know NVidia's modus operandi. NVidia is trying to make a datacenter play and create a vertical company for high-end supercomputers. Such a strategy means that NVidia will NOT play nice with their rivals: Intel or AMD. (And the Mellanox acquisition is just icing on the cake now).
NVidia will absolutely leverage ARM to gain dominance in the datacenter. That's the entire point of this purchase.
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There's a story about scorpions and swimming with one on your back. I'm sure you've heard of it before. Just because its necessary for the scorpion's survival doesn't mean it is safe to trust the scorpion.
Yes, yes, and yes. This is Oracle we're talking about. Of course they'll invest more in lawyers than tech. The only reason they still invest in Java is the lawsuit potential. If only Google had the smarts to buy Sun instead...
As for NVidia, their play probably is integration and datacenters. At the moment, going after other ARM licencees will hinder NVidia more than help (they're going after x86, no time to waste on bad PR and legal issues with small time ARM datacenter licencees; Qualcomm and Apple are in a different segment altogether). Of course, we can't guarantee it stays that way.
yes? I mean that felt eminently possible from the get-go.
ARM being owned by an organisation deeply embedded in processor design and manufacturing, will now be licensing designs to competitors, as well as getting a lot of intel on its competitors.
ARM supercomputers were poised to take on Nvidia. Now its all one and the same.
As others have said, this will do wonders for RISC-V.
It really is possible to be critical of a monopoly without disparaging the product itself. It is when a true competitor arises that we see the monopolist's true capabilities (see Intel and AMD).
There is literally no benefit to 90% of the audience if they doubled the RAM. Of course, they also want to do market segmentation too, but you can’t blame GeForce for not being designed for ML training.