I can think of no worse owner of ARM in this industry, with the possible exception of Qualcomm.
If NVidia indeed wants to have a real foothold in the CPU space, we would all be much better off if they went the RISC-V route.
If NVidia indeed wants to have a real foothold in the CPU space, we would all be much better off if they went the RISC-V route.
Or indeed just license ARM like everyone else. It's not like they can't use ARM without buying them.
Why can’t NVIDIA make their own M1 competitor as it is right now?
This is a real problem when some of that investment is porting/tuning various open source projects to make them run well on ARM. Such work would benefit the whole ARM ecosystem, including competitors who sell ARM based chips. At which point, owning ARM starts to look sensible.
An ARM license is only for unit cost benefits. Nothing else.
ARM is a first and foremost a British Company, not very good at extracting every single ounce of profits like their cousins.
"With its proposed acquisition of Arm, NVIDIA will be able to turn new AI possibilities into realities much faster."
Which doesn’t make much sense to me, unless they wish to change aspects of Arm that is currently outside of any license.
But it's nVidia. No way they are going to do anything good.
Softbank needs to liquidate some of its asset due to the genius work of con-man WeWork losing them tens of billions. The original purchase price for ARM was something like 100 - 120 P/E in 2016. And the current earnings are still 100 -120 P/E with no immediate or short term profits growth. The prospect of the company's fundamentals and future growth hasn't changed since 2016.
Who in the right mind would want to buy a company for P/E 100+ with no visible growth factor?
And since no one wants to buy it, Softbank had to find a buyer. Softbank is one of the largest shareholders in Nvidia. And with its current stock price that was a perfect fit.
Of course that is ignoring Nvidia could have said No. I guess Softbank could decide to liquidate its position on Nvidia instead.
Is your information about SoftBank being a major shareholder in nvidia up to date?
Feeling bad for spreading misinformation. :(
I will need to double check on Son, Softbank and Nvidia again.
"Denver's binary translation layer runs in software, at a lower level than the operating system, and stores commonly accessed, already optimized code sequences in a 128 MB cache stored in main memory"
It is somewhat ironic to me that, it is the software layer made available by gcc and clang that actually makes these billion dollar cpu vendors viable.
CPU vendor usually contribute to both GCC and Clang these days.
Can you further expand on this? I didn't see any evidence or even opinions backing this in the comment.
In Stratchery's wonderful write up of how quixotic & weird & strange the Nvidia acquisition of ARM seems[2], Ben highlights CEO Haung's core interesting idea of this acquisition:
"Arm’s business model is brilliant. We will maintain its open-licensing model and customer neutrality, serving customers in any industry, across the world, and further expand Arm’s IP licensing portfolio with NVIDIA’s world-leading GPU and AI technology."
And I'd love to expound on how weird, how strange this sounds. But Ben's done it far better than I could:
"Notice that last bit: Huang is not only arguing that Nvidia will serve Arm customers neutrally, but that Nvidia itself will adopt Arm’s business model, licensing its IP to competitive chip-makers. It’s as if this is an acquisition in reverse: the $318 billion acquirer is fitting itself into a world defined by its $40 billion acquisition.
Color me skeptical; not only is Nvidia’s entire business predicated on selling high margin chips differentiated by highly integrated software, but Nvidia’s entire approach to the market is about doing what is best for Nvidia, without much concern for partners or, frankly customers. It is a luxury afforded those that are clearly best in class, which by extension means that sharing is anathema; why trade high margins at the top of the market for low margins and the headache of serving everyone?"
I would LOVE to see Nvidia acquire arm & gain a soul, figure out what it means to innovate, openly, to drive tech forward while working hand in hand with others to see it get adopted & grow & thrive, in ways far beyond their own limited control & vision. Nvidia is up to great things, has such an amazing mastery of high technology that so few share, building amazing chips, releasing amazing products. They are so integrative, building great chips (gpus & cpus both), building ways to make chips work together (nvlink), building consumer electronics (shield tablet, shield tv), building ultra-dense servers (dgx).
But they do not share. "Take what you can, give nothing back!" is how a lot of people feel about Nvidia, and on many days I share that view. It's so hard to imagine. It would be such a change.
Ben tails the end of his write-up with a wonderful question posed to Huang, why does Nvidia need to own ARM? Huang comes up with great answers, seems very thoughtful, and I am excited to see his future, as he talks about it happen. But it would not be Nvidia as we know it any more doing this. The company would need to be reborn, be something else. Huang seems to get that, he sees and says that, but it seems just so much more probable that the real end would be a miserly, sad fate for ARM, performance going up yes, but control & closeness shutting down the relevance & interestingness & availability & affordability.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Arc...
[2] https://stratechery.com/2020/nvidias-integration-dreams/
Thus whoever bought ARM was doing him a big personal favor that would ultimately get repaid. NVIDIA does not need or want ARM but Son pretty much owes Huang his life now.
(Patronage Networks are a good master narriative for how any society works.)