The ecosystem business model that defines Arm simply doesn't have any space for them being perceived as biased this way or that way.
I would imagine plenty. Take a look at the list of vendors that sell Nvidia GPUs despite the fact that Nvidia sells directly into the market.
>The ecosystem business model that defines Arm simply doesn't have any space for them being perceived as biased this way or that way.
I don't know, Intel's recent announcement that they're going to start licensing their IP directly contradicts that. I don't think Intel would waste what will likely be a fairly large amount of money spinning up a new business unit without first doing some market research and ensuring there's demand for it.
We have people licensing Arm and building interesting CPUs (Ampere).
I'm not sure that the NVIDIA acquisition would be good for the market or for Arm.
Intel has done lots of things that it turns out people didn't want to do (with them).
I can't tell if you're saying you have insider information or you're just assuming they're getting customers with no evidence.
And Annapurna (owned by Amazon) sells CPUs to all sorts of vendors, including Ubiquiti and Synology.
Adding to that Intel didn't exactly pick this model as their first choice. The combination of a wafer production shortage and Intels CPUs underperforming is what drove Intel to this. It is neither Intels or most feasible clients first choice.
Intel once was in a similar position to Nvidia and everyone hated them then. The failure of their last few generation has meant they don't have as strong a monopoly position and so have to start taking a more conciliatory position with the market. I don't know if they're succeeding here but it's obvious they've been "humbled".
Now, maybe Nvidia will treat ARM completely differently than it's GPUs. But companies tend to have single cultures and so it's easy to imagine Nvidia squeezing dimes from other ARM customers, where ARM has been at the opposite side of the market, reasonably priced, good-enough tech. Charging a high premium on your capital investment works for a market leader, that uses the money for more investment. But for a market followers, the same strategy results in market share shrinking 'till the whole thing dies (not that this isn't a way to make money but when the thing dies, some people are unhappy).
> I'm not sure that the NVIDIA acquisition would be good for the market or for Arm.
NVIDIA works with Ampere and just started shipping server nodes with Ampere CPUs.
If that was bad for Ampere, they would not be working with NVIDIA on this.
Not that you are right/wrong (I don't know), but Ampere appears to be an example that shows the opposite of what you are trying to claim.
Why?
> which customer would prefer to buy IP from a potential competitor rather than from a neutral provider.
The same customers that buy NVIDIA GPUs, NVIDIA interconnects, support NVIDIA's software, etc.
You seem to be suggesting that this "somehow" matters, but are not explaining "why" do you think this matters.
AFAICT if AMD wants to ship a data-center node, it needs Mellanox interconnect, and has to buy that from NVIDIA, pretty much in the same way that NVIDIA ships AMD CPUs with their DGX boxes.
There are dozens of thousands of pattents that all these companies need to buy from each other on a regular basis to function.
I don't see how this particular change makes the status quo worse.
Not as low power as mobile phones, but not completely far away either.
I think the overall trend is still accurate and in either case ARM + Nvidia is (or would be) a compelling provider of hardware but the segment of the market that needs/relies on X86 architecture does seem to be shrinking.
Until now the competing products of NVIDIA and Qualcomm differed in NVIDIA having worse CPUs and better GPUs and Qualcomm having better (ARM-designed) CPUs and worse GPUs.
I do not find it believable that in the future NVIDIA would ever provide Qualcomm with better CPUs than those of NVIDIA products.
Given NVIDIA's desire of dominating the datacenters, it is also hard to believe that they will give to all other companies who will attempt to design server CPUs new ARM cores at the same time when they will be available for the internal NVIDIA design teams.
ARM does not make CPUs (it makes CPU IP), Qualcomm does.
The fact that NVIDIA builds bad ARM CPUs does not change with the acquisition as far as I can tell.
For that NVIDIA would need to invest a lot of R&D into their CPU team, and again, if it does that, it can compete with Qualcomm, independently of whether the acquisition takes place.