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Comment by volta83 | Hacker News Reader

You claim that it is in the interest of an ARM CPU vendor that wants to buy ARM to cut ARM's R&D and sell it for parts after buying it.

What's the rationale of this claim? (you don't say)

I'd expected that ARM CPU vendors are interested in having "great" CPUs to sell and having as big of an ecosystem as possible.

So my expectation would be that NVIDIA would significantly increas - not cut - ARM's R&D budget, and will significantly invest in the ARM platform.

On top of this, NVIDIA apparently is trying to cut its reliance on Intel and AMD CPUs. I don't see how cutting ARM's R&D budget and stripping it for parts would allow them to reach that goal.

This is the opposite of what you claim.

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Nvidia don’t need ARM in-house to be successful. They already are. They are overvalued and have a huge mkt cap and are looking to make an acquisition as a result. Ultimately, the stock market will decide what Nvidia does with ARM. The pressure to deliver Q on Q improvements is immense. And re slashing and burning, it happens all the time in semiconductors. When you make an M&A, the first thing you look for are cost reduction opportunities because that’s one of the P&L drivers which in turn drives stock price (supply shortages notwithstanding). As for synergies (the other big thing in an M&A) I just don’t see any. If ARM goes to Nvidia it will be a disaster for ARM. Herman Hauser, ARM’s founder (now retired) has said as much. He was very unhappy about the SoftBank deal as well.

> Nvidia don’t need ARM in-house to be successful. They already are.

You keep saying this, but this still does not match the reality that Nvidia has bid a lot of money for ARM.

So there must be something "in" for them that makes it worth it for them to pay 40 billion dollars.

The claim that this deal will be a disaster for ARM is IMO equivalent to saying that "killing ARM is worth 40 billion dollars to NVIDIA".

That makes no sense, at all. The only reason ARM is worth 40 billion dollars is because of its users. If ARM loses its user base, it is worth as much as MIPS or OpenPOWER (aka 0 dollars).

Also, if ARM loses its user base, NVIDIA ARM CPUs become worthless.

I have a hard time believing that, after investing 15 years of R&D into their own ARM CPUs and finally shipping serious ARM CPUs to market, NVIDIA would pay 40 billions to make that all worthless.

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