Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA | Hacker News Reader

Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA

cringely.com

42 pointsprofquail34 comments

WOW does this title need to be edited. I didn't bother reading it via my RSS feed, figuring, "uh, ok, Intel is buying nVidia". That's because the RSS feed doesn't include the "cringely.com".

Intel and NVIDIA generally operate under different philsophies. Intel, of course, adamantly backs the CPU. NVIDIA has for a while been touting the superiority of the GPU and the idea of general purpose GPUs, with projects like CUDA.

Not to mention, NVIDIA is still reeling from the costs of repairing faulty GPUs from last year, coupled with the impact of the recession on demand. They were also facing pricing pressures from AMD, especially at the consumer/enthusiast level. All of this led to fixed costs and cut into margins, which resulted in lower profits in the last several quarters. However, NVIDIA's management has remained resolute with a long-term focus. IMHO, NVIDIA is, at the moment, grossly undervalued. So that $110B vs $8B market cap is a bit misleading.

Looking at the respective balance sheets of both companies, it's certainly possible. I was thinking it might not be.. but was surprised to see Intel has a 110bn market cap versus nVidia's 8..

One of the most reliable rules on the internet is that Cringley is always wrong.

Cringely called the HP-Compaq acquisition perfectly.

He gets out there a ways but is not as wrong as often as he is really right in my experience.

Did he think it would be a good idea or not - I can't remember

I remember precisely - Cringely called it Carly Fiorina's attempt to "reset the shot clock" on her tenure at HP and that it would hurt HP. It went down exactly that way.

You're confusing Cringely with John C. Dvorak.

No, Dvorak is just mad

Maybe we'll start getting some decent open source graphics drivers.

Writing drivers is one of the most difficult aspects of producing graphics cards; perhaps you are right if competition in the space decreases.

well, if this article http://www.brightsideofnews.com/print/2009/10/12/an-inconven... is true, then the answer is no.

from the article: The problem is that Intel hired a 3rd party vendor called Tungsten Graphics [now a whole owned subsidiary of VMware Inc.] to create the drivers for the parts. Problem with those drivers is the fact that "GMA500 suffers from utterly crappy drivers. Intel didn't buy any drivers from Imagination Technologies for the SGX, but hired Tungsten Graphics to write the drivers for it. Despite the repeated protest from the side of Imagination Technologies to Intel, Tungsten drivers DO NOT use the onboard firmware of the chip, forcing the chip to resort to software vertex processing."

While i share your sentiment, NVIDIA's binary blobs are pretty good.

I wont be buying any ATI product until their drivers improve substantially and Intels GPU's don't really cut it for anything beyond basic desktop effects.

Just one comment about the x86 instruction set: Right is wrong. I'm just amazed at the engineers at Intel who are getting out with this horrible instruction set (horrible, and the same time - the only assembly instruction set that I can read & write) :)

If I'm not behind the times, wouldn't there be antitrust problems from the huge percentage of the chipset market that would be held by the combined company?

AMD / ATI?

Yes, but that was smaller/smaller. This is bigger/bigger, so it's not necessarily proof that it would be allowed.

However, with AMD holding a clear lead in the GPU market at the moment, and the GPU market probably being of more concern to regulators than the chipset market, now is probably the easiest time for Intel to buy NVidia.

NVidia is one of the few fairly big companies I know that is able to write extremely good documentation. That, alone, makes me root for them.

Intel will not buy Nvidia. More like Intel can't. The deal would never go through all the checks. Intel doesnt need Nvidia and Nvidia cannot make a CPU part. At-least not an x86 CPU part (licensing).

Setting aside the antitrust issues...

Intel needs nVidia because it (arguably) cannot make a GPU part (the ones it has are slow, Larrabee is a bust). nVidia is (arguably) less dependent on Intel since it has standalone GPUs as well as low power integrated ARM+GPUs. This makes nVidia well positioned in the low power mobile world, a place where Intel just started to aspire to.

In "An Inconvenient Truth: Intel Larrabee story revealed" http://www.brightsideofnews.com/print/2009/10/12/an-inconven... (discussed on HN yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980927), skip down to the section "GPU is dead" and the war with nVidia. In it, the author asserts Intel started a war with nVidia before it had real ammunition (Larrabee) and is in a world of hurt as a result. His speculation is "...on Intel giving an x86 license to nVidia in exchange for cross-license patent, but only time will tell how the situation will develop."

If true, that would give nVidia a x86 CPU in addition to their ARM CPU and graphics GPU. Pretty interesting thought.

Didn't Intel sell the ARM division to Marvell or something?

Yes, there is irony in the world today. Intel acquired StrongARM (renamed XScale) with an ARM CPU license from DEC. IIRC, they had a development license which meant that they (now Marvell) could modify the instruction set.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale

So Intel had an unusually permissive license to a very popular, very low power CPU architecture and they sold it (June 2006). A few years later, they are struggling to recreate that low power capability in their x86 architecture.

You're right only in that they shouldn't have sold it -- they should have sat on it.

They can't let ARM or any non-x86 architecture win in a PC-replacement market.

hm, intel tries hard to make a decent GPU for years now and fails miserably every time. AMD bought ATI, why intel shouldn't pass checks to buy nvidia then? Nvidia seems a bit lost in their direction and they are using TSMC's fabs, where they could use intels if there were an acquisition. Both companies have superb engineering talent. Also, there was always this feud between AMD/ATi vs intel/NVIDIA rigs amongst geeks, might be a consolidation on that turf also.

I like that idea.

pardon my ignorance..Is it trust worthy Source ??

No, Cringely is generally untrustworthy.

Cringely means well, but he tends to get these sorts of hunches that don't necessarily have any basis in reality.

From the article: "If this reads like a huge conspiracy theory that’s because it is."

Thanks .. and i feel '?' should be added to the title ...That was some news when i saw the title...but now one of those predictions...

I am at a loss as to any predictions that Cringely has ever gotten right. In that regard, he is somewhat akin to the Amazing Criswell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Criswell)

He predicted the HP/Compaq merger (and, further, predicated that it wouldn't help). He also predicted Sun's march to irrelevance. And that the iPhone would crush Windows Mobile.

But yeah, most everything else has been wrong. This episode was particularly amusing: http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/the-neokast-mystery/ That was around the time I unsubscribed from his RSS feed.

The HP/Compaq merge wasn't too hard to see. Somebody had to buy up Compaq as the market consolidated, and it wasn't going to be Dell.

As for Sun, that's like predicting that the year will end in a few weeks. Mcnealy was one big pile of fail with his rapid course changes and bluster.

would probably lead to some pretty crazy GPU/CPU rigs. especially if the CPUs were "aware" that workloads could be offloaded to the GPU.

Speculation: EU already planning to bully Intel out of acquiring nVIDIA

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