This is quite concerning honestly. I don't mind ARM being acquired, and I don't mind Nvidia acquiring things. But I'm concerned about this combination.<p>Nvidia is a pretty hostile company to others in the market. They have a track record of vigorously pushing their market dominance and their own way of doing things. They view making custom designs as beneath them. Their custom console GPU designs - in the original Xbox, in the Playstation 3 - were considered a failure because of terrible cooporation with Nvidia [0]. Apple is probably more demanding than other PC builders and have completely fallen out with them. Nvidia has famously failed to cooporate with the Linux community on the standardized graphics stack supported by Intel and AMD and keeps pushing propietary stuff. There are more examples.<p>It's hard to not make "hostile" too much of a value judgement. Nvidia has been an extremely successful company <i>because of it</i> too. It's alright if it's not in their corporate culture to work well with others. Clearly it's working, and Nvidia for all their faults is still innovating.<p>But this culture won't fly well if your core business is developing chip designs <i>for others</i>. It's also a problem if you are the gatekeeper of a CPU instruction set that a metric ton of other infrastructure increasingly depends on. I really, really hope ARM's current business will be allowed to run independently as ARM knows how to do this and Nvidia has time and time again shown not to understand this at all. But I'm pessimistic about that. I'm afraid Nvidia will gut ARM the company, the ARM architectures, and the ARM instruction set in the long run.<p>[0]: An interesting counterpoint would the Nintendo Switch running on an Nvidia Tegra hardware, but all the evidence points to that this chip is a 100% vanilla Nvidia Tegra X1 that Nvidia was already selling themselves (to the point its bootloader could be unlocked like a standard Tegra, leading to the Switch Fusee-Gelee exploit).
<i>> Nvidia is the only suitor in concrete discussions with SoftBank, according to the people.</i><p>Would Arm <i>stake</i>holders (i.e. much of the computer industry) prefer an IPO?<p>In 2017, Softbank's Vision Fund owned 25% of Arm and 4.9% of Nvidia, i.e. these are not historically neutral parties, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/07/softbank-nvidia-vision-fund/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/07/softbank-nvidia-vision-fun...</a><p>After WeWork imploded, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do-you-like-we-now" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do...</a><p><i>> Neumann created a company that destroyed value at a blistering pace and nonetheless extracted a billion dollars for himself. He lit $10 billion of SoftBank’s money on fire and then went back to them and demanded a 10% commission. What an absolute legend.</i><p>Is the global industry (cloud, PC, peripheral, mobile, embedded, IoT, wearable, automotive, robotics, broadband, camera/VR/TV, energy, medical, aerospace and military) loss of Arm independence our only societal solution to a failed experiment in real-estate financial engineering?
This is troubling.<p>At the moment ARM lives or dies by the success of the ecosystem as a whole.<p>When its owned by a customer this may no longer be the case and there are huge potential conflicts of interest. For example, would an Nvidia owned ARM offer a new license to a firm that would be a significant competitor to an existing Nvidia product (eg Tegra)? Will Nvidia hinder the development efforts of other competitors? Will Nvidia give itself access to new designs first? How will it maintain appropriate barriers to the flow of information about competitors new designs to its own design teams?<p>I can see this getting very significant regulatory scrutiny and rightly so.
It's Nvidia circling back for a kill on intel. They didn't go head to head, even they wanted to. Instead they built a completely different space within data centers for them, got a foothold, expanded (mellanox) and now going for the missing piece, which will also allow them to expand the battleground with intel outside of datacenters. Interesting times and Nvidia, so far, showed they know their strategic moves.
So basically, it will be two companies which own both the CPU and GPU stack (AMD/ATI and Nvidia/ARM) and intel will just sort of end up at the wayside. Not really what I expected.
This would be bad. Not because of the CPU business - I think RISC V will eventually make that irrelevant. Once CPUs are open source commodities, the next big thing is GPUs. This merger will eliminate a GPU maker, and one that licenses the IP at that.
I know it says “more” than $32B but isn’t that a little low if Softbank paid $31B?<p>Neither Softbank nor Nvidia care what I think, but I would feel better if the buyer of ARM wasn’t a company with a existing chip business.
I wonder if it would be possible for a consortium of companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google to swoop in and outbid Nvidia? All of them rely on customization agreements with ARM and Nvidia, being a chip maker, would be competition. And a consortium like that would allow the consortium members to keep their changes to themselves so whatever Qualcomm and Microsoft are doing with the SQ1 or Apple with their Silicon stuff wouldn't have to be shared will all consortium members -- or a competing chip maker like Nvidia.
Why is ARM selling itself? May be I am missing something here but if Qualcomm can generate a bulk of their revenues through licensing fees, shouldn't ARM be bringing in more? It feels like going public would be a profitable route for their investors. Wonder why they are opting for that.
If that happens it may have wider consequences.<p>ARM would become owned by an American company. It has to comply with American restrictions on dealing with China but that would make it essentially no different from any other American company, either legally or in fact.<p>So in the current context this would be bound to raise eyebrows in Beijing, and China could only react by doubling-down on developing domestic alternatives.
Can anyone explain what is going on between Apple and Nvidia? Seems Apple will not add Nvidia hardware to its machines no matter what. What’s the back story to that?<p>And where this is related is I wonder if Apple will have to relent (assuming the purchase goes through) and do business with Nvidia since it licenses some technology from ARM. Or, have I got it wrong here? Does Apple not rely on ARM?
See related discussion (from last week): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929993" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929993</a>
I think people are overlooking a worse outcome. Chinese companies have already bought the Asian subsidiary of ARM, if China bought ARM who knows how they would retaliate with it given the current attacks on Huawei. They might use it as leverage.<p>realistically we need an open unowned architecture like RISC-V, because whoever buys ARM will cause concern given how hyperconpetitive mobile is, the incentive to abuse the ownership is high.<p>We really want to avoid another Oracle/Java scenario as well.
Looking at how qualcomm has a virtual monopoly for mobile processors nvidia buying arm and getting back into the mobile space might be a good thing. Though I think this is more a play for desktop processors intel is getting into discrete cpu market Amd already is. Every year integrated gpus are getting better at giving good enough performance so the market for discrete gpus will decrease in the end Nvidia might need its own cpu to stay relevant.
Oh no, look what have you done WeWork. Who would have thought that rich kids burning VC money, who themselves were running elaborate ponzi scheme would end-up as a threat to the democracy of computing.<p>Ofcourse U.S. Govt. wouldn't have problems with this unlike Broadcom-Qualcomm deal, on the contrary this will put American semiconductor industry in a more dominant position.<p>RISC-V is the only hope for the rest of the world now.
This isn't a bad move strategy wise. If the Apple performance is as awesome as is rumoured and hype, there are going to be a lot of people looking for new arm chips, with no obviously ahead players. nVidia has looked a couple of times at building their own x86 core, and ARM cores may be a better bet.<p>At this point - AMD, Intel, Apple are all looking at fully integrated APU/CPU/GPU stacks. That leaves NV out in the cold if they don't do something.
This might be a lucky break for Intel. If NVidia buys ARM, this might slow the ARM ecosystem's intrusion on Wintel. As others have noted, NVidia will probably go and develop a data center CPU to complement their other offerings. Qualcomm already tried that and failed though [0], so NVidia's effort may meet the same fate several years from now. Regardless, Intel would get a little more time to work through its process problems.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/</a>
Wonder how much of this is pushed by US policy to secure IC dominance like getting TSMC to build US fab. Barr was floating the idea of getting Cisco to acquire Ericsson for 5G, not a stretch to also ask Nvidia to buy ARM.
This makes no sense. nVidia is already transitioning away from ARM and shipping RISC-V controllers in their GPUs. They already gave up on Denver, their high perf ARM server chip. Why would they buy ARM?
I can see why Apple wouldn't want to buy ARM since that would put them in very delicate position, but I'd be surprised if Intel or AMD weren't trying to buy ARM as well.
This acquisition is in US interests and can be supported by US government. They try to stop leaking silicone industry in general (famous CHIPS act), and block Huawei and its partners.
I hope that this ends up giving Nvidia enough leverage over Qualcomm that they can start putting Tegra chips in smartphones again without cellular radio patent disputes.
The name is officially "Arm", not "ARM", and that's been the case for exactly 3 years now.
Bloomberg has it correct in the article.
People in this thread discuss what Nvidia would do with ARM after they buy it, but I'm honestly not even sure if anyone even <i>could</i> buy ARM to be honest. The article barely even mentions the anti-competitive nightmare that it would probably become, and if Nvidia agreed to let everyone else keep buying licenses and designs as it is now, then you have to argue is there any reason for them to buy ARM at all?
Thats a lot of money and must be very tempting.
Lets hope that ARM doesn’t get bullied to bite the apple.
Nvidia sees the writing on the wall with GPUs and knows it must acquire the future king of CPUs to survive.
Is nvidia seriously going to get into ARM business? Are they going to grok the business of embedded development and microcontrollers? I can't help but think that this would mean the end of ARM as we know it.
In the ML GPU they are a monopoly but man they do a great job providing support for TF or Pytorch where AMD hasn't invested. So in Cloud Nvidia is the only way to go
Well nvidia need to create an operating system now and we could end up with three ecosystems that could be competitive with each other. Good for consumers I say.
1) Nvidia my produce good performing GPUs, but it doesn't provide Open Source Drivers and it is not so cooperative with Linux Desktop. Also it is quite buggy.<p>2) Due to (1) , i believe that this acquisition might promote locked down devices. I don't want this situation to occur.<p>3) This acquisition may have some affect on Apple since Apple is transitioning to ARM Hardware. If this is the case, Apple may even transit to some other Hardware architecture like RISC-V or OpenPower once again.
Doesn’t sound legit. ARM was purchased by SoftBank in 2016 for 32bn USD.and from then it might have grown more than 20% per year. Selling a growing company with bright perspectives today for the same price you purchased it 4 years ago makes no sense, even for a struggling Softbank.
Is there a way to get rid of these paywalls? So annoying to click on a popular post with plenty of upvotes only to find it is paywall-restricted. Incognito mode works but inefficient.
Wouldn't Alphabet be able to buy Arm. I think as long as it is separate from Google it should be fine. It would be the company starting with A in their portfolio.