Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

This is terrible. Not really just because of Nvidia - which has a lot of problems I&#x27;ve previously commented on the rumors of this [1] - but Nvidia&#x27;s ownership completely changes ARM&#x27;s incentives.<p>ARM created a business model for itself where they had to act as a &quot;BDFL&quot; for the ARM architecture and IP. They made an architecture, CPU designs, and GPU designs for others. They had no stake in the chip making game, and they had others - Samsung, Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Huawei, Mediatek, Rockchip and loads of others make the chip. Their business model was to make the ARM ecosystem accessible for as many companies as possible, so they could sell as many licenses as possible. In that way, ARM&#x27;s business model enabled a very diverse and thriving ARM market. I think this is the <i>sole</i> reason we see ARM eating the chip world today.<p>This business model would continue to work perfectly fine as a privately held company, or being owned by a faceless investor company that wants you to make as much money as possible. But it&#x27;s not fine if you are owned by a company that wants to use you to control their own position in the chip market. There is no way Nvidia (any other chip company, but as laid out previously Nvidia might even be more concerning) will spend 40 billion on this without them deliberately or inadvertently destroying ARM&#x27;s open CPU and GPU ecosystem. Will Nvidia allow selling ARM licenses to competitors of Nvidia&#x27;s business? Will Nvidia reserve ARM&#x27;s best IP as a selling point for its own chips? Will Nvidia allow Mali to continue existing? Any innovations ARM made previously it sold to anyone mostly indiscriminatorily (outside of legal restrictions), but now every time the question must be asked &quot;does Nvidia have a better propietary purpose for this?&quot;. For any ARM chip maker the situation will be that Nvidia is both your ruthless competitor, but it also sells you the IP you need to build your chips.<p>EDIT: ARM&#x27;s interests up to last week were to create and empower as many competitors for Nvidia as possible. They were good at that and was the root of the success of the ARM ecosystem. That incentive is completely gone now.<p>Unless Nvidia leaves ARM alone (and why would they spend $40B on that??), this has got to be the beginning of the end of ARM&#x27;s golden age.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24010821" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24010821</a>

No one has seemed to notice the following two things:<p>&quot;To pave the way for the deal, SoftBank reversed an earlier decision to strip out an internet-of-things business from Arm and transfer it to a new company under its control. That would have stripped Arm of what was meant to be the high-growth engine that would power it into a 5G-connected future. One person said that SoftBank made the decision because it would have put it in conflict with commitments made to the U.K. over Arm, which were agreed at the time of the 2016 deal to appease the government.&quot; (from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;nvidia-reportedly-to-acquire-arm-holdings-from-softbank-for-40-billion&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;nvidia-reportedly-to...</a> )<p>and<p>&quot;The transaction does not include Arm’s IoT Services Group.&quot; (nvidia news.)<p>which appear to contradict each other.<p>I&#x27;m not sure about the significance of this. I would have guessed Nvidia would have wanted the IoT group to remain.<p>Also, to first order, when a company issues stock to purchase another corporation, that cost is essentially &quot;free&quot; since the value of the corporation increases.<p>In other words, Nvidia is essentially paying $12 billion in cash for ARM up front, and that&#x27;s all. (The extra $5B in cash or stock depends on financial performance of ARM, and thus is a second-order effect.)

When will Europe realise that there is no second place when it comes to a market - the larger player will always eventually end up owning everything.<p>I can not put into words how furious I am at the UK&#x27;s Conservative party for not protecting our last great tech company.<p>Europe has been fooled into the USA&#x27;s ultra free market system (which works brilliantly for the US but is terrible for everybody else). As such American tech companies have brought EVERYTHING and eventually moth balled them.<p>Take Renderware it was the leading game engine of the PS2 era consoles, brought by EA and mothballed. Nokia is another great example brought by Microsoft and mothballed. Imagination Technologies was slightly different in that it wasn&#x27;t bought but Apple essentially mothballed them. Now ARM will undoubtedly be the next via an intermediate buyout.<p>You look across Europe and there is nothing. Deepmind could have been a great European tech company - it just needed the right investment.

I see this going a few ways for different players:<p>The perpetual architecture license folks that make their own cores like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Fujitsu (I think they needed this for the A64FX, right?) will be fine, and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there. Apple especially will be fine as they can get code into LLVM for whatever &quot;Apple Silicon&quot; evolves into over time.<p>The smaller vendors that license core designs (like the A5x and A7x series, etc.) like Allwinner, Rockchip, and Broadcom are probably in a worse state - nVidia could cut them off from any new designs. I&#x27;d be scrambling for an alternative if I were any of these companies.<p>Long term, it really depends on how nVidia acts - they could release low end cores with no license fees to try to fend off RISC-V, but that hasn&#x27;t been overly successful when tried earlier with the SPARC and Power architectures. Best case scenario, they keep all the perpetual architecture people happy and architecturally coherent, and release some interesting datacenter chips, leaving the low end (and low margin) to 3rd parties.<p>Hopefully they&#x27;ll also try to mend fences with the open source community, or at least avoid repeating past offenses.

And there you have it. Perhaps the greatest thing to happen to RISC-V since the invention of the FPGA :-).<p>I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to.<p>Regarding the federal investment in FOSS thread that was here perhaps CPU architecture would be a good candidate.

I love this, I was amongst early engineers on CUDA (compilers).<p>NVIDIA was so well run, but boxed into a smaller graphics card market - ATI and it were forced into low margins since they were made replaceable by OpenGL and DirectX standards. For the standard fans - they resulted a wealth transfer from NVIDIA to Apple etc. and reduced capital available for R&amp;D.<p>NVIDIA was constantly attacked by a much bigger Intel (which changed interfaces to kill products and was made to pay by a court)<p>Through innovation, developing new technologies (CUDA) they increased market cap, and have used that to buy Arm&#x2F;Mellanox.<p>I love the story of the underdog run by a founder, innovating it’s way to getting into new markets against harsh competition. Win for capitalism!

Talking points from the founders of Arm &amp; Nvidia: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;patrickmoorhead&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;13&#x2F;its-officialnvidia-acquires-arm-for-40b-to-create-what-could-be-a-computing-juggernaut&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;patrickmoorhead&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;13&#x2F;its-...</a><p><i>&gt; Huang told me that first thing that the combined company will do is to, “bring NVIDIA technology through Arm’s vast network.” So I’d expect NVIDIA GPU and NPU IP to become available quickly to smartphone, tablet, TV and automobile SoC providers as quickly as possible.</i><p><i>&gt; Arm CEO Simon Segars framed it well when he told me, “We&#x27;re moving into a world where software doesn&#x27;t just run in one place. Your application today might run in the cloud, it might run on your phone, and there might be some embedded application running on a device, but I think increasingly and with the rollout of 5g and with some of the technologies that Jensen was just talking about this kind of application will become spread across all of those places. Delivering that and managing that there&#x27;s a huge task to do.&quot;</i><p><i>&gt; Huang ... “We&#x27;re about to enter a phase, where we&#x27;re going to create an internet that is thousands of times bigger than the internet that we enjoy today. A lot of people don&#x27;t realize this. And so, so we would like to create a computing company for this age of AI.”</i>

My initial reaction is that this reminiscent of the AMD-ATI deal back in 2006. It almost killed both companies and comparatively, this deal size is much bigger ($40B vs. $6B) for both a more mature industry and companies involved.<p>$40B is an obscene lot of money objectively and what&#x27;s the endgame for Nvidia? If it&#x27;s to &quot;fuse&quot; ARM&#x27;s top CPU designs with their GPU prowess, then couldn&#x27;t they invest the money to restart their own CPU designs (e.g. Carmel)? My inner pessimist, as with others here, is that Nvidia will somehow cripple the ARM ecosystem or prioritize their own needs over those of other customers&#x27;. Perhaps an appropriate analogy is Qualcomm&#x27;s IP licensing shenanigans and how they&#x27;ve crippled the non-iOS smartphone industry.<p>That said, there&#x27;s also examples of companies making these purchases with minimal insidious behavior and co-existing with their would-be competitors: Microsoft&#x27;s acquisition of Github, Google&#x27;s Pixel smartphones, Sony&#x27;s camera lenses business and even Samsung, which supposedly firewalls its components teams so the best tech is available to whoever wants (and is willing to pay for it).<p>I suppose if this acquisition ends up going through (big if), then we&#x27;ll see Nvidia&#x27;s true intent in 3-5 years.

I’m not convinced this is a death sentence for ARM. I doubt nVidia spent $40b on a company with the intention of killing it’s golden goose business model. The contractual agreements might change, but ARM wasn’t exactly giving their IP away for free before this move.

Softbank paid $32B for ARM in 2016.<p>A 25% gain over a horizon of four years is not bad for your average investment -- but this isn&#x27;t an average investment.<p>First, compared to the SP500, this underperforms over the same horizon (even compared to end of 2019 rather than the inflated prices right now).<p>Second, ARM&#x27;s sector (semiconductors) has performed far, far better in that time. The PHOX (Philadelphia Semiconductor Index) doubled in the same time period.<p>And looking at AMD and NVIDIA, it feels as if ARM would have been in a position to benefit from the surrounding euphoria.<p>On the other hand, unless I&#x27;m misremembering, ARM back then was already considered massively overvalued precisely because it was such a prime takeover target, so perhaps its the $32B that are throwing me off here.

The British should never have allowed foreign ownership of their core tech

Most tech acquisitions are fairly bland - they often maintain their separate ways for several years with a bit of integration. Others satisfy a political purpose or serve to stifle competition.<p>However, given the momentum of Nvidia these past several years alongside the massive adoption and evolution of ARM, this is probably going to be the most interesting acquisition to watch over the next few years.

Many various reasons for this but one perspective I am curious about is how much this is actually a defensive move against Intel, because nVidia knows Intel is busy developing dedicated graphics via Xe, and if nVidia just allows that to continue they are going to find themselves simultaneously competing with and dependent on a vendor that owns the whole stack that their platform depends on. It is not a place I would want to be, even accounting for how incompetent Intel seems to have been for the last 10 years.<p>Edit: yes I meant nVidia not AMD!

On the bright side, this could end up being a big boost for RISC-V.

I wonder what this means for NVIDIA&#x27;s recent RISC-V efforts [1]. Apparently they&#x27;ve been aiming to ship (or already have been shipping?) RISC-V microcontrollers on their GPUs for some time .<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;riscv.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;Tue1345pm-NVIDIA-Sijstermans.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;riscv.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;Tue1345pm-NVIDI...</a>

None of the top comments disuss the possibility of the deal not going through due to antitrust or other concerns by regulators. While it&#x27;s owned by a Japanese company and being sold to an American one, China most likely doesn&#x27;t approve and it could be a diplomatic issue due to security and intelligence concerns?<p>Not sure how relistic that scenario is, although I personally can very much see this being used as a negotiation vehicle, depending on the actual security concern (I&#x27;m obviously not an expert there..)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.globaltimes.cn&#x2F;content&#x2F;1200871.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.globaltimes.cn&#x2F;content&#x2F;1200871.shtml</a>

Qualcomm and Apple are going to be fine even with NVIDIA owning ARM. They are American companies under the protection of US legislation and representation.<p>However the situation for Chinese companies is even clearer now. Huawei, Hikvision etc. need to move away from ARM. Probably on to their own thing as RISC-V is dominated by US companies.

Related discussions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24009177" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24009177</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24173539" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24173539</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24454958" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24454958</a>

Just noting that Apple <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> have a perpetual license, they have an architecture license[1], including for 64bit parts[2].<p>This allows them to design their own cores using the Arm instruction set[3] and presumably includes perpetual IP licenses for Arm IP used while the license is in effect. New Arm IP doesn&#x27;t seem to be included, since existing 32bit Arm licensees had to upgrade to a 64bit license[2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;7112&#x2F;the-arm-diaries-part-1-how-arms-business-model-works&#x2F;3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;7112&#x2F;the-arm-diaries-part-1-h...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.electronicsweekly.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business&#x2F;finance&#x2F;arm-adds-architectural-licensee-2015-04&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.electronicsweekly.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business&#x2F;finance&#x2F;arm-...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ARM_architecture#Architectural_licence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ARM_architecture#Architectural...</a>

Tangential, but when I hear about all these insane &quot;start-up du jour&quot; valuations, does anyone else feel like $40B isn&#x27;t a lot of a hardware company sur as ARM?

We&#x27;ve been repeating the word &quot;bad&quot; for the last couple of weeks here, but I don&#x27;t really remember any insights on what can happen long term (and I&#x27;m asking, because I have absolutely no idea). I mean, let&#x27;s suppose relationships with Qualcomm don&#x27;t work out (which we all kind of suspect already). What&#x27;s the alternative? Is it actually possible to create another competitive architecture at this point? Does it take 5, 10 years? Is there even a choice for some other (really big) company, that doesn&#x27;t want to depend on NVIDIA?

This seems fair, as long as it stays true(regarding open licensing and neutrality). I&#x27;ve mentioned before, I think this will ultimately be a good thing. NVidia has the gpu chops to really amp up the reference implementation, which is a good thing for competition in the mobile, settop, and perhaps even desktop space.

This it terrible news for the FLOSS community.<p>Nvidia has consistently for many years refused to properly support Linux and other open source OSs.<p>Heck, Wayland compositors just say &quot;if you&#x27;re using nvidia then don&#x27;t even try to use our software&quot; since they&#x27;re fed up of Nvidia&#x27;s lack of collaboration.<p>I really hope ARM doesn&#x27;t go the same way. :(

I feel like this is yet more terrible news for the UK.

On the one hand, this is bad news - I would prefer ARM to remain independent. But on the other, from a purely selfish standpoint, NVIDIA will likely lean on Apple pretty hard to get its GPUs into Apple devices again, which bodes well for GPGPU and deep learning applications.<p>Apple is probably putting together a RISC-V hardware group as we speak. The Jobs ethos will not allow them to depend this heavily on somebody else for such a critical technology.

nvidia is notorious for being not nice to oss developers as Linus Torvalds claims: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&amp;ab_channel=SiliconNews" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&amp;ab_channel=Silic...</a><p>I wonder how Linux would react to this news.

&gt; Immediately accretive to NVIDIA’s non-GAAP gross margin and EPS<p>Can someone explain this? (From the bullet points of the article)<p>I looked up the definition of accretive: &quot;characterized by gradual growth or increase.&quot;<p>So it seems like they expect this to increase their margins. Does that mean ARM had better margins than NVIDIA?<p>Edit: I don&#x27;t know what non-GAAP and EPS stand for

Eeek. My gut reaction to think is.. could we have less powerful conglomerates.. please?

Arm’s primary base is in the IoT and the edge, and it has been very successful there. Its focus on low power allowed it to shut out Intel from the mobile phone market, and from there it has been gaining ground in a slew of vertical markets ranging from medical devices to Apple computers. But as more intelligence is added to the edge, the next big challenge is to be able to radically improve performance and further reduce power, and the only way to make that happen is to more tightly customize the algorithms to the hardware, and vice versa <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiengineering.com&#x2F;nvidia-to-buy-arm-for-40b&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiengineering.com&#x2F;nvidia-to-buy-arm-for-40b&#x2F;</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiwiki.com&#x2F;ip&#x2F;287846-tears-in-the-rain-arm-and-china-jvs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiwiki.com&#x2F;ip&#x2F;287846-tears-in-the-rain-arm-and-chi...</a><p>Does this mean Nvidia will have to deal with the hot mess at China ARM?

Why would Nvidia spend $40B to ruin Arm? I can&#x27;t see them making a return on this investment. No one wants to work with Nvidia they are notoriously roothless. I&#x27;m sure everyone is making plans to move to something else ASAP. Maybe RISC-V

Sounds like everyone is rallying around RISC-V. What does this mean for MIPS?<p>&quot;ARM was probably what sank MIPS&quot; - saagarjha<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24402107" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24402107</a>

This isn&#x27;t going to do good things for anyone who doesn&#x27;t own a lot of Nvidia stock.<p>This is going to do especially bad things for anyone who needs to buy a cell phone or the SoC that powers one. There&#x27;s no real alternative to ARM-based phone SoCs. Given Nvidia&#x27;s business practices, any manufacturer who doesn&#x27;t already have a perpetual ARM license should expect to have to pay a lot more money into Jensen Huang&#x27;s retirement fund going forward. These costs will be passed on to consumers and will also provide an avenue for perpetual license holders to raise their consumer prices to match.

I am surprised that no one has mentioned China will very likely block this deal.

The root problem here is the concept of patents -- at least as far as I can see.<p>If patents did not exist, and nVidia were to close down ARM and tell people &quot;<i>no more ARM GPUs; only nVidia GPUs from now on</i>&quot;, then a competitor who offers ARM-compatible ISAs would quickly appear. But in the real world, nVidia just bought the monopoly rights to sue such a competitor out of existence.<p>It&#x27;s really no wonder nVidia did this given the profits they can extract from this monopoly (on the ARM ISA).

Excellent, can&#x27;t wait for Jensen to pull out a Cortex A-78 TI from his oven next year. &#x2F;s

edge-AI!<p>They&#x27;re also building an ARM supercomputer at Cambridge, but server-ARM doesn&#x27;t sound like a focus.<p>I&#x27;m just hoping for some updated mobile Nvidia GPUs... and maybe the rumoured 4K Nintendo Switch.<p>They <i>say</i> they won&#x27;t muck it up, and it seems sensible to keep it profitable:<p>&gt; As part of NVIDIA, Arm will continue to operate its open-licensing model while maintaining the global customer neutrality that has been foundational to its success, with 180 billion chips shipped to-date by its licensees.

They sure seem to be marketing this as a logical move for their AI platform.

Wow, didn&#x27;t someone call this out recently on HN? I mean, someone mentioned that this was going to happen. (Or rather, feared that this was the direction things were going in.)<p>On a different topic, how would this influence Raspberry Pis going forward?

No doubt because Softbank was facing investor pressure to make up for their losses.

Could Apple hypothetically use their perpetual license to ARM to license the ISA to other manufacturers if they so desired? (not that they do now, but it could be a saving grace if Nvidia assimilated ARM fully).

Well, China will surely block this, just like how it blocked the Qualcomm attempt to buy NXP (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-nxp-semicondtrs-m-a-qualcomm&#x2F;qualcomm-ends-44-billion-nxp-bid-after-failing-to-win-china-approval-idUSKBN1KF193" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-nxp-semicondtrs-m-a-qualc...</a>).<p>Otherwise ARM would become a US company, and then the US would have another weapon in their arsenal to sanction China&#x27;s tech companies (e.g. Huawei).

Can anyone point me who would be competing with Nvidia in AI Market ?

Okay let’s look at this from a slightly different POV. We have two different things here, ARM CPU design licenses and ARM ISA licenses. If I was an ARM cpu maker I think it would be best to setup something to design better shared ARM CPU designs, the problem of course is building an amazing team and patents which could prove extremely expensive to solve.<p>Is it possible&#x2F;legal for nvidia to charge a billion dollars per cpu for the isa license or are these things perpetual?

(Nvidia - ARM) - Nvidia &gt;&gt; 40 Bn<p>Only about 50% is gaming and nascent divisions like data centres can get a big boost from the acquisition.<p>We only connected Nvidia with GPUs, perhaps AI &amp; ML. Now they are going to be a dominant player everywhere from consumer devices, IOT, cloud, HPC &amp; Gaming.<p>And since Nvidia does not FAB its own chips like intel, this transformation is going to be pretty quick.<p>If only they go into public cloud business, we as costumers would have one other strong vendor to choose from.

Amidst all the hand-wringing: RISC-V is at least a decade away (at current pace + ARM’s own example). But what if Google bought AMD and put TPUs on the die?

SoftBank isa true banking company .. invested (Bought) in ARM and selling it now for meagre profit. A company that says it has 300 year vision

Doesn’t this need regulatory approval from the USA and Japan? (Not that the USA would look a gift horse in the mouth, of course.)

nVidia clearly wants to compete with Intel in data centers. But how does buying ARM help with that? They already have an architectural license.<p>Right now, I can see nVidia replacing Mali smartphone GPUs in low to mid-end Exynos SoCs and the like. But it&#x27;s not like nVidia to want to be in that low-margin area.

This sort of stuff really isn’t going to produce long term benefits for humanity is it.<p>Does anyone know if or how Apple will be affected by this? What are the licensing agreements on the ISA?

Why do you think Nvidia cares about Arm? Probably the &quot;access&quot; into a lot of industries?

I&#x27;m confused. What is it that Nvidia can do by owning ARM that it can&#x27;t do by just licensing the architecture? Can&#x27;t they just license and build all the chips people think they&#x27;ll build without buying the whole thing?

Vertical integration. It&#x27;s the end products, not the producers that matter.<p>Or maybe, more accurately, the middle of the supply chain doesn&#x27;t matter. The most value is at either end: raw materials and energy, and end products.<p>Or so it seems :p ;) xx

This is <i>awful</i>. Out of all the big tech companies, Nvidia is probably least friendly to open source and cross-platform comparability. It seems to me that their goal is to monopolize AI hardware over the next 20 years, the same way Intel effectively monopolized cloud hardware over the last 20. Expect to see less choice in the chip market and more and more propietary software frameworks like CUDA. A sad day for CS and for AI.

Softbank buys low ($32B in 2016) and sells high ($40B in 2020). Nice trade!

It&#x27;s so amazing Apple didn&#x27;t win this M&amp;A race.

Isn&#x27;t pay for IP model used by companies to avoid paying tax? I wonder if Nvidia is going to be forced to absorbe Arm in its entirety to avoid tax issues?

What do 5 hurricanes, global pandemic, and Nvidia buying Arm have in common?<p>What a wild year! Let&#x27;s not forget Apple announce they are transitioning from x86 to Arm :b.

What does this change for STM32 and many other such low power MCUs? They&#x27;re pretty ubiquitous in electornics.

Simple question, is this about ARM architecture and IP... or securing a worldwide competitive advantage in 5G?

Nvidia being like &quot;Apple did now want to use our tech? Let&#x27;s just buy ARM!&quot;

This is all about NVLink in ARM.

Has this become the post with the most points and engagement by number of comments?

Looking at the conversations almost 24 hours after posting the IP, licensing, ecosystem, political, and overall business aspects of this have been discussed to death. Oddly for Hacker News there has been little discussion of the potential technical aspects of this acquisition.<p>Pure speculation (of course)...<p>To me (from a tech standpoint) this acquisition centers around three things we already know about Nvidia:<p>- Nvidia is pushing to own anything and everything GPGPU&#x2F;TPU related, from cloud&#x2F;datacenter to edge. Nvidia has been an ARM licensee for years with their Jetson line of hardware for edge GPGPU applications:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;buy-jetson" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;buy-jetson</a><p>Looking at the architecture of these devices (broadly speaking) Nvidia is combining an ARM CPU with their current gen GPU hardware (complete with Tensor Cores, etc). What&#x27;s often left out of this mention is that they utilize a shared memory architecture where the ARM CPU and CUDA cores share memory. Not only does this cut down on hardware costs and power usage, it increases performance.<p>- Nvidia has acquired Mellanox for high performance network I&#x2F;O across various technologies (Ethernet and Infiniband). Nvidia is also actively working to be able to remove the host CPU from as many GPGPU tasks as possible (network I&#x2F;O and data storage):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;gpudirect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;gpudirect</a><p>- Nvidia already has publicly available software in place to effectively make their CUDA compute available over the network using various APIs:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;triton-inference-server&#x2F;server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;triton-inference-server&#x2F;server</a><p>Going on just the name Triton is currently only available for inference but it provides the ability to not only directly serve GPGPU resources via network API at scale but ALSO accelerate various models with TensorRT optimization:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.nvidia.com&#x2F;deeplearning&#x2F;triton-inference-server&#x2F;user-guide&#x2F;docs&#x2F;optimization.html#framework-specific-optimization" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.nvidia.com&#x2F;deeplearning&#x2F;triton-inference-server...</a><p>Given these points I think this is an obvious move for Nvidia. TDP and performance is increasingly important across all of their target markets. They already have something in place for edge inference tasks powered by ARM with Jetson but looking at ARM core CPU benchmarks it&#x27;s sub-optimal. Why continue to pay ARM licensing fees when you can buy the company, collect licensing fees, get talent, and (presumably) drastically improve performance and TDP for your edge GPGPU hardware?<p>In the cloud&#x2F;datacenter, why continue to give up watts in terms of TDP and performance to sub-optimal Intel&#x2F;AMP&#x2F;x86_64 CPUs and their required baggage (motherboard bridges, buses, system RAM, etc) when all you really want to do is shuffle data between your GPUs, network, and storage as quickly and efficiently as possible?<p>Of course many applications will still require a somewhat general purpose CPU for various tasks, customer code, etc. AWS already has their own optimized ARM cores in place. aarch64 is more and more becoming a first class citizen across the entire open source ecosystem.<p>As platform and software as a service continues to eat the world cloud providers likely have already started migrating the underlying hardware powering these various services to ARM cores for improved performance and TDP (same product, more margin).<p>Various ARM cores are already showing to be quite capable for most CPU tasks but given the other architectural components in place here even the lowliest of modern ARM cores is likely to be asleep most of the time for the applications Nvidia currently cares about. Giving up licensing, die space, power, tighter integration, etc to x86_64 just seems to be foolish at this point.<p>Meanwhile (of course) if you still need x86_64 (or any other arch) for whatever reason you can hit a network API powered by hardware using Nvidia&#x2F;Mellanox I&#x2F;O, GPU, and ARM. Potentially (eventually) completely transparently using standard CUDA libraries and existing frameworks (see work like Apex):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;NVIDIA&#x2F;apex" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;NVIDIA&#x2F;apex</a><p>I, for one, am excited to see what comes from this.

What is Amazon&#x27;s license for ARM like to make graviton processors?

How large or little of boost does this give the likes of RISC-V?

This is really bad news. I hope the deal somehow falls through.

this should have triggered an anti-trust probe into the deal, as this radically changes powers at play into the the chip market how many have outlined.

I was hoping that Apple&#x27;s switch to ARM would prompt better ARM support for popular Linux distros. Given NVIDIA&#x27;s track record with the OSS community, I&#x27;m definitely less hopeful now.

There is now but one choice... RISC-V, full throttle.

Sounds like we need someone to found another ARM.

So when does everyone switch to risc-v then

What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up.<p>Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called &quot;world stage&quot;, that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa.<p>In 2011, I thought that they would learn the lessons and warnings highlighted from Eric Schmidt about the UK creating long standing tech companies like FAANMG. [0] I had high hopes for them to learn from this, but after 2016 with Softbank and now this, it is just typical.<p>ARM will certainly be more expensive after this and will certainly be even more closed-source, since their Mali GPUs drivers were already as closed as Nvidia&#x27;s GPUs. This is a terrible outcome I have seen but from Nvidia&#x27;s perspective, it makes sense. From a FOSS perspective, ARM is dead, long live RISC-V.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2011&#x2F;aug&#x2F;26&#x2F;eric-schmidt-chairman-google-education" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2011&#x2F;aug&#x2F;26&#x2F;eric-schm...</a>

It was good while it lasted. RIP ARM

This is horrible for Arm

smic and Huawei better be prepared to have to dump arm asap

Can we,for once, hear the opinions of people in the chip industry and not the same tired posts from software folks? NVIDIA Bad! Ok, we get it. Do you have anything more insightful than that?<p>I&#x27;m starting to feel like social media based on upvotes is a utter waste of time. Echo chambers and groupthink. People commenting on things they barely know anything about and getting validation from others who don&#x27;t know anything. I&#x27;d rather pay for insightful commentary and discussion. I feel like reddit going downhill has pushed a new group of users to HN and it&#x27;s sending it down the tube. Maybe it&#x27;s time for me to stop participating and get back to work.

HN being hyperbolic and anti-NVIDIA as usual. I think this is a great thing. Finally a competitor to the AMD-Intel x86 duopoly. I imagine the focus will first be on improving ARM’s data center offerings but eventually I’m hoping to see consumer-facing parts available sometime as well.

This is not good

They need to block this deal. A real clean case.

Holy shit this is huge. Did anyone see this coming?!?

I am really worried of a single company monopolising over the entire market

How does this get past the FTC? Oh right, it&#x27;s been a dead letter since the Reagan administration. Monopoly &#x27;R Us.<p>Never mind the FTC - the rest of the semiconductor industry has to be [very] strongly opposed.

LOL, Apple must be shitting bricks. Serves them right for going with ARM for their new Mac Books, the smarter move would have been to move to an AMD Ryzen APU, they also clearly should have gone with AMD Epyc for the new Mac Pro&#x27;s.

I still think the real reason was just to spite Apple :)

I wonder what the this means for Apple and their move to ARM for their macbooks. End of 2019 Apple and NVIDIA broke up their cooperation on CUDA. Both these companies are very tight on their hardware. Apple must&#x27;ve known this was happening but I guess they weren&#x27;t willing to pay more than 40B for this risky joint venture they&#x27;re bound to go into.<p>Anyone has a proper analysis on the ramifications of this acquisition for Apple&#x27;s future in ARM?

That&#x27;s nasty Nvidia, very nasty. But on the other hand might be it will be a motivation for everyone to use ARM less.<p>I quite expect AMD for example to drop ARM chips from their hardware. Others should also follow suit. Nvidia is an awful steward for ARM.