I would love OpenPOWER to succeed. I just don&#x27;t see the 48 pin QFP version that costs &lt; $1 and powers billions of gizmos. For me the ARM ecosystem&#x27;s biggest win is that it scales from really small (M0&#x2F;M0+) to really usefully big (A78) and has many points between those two architectures.I don&#x27;t see OpenPOWER going there, but I can easily see RISC-V going there. So, for the moment, that is the horse I&#x27;m betting on.

OpenPOWER is pretty awesome but would be nowhere near as awesome as an OpenItanium. IMHO, Itanium was always mismarketed and misoptimized. It made a pretty good server processor, but not so good that enterprises were willing to migrate 40 year old software to run on it.In mobile form, it would have made a large leap in both performance and battery life. And it would have been a fairly easy market to break into: the average life of a mobile device is a few years, not a few decades. Recompilation and redistribution of software is the status quo.

RISC-V still seems too ad-hoc to me, and really new. Hard to say where it&#x27;d go for now.I know momentum is currently towards ARM over POWER, but... OpenPOWER is certainly a thing, and has IBM &#x2F; Red Hat support. IBM may be expensive, but they already were proven &quot;fair partners&quot; in the OpenPOWER initiative and largely supportive of OSS &#x2F; Free Software.

Because of this transaction? I’m sure this deal will have absolutely no impact on apple’s deal with ARM.Apple could of course Afford to invest in RISC-V (and surely has played with it internally) but they have enough control of their future under the current arrangement that it will be a long long time before they feel any need to switch — 15 years at least.

I suspect you&#x27;ll be waiting for quite a long time, if not forever.

ROFL.  Why not wait for the upcoming Josephson junction memristors, while you&#x27;re at it?

The next Apple machine I am going to buy will be using RISC-V cores.

I would like to understand what you know about ARM that it&#x27;s board of director&#x27;s didn&#x27;t (doesn&#x27;t) know? In my experience companies merge when they are forced to, not because they want to.I have always assumed that their shareholders were offered so much of a premium on their shares that they chose to sell them rather than hold onto them. Clearly based on their fiscal 2015 results[1] they were a going concern.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arm.com&#x2F;company&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;arm-holdings-plc-reports-results-for-the-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2015" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arm.com&#x2F;company&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;arm-holdings-plc-re...</a>

&gt; I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to.I understand what you&#x27;re saying and this seems to be the prevailing pattern but I really don&#x27;t understand it. ARM could easily be a standalone company. For some reason, mergers are in.

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

More power concentrated in a company that already has a de-facto monopoly over a gpu market.

An independent ARM that did not manufacture processors was the best outcome for everyone in the industry.ARM being owned by an organisation deeply embedded in processor design and manufacturing, will now be licensing designs to competitors, as well as getting a lot of intel on its competitors.ARM supercomputers were poised to take on Nvidia. Now its all one and the same.As others have said, this will do wonders for RISC-V.

Consider one of NVidia&#x27;s rivals: AMD, who uses an ARM chip in their EPYC line of chips as a security co-processor. Does anyone expect NVidia to &quot;play fair&quot; with such a rival?ARM as an independent company, has been profoundly &quot;neutral&quot;, allowing many companies to benefit from the ARM instruction set. It has been run very well: slightly profitable and an incremental value to all parties involved (be you Apple&#x27;s iPhone, NVidia&#x27;s Tegra (aka Nintendo Switch chip), AMD&#x27;s EPYC, Qualcomm&#x27;s Snapdragon, numerous hard drive companies, etc. etc.). All in all, ARM&#x27;s reach has been because of its well-made business decisions that have been fair to all parties involved.NVidia, despite all their technical achievements, is known to play hardball from a business perspective. I don&#x27;t think anyone expects NVidia to remain &quot;neutral&quot; or &quot;fair&quot;.

I have heard numerous arguments but they arguments don&#x27;t feel that compelling, what are reasons why this is bad?

Microsoft can&#x27;t afford to buy ARM? lol...  well that&#x27;s not true at all.

It wouldn&#x27;t have been good if any of the people who could actually afford to buy ARM did so.Would you rather have TSMC in control of ARM? Maybe have access to new architectures bundled with a mandate that you have to build them on TSMC&#x27;s processes?How about Samsung? All of the fab ownership concerns of TSMC plus they also make basically any tech product you care to name, so all the integration concerns of NVIDIA.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asia.nikkei.com&#x2F;Business&#x2F;Technology&#x2F;Key-Apple-suppliers-approached-for-possible-Arm-sale" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asia.nikkei.com&#x2F;Business&#x2F;Technology&#x2F;Key-Apple-suppli...</a>Microsoft? Oracle? None of the companies who could have afforded to pay what Son wanted for Softbank were any better than NVIDIA.There are a lot of good things that will come out of this as well. NVIDIA is a vibrant company compared to a lot of the others.

Why would they ever want to enable their competitors?

&gt; I bet they&#x27;d make a completely custom ISA if they could. Heck, maybe they plan to some day, and that&#x27;s why they&#x27;re calling the new Mac processors &quot;Apple Silicon&quot;.That was my first thought.I&#x27;d be surprised if Apple wasn&#x27;t already working on this.

I could see apple being the next in line of basically failed VLIW ISAs - the cost&#x2F;benefit doesn&#x27;t really add up to completely redesign, prove, implement, and support a new ISA unless it was worth it technologically.If they could pull it off I would be very impressed.

Thinking about that though, from a technical perspective keeping the name but changing the function would only produce bad PR.- &quot;We changed from the 68K to PPC&quot; &quot;Agh!...fine&quot;- &quot;We changed from PPC to x86&quot; &quot;What, again?&quot;- &quot;We changed from x86 to Apple Silicon&quot; &quot;...oooo...kay...&quot;- &quot;We changed from Apple Silicon to, uh, Apple Silicon - like it&#x27;s still called Apple Silicon, but the architecture is different&quot; &quot;What&#x27;s an architecture?&quot; &quot;The CPU ISA.&quot; &quot;The CPU is a what?&quot;

I&#x27;m pretty sure they can&#x27;t, but I also think there&#x27;s no way in hell they&#x27;d do it if they could. It&#x27;s not in Apple&#x27;s DNA. Better for them if no one else has access to the instruction set.I bet they&#x27;d make a completely custom ISA if they could. Heck, maybe they plan to some day, and that&#x27;s why they&#x27;re calling the new Mac processors &quot;Apple Silicon&quot;.

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).

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

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

GAAP is an accounting set of rules, EPS is Earning per Share. Basically means they think it will increase their gross margin and EPS but you can&#x27;t sue them if it does not.

Though note the intent of GAAP is to cut down on &quot;creative accounting&quot; which can tend to mislead.

EPS -&gt; earnings per shareNon-GAAP -&gt; doesn’t follow generaly accepted accounting practices. There are alternative accounting methods. GAAP is very US-centric (not good or bad, just stating a fact).

I would guess they do have higher margins since they are mostly selling licenses and not actual hardware.This article is old, but suggests a 48% operating margin: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asia.nikkei.com&#x2F;NAR&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;ARM-posts-strong-profit-margin-on-chip-royalties" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asia.nikkei.com&#x2F;NAR&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;ARM-posts-strong-profit...</a>

You are correct that it means they expect margins to increase. One possibility is that ARM has higher margins as you mentioned.  Another is that they are making some assumptions about how much they can reduce certain expenses by, and once you factor in those savings, margins go up.

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

The company who was part of the creation of ARM and has a perpetual license to its IP? Tell me how.

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

And Nvidia&#x27;s GPUs now include the same type of hardware that TPUs have, so there&#x27;s no reason to believe that TPUs will win out over GPUs.

Where did you get this from? AFAIK GPT-3 (for example) was trained on a GPU cluster, not TPUs.

AI training is moving away from CUDA and toward TPUs anyway. DGX clusters can&#x27;t keep up.

Hardly sleeping, they have a fraction of the revenue and profit of NVidia and Intel. Revenue was half of Nvidia, profit was 5% of NVidia. Intel is even bigger. They only have so much in the way of R&amp;D money.

It is frankly amazing AMD can keep up at all.

Aside from Navi support, which has already been mentioned, what would you like to see?

The problem is more that AMD is sleeping in regard of GPU AI and good software interfaces.

There are good points on both sides; as a Linux user, I feel the effects of their proprietary drivers and uncooperative approach, while I can also appreciate that they&#x27;ve managed to work with the Gnome and KDE project to have some support under Wayland, and the contributions they&#x27;ve made to the 
machine learning communities. Ad a whole, I do think that the former outweighs the latter, and loath the acquisition, but do think that the resources they&#x27;re packing will bring ARM to new heights for the majority users.

Yes I wonder the same thing about the sentiment against nvidia. It’s be helpful if there were some wiki about things they’ve killed or instances they’ve acted against foss systems.

The OP said nothing about being ok with the x86 duopoly.Its possible to dislike two things at once, its also possible to be wary of new developments that give much more market power to a notoriously uncooperative and closed company.

&gt; Why not look at some of the potential bright sides to this for a more nuanced and balanced opinion?because as a NVIDIA user of the last 20 years, I never saw such bright side when it comes to open source.

I don&#x27;t really have an opinion on nVidia, as I haven&#x27;t dealt with any of their products for over a decade; my own problem with this is somewhat more abstract: I&#x27;m not a big fan of this constant drive towards merging all these tech companies (or indeed, any company really). Perhaps there are some short-term advantages for the ARM platform, but on the long term it means a few small tech companies will have all the power, which doesn&#x27;t strike me as a good thing.

NVIDIA’s hardware works on x86, PowerPC, and ARM platforms.Many of their AI libraries&#x2F;tools are in fact open source.They stand to be a force that could propel ARM’s strength in data center and desktop computing. For some reason you’re okay with the current x86 duopoly held by AMD and Intel, both who have their own destiny over CPUs and GPUs.The HN crowd is incredibly biased against certain companies. Why not look at some of the potential bright sides to this for a more nuanced and balanced opinion?

Is the FreeBDD driver open source? Also, somehow I was under the impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver. Is that correct?

Nvidia&#x27;s &quot;Blob&quot; approach does have an advantage when it comes to supporting random OSes.It&#x27;s less of a driver and more of an operating system. Basically self-contained with all the support libraries it needs. Super easy to port to a new operating system and any driver improvement work on all OSes.But the approach also has many downsides. It&#x27;s big. It ignores all the native stuff (like linux&#x27;s GEM interface).It also has random issues with locking up the entire system. Like if you are debugging a process with the linux drivers, a breakpoint or a pause in the wrong place can deadlock the system.

The proprietary driver also doesn&#x27;t support fractional scaling on 20.04 and I&#x27;ve been waiting ages for that.

Not just developer machines e.g. the Nintendo Switch uses an Nvidia Tegra X1 and run FreeBSD. Lots of game consoles do, you don&#x27;t have to worry about the GPL.

The FreeBSD blob driver will drive a monitor, but it lacks a bunch of GPU hardware support the Linux one has: all of CUDA, NVENC&#x2F;NVDEC, I²C DDC, and certainly more.

Surprisingly - they have a working driver for FreeBSD. Never had an issue with it - and the performance is fantastic. As far back as early 2000&#x27;s I remember installing proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux and playing UT2004.Maybe Nintendo&#x2F;Sony uses Nvidia cards on their developer machines? I imagine FreeBSD drivers aren&#x27;t simply altruism on their part.On the other hand, stagnation on other fronts:- Nouveau (tried recently) is basically unusable on Ubuntu. As in the mouse&#x2F;keyboard locks every 6 seconds.- Proprietary drivers won&#x27;t work with waylandAnd since their stuff isn&#x27;t open, the community can&#x27;t do much to push Nouveau forward.

On the other hand, if Nvidia wants ARM to succeed (and why else would they acquire it?), they can be a source of more competition in the CPU market.I don&#x27;t really see how this deal makes the CPU market worse -- wasn&#x27;t the ARM market for mobile devices basically dominated by Qualcomm for years? Plus, the other existing ARM licensees don&#x27;t seem to be impacted. On the other hand, I do see a lot of potential if Nvidia is serious about innovating in the CPU space.

This is awful. 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.

Perhaps not. I mean AMD and soon Intel basically compete with themselves by pushing advances in both discrete GPU and APU at the same time, one negating the need for the other.I&#x27;m not claiming I&#x27;m right and you&#x27;re wrong, of course. I just think it&#x27;s unfair to make negative assumptions at this point, so wanted to paint a possible good thing.

That&#x27;s not what everyone thinks.NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own ARM CPUs with an unlimited ARM license.ARM doesn&#x27;t give NVIDIA a world-class CPU team like apple&#x27;s, amazon&#x27;s or fujitsu. ARM own cores are &quot;meh&quot; at best. Buying such a team, would also have been much cheaper than 40b$.Mobile ARM chips are meh, but nvidia doesn&#x27;t have GPUs for that segment, and their current architectures probably don&#x27;t work well there. The only ARM chips that are ok-ish are embedded&#x2F;IoT at &lt; 1W power envelope. It would probably take nvidia 10 years to develop GPUs for that segment, the margins on that segment are razor thin (0.10$ is the cost of a full SoC on that segment), and it is unclear whether applications on that segment need GPUs (your toaster certainly does not).The UK appears to require huge R&amp;D investments in ARM to allow the sale. And ARMs bottom line is 300million $&#x2F;year in revenue, which is peanuts for nvidia.So if anything, ARM has a lot to win here with nvidia pumping in money like crazy to try to improve ARM&#x27;s CPU offering. Yet this all seem super-risky because at the segments ARM is competing at, RISC-V competes as well, and without royalties. It is hard to compete against something that&#x27;s free, even if it is slightly less good. And chances are that over the next 10 years RISC-V will have much better cores (NVIDIA themselves started replacing ARM cores with RISC-V cores in their GPUs years ago already...).Either way, the claim that it is obvious to everybody what the 3D-chess being played here is false. To me this looks like a bad buy for nvidia. They could have paid 1 billion for a world class CPU team and just continue to license ARM and&#x2F;or switch to RISC-V chips. Instead they are spending 40 billion in a company that makes 300 million a year, makes meh-cpus, is heavily regulated in the UK and the world, has problems with China due to being in the West, have to invest in the UK which is leaving the EU in a couple of weeks, etc.

No, what everyone thinks will happen is a pretend open ARM architecture and Nvidia CPUs dominating. Nvidia isn’t going to license the best GPU features they start adding.It’s an excellent deal for NVIDIA of course, I’m certain they intend to make the chips they produce much faster than the ones they license (if they even ever release another open design) to the point where buying CPUs from Nvidia might be they only game in town. We’ll have to see but this is what I expect to happen.

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.

I guess Apple have a perpetual ARM ISA license. They haven’t used the CPU designs from ARM for many years.

This has been out there in the news for well over a month, I guess I don&#x27;t understand why Apple didn&#x27;t try to make a bid for ARM? Or why Apple didn&#x27;t try to set up some sort of independent holding company or consortium to buy ARM. They definitely have the money and clout to have done something like that.

ARM and Apple go way back (Apple was one of the three original consortium members who founded ARM). I am sure they pay a flat fee and have freedom to do whatever they like (probably other than sub licensing).Owning ARM would make no sense for them as they would gain no IP but would have to deal with antitrust which would force them to continue licensing the ip to others, which is not a business they are in.If ARM vanished tomorrow I doubt it would affect apple’s business at all.

I doubt Apple&#x27;s arm license will be affected. But I think they will be getting tougher competition in the sense that Android phones will be getting a fair bit better now - most of them will be using super well integrated Nvidia GPU&#x2F;ML chips in the future because of this deal.I think it will also bring Google and Nvidia closer together

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

Yes. It&#x27;d have been reasonable to block sales to non eu parties for national security reasons.Now arm is yet another US company.

I&#x27;m so exercised about this that I&#x27;m setting up a think tank to actively discuss UK control of critical tech (and &quot;golden geese&quot; as per others in this thread). If you&#x27;re in tech and have a problem with this, please drop me a line, I&#x27;m @bencollier on Twitter.

Britain and the US are politically, and economically entwined with each other. As a country, keeping core technology at home is tied to defense (don&#x27;t buy your guns from your competitor). If they don&#x27;t intend to go to war with the US, then there isn&#x27;t any real defense loss (I&#x27;d also point out that making IP &quot;blueprints&quot; for a core is different from manufacturing the core itself). If Britain were to have a real issue, it would be the US locking down F35 jets they sell to their allies.

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

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

It might pretty much work today, perhaps with a few config file changes.

Android still works on x86-64; indeed there are quite a few actively maintained x86-64 Android ports that are used, both on bare metal PCs and virtualized, for various purposes.The problem is that there are no x86 SoCs that are sufficiently power efficient to be battery-life competitive with ARM SoCs in phones.

You would first need an actual working RISC-V silicon that it would be worth porting to. Not the essentially demo chips with poor performance that are around now.RISV-V is a lot of talk and hype but the actual silicon that you could buy and implement into a product is hard to come by. With the exception of a few small microcontroller efforts (GigaDevice, Sipeed).

MIPS support was removed from the Android NDK, though older versions of the NDK stand a good chance of working, still. So app developers with components needing the NDK support have a bit of work to remain compatible.

Android worked on x86 and MIPS in the past, it could presumably be ported to work with RISC-V

Well, the commenter is actively worried about Nvidia destroying shareholder value. If you destroy ARM in the process of acquiring it the combined company will be worth less in the long run. If the acquisition was actually motivated by synergy then Nvidia could have gotten away with a much cheaper license from ARM.

&gt; This isn&#x27;t going to do good things for anyone who doesn&#x27;t own a lot of Nvidia stock.If it makes you feel any better, studies of acquisitions show that most of them are duds and destroy acquirer shareholder value.

This isn&#x27;t going to do good things for anyone who doesn&#x27;t own a lot of Nvidia stock.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.

This is NVIDIA&#x27;s &quot;xbox one&#x2F;PS4&quot; moment. AMD has deals with console manufacturers, their clients pay for a huge amount of R&amp;D that gets ported back into AMD&#x27;s desktop graphics architecture. Even if AMD doesn&#x27;t make basically anything on the consoles themselves, it&#x27;s a huge win for their R&amp;D.Now, every reference-implementation ARM processor manufactured will fund GeForce desktop products, datacenter&#x2F;enterprise, etc as well.NVIDIA definitely needs something like this in the face of the new Samsung deal, as well as AMD&#x27;s pre-existing console deals.

Is the situation better with Mali? This seems something that might actually improve with Nvidia. I was under the impression that ARM GPUs are currently heavily locked down anyway (in terms of open source drivers). Nvidia would presumably still be locked down, but maybe we&#x27;d have more uniform cross platform interfaces like CUDA.

Or Jensen believes that smart, convergent IoT is at a tipping point, and this is a bet on that.Not all fashionable words are devoid of meaning.

There&#x27;s a pretty big assumption that the deal even gets approved.Even if it does get approved, and even if NVIDIA decides to not screw up any of the licensees, the whole notion of NVIDIA being capable of doing so to any of their (NVIDIA&#x27;s) competitors, will surely mean extra selling points for all of ARM competitors like MIPS, RISC-V etc.

Want to be nerdy and use powers-of-ten? Fine by me! But then please go all the way: $4E10!!!

My instincts are telling me this is smoke and mirrors to rationalize a $40E9 deal.  The only part of that that computes at all is the GPU integration, and that only works if NVIDIA doesn&#x27;t terrorize Arm licencees.  The rest is buzzwords.

Arm CEO really doesn&#x27;t understand what&#x27;s going on. There is no future where everything runs on the cloud. That simply cannot happen for legal reasons. Additionally the internet is getting more balkanized and that further is against the idea of the cloud. AI will not be running in the cloud, it will be running locally. Apple sees this but many others don&#x27;t yet. You only run AI in the cloud if you want to monetize it with advertising.

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>&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.&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;&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.”

Softbank has some losses of it’s own to make up, so that’s not very surprising.

Once they were sold to SoftBank ARM had no more control over its destiny. You&#x27;re saying that they&#x27;re repeating the pattern, but they had no choice in this today. This was SoftBank&#x27;s decision as the owner of ARM.

It&#x27;s not too early to judge, because this has been in the news for a while and people have had the time to do an analysis of what it means for Nvidia to buy ARM. The press release doesn&#x27;t add much to that analysis. We&#x27;ve seen a ton of press releases go by for acquisitions and they&#x27;re always full of sunshine... at the moment, I&#x27;m thinking of Oracle&#x27;s acquisition of Sun, but that&#x27;s just one example. The typical pattern for acquisitions is that a tech company will acquire another tech company because they can extract more value from the acquired company&#x27;s IP compared to the value the acquired company would have by itself, and you can extract a lot of value from an IP while you slash development budgets. Not saying that&#x27;s going to happen, but it&#x27;s a common pattern in acquisitions.I think it&#x27;s enough to know what Nvidia is, how they operate, and what their general strategies are.Not saying I agree with the analysis... but I am not that optimistic.

Corporations say these types of things with every acquisition. It might be true initially and superficially, but that&#x27;s all.

Why would you read the press release at all? Do you expect a company to not do what&#x27;s in their own financial self-interest? Look, I love nVidia. I only buy nVidia GPUs and I adore their devices like the SHIELD TV, handheld, tablet, even the Tegra Note 7. Even I can see that they&#x27;re not just buying ARM on a whim. They intend to make that money back. Them using ARM to make that money is good for absolutely nobody except nVidia themselves.

My experience of acquisitions is that sweet songs are sung to calm the horses. Then the next financial quarter comes around and the truck from the glue factory arrives.If you take at face value anything from a press release, earnings call or investor relations website, then I would like to take a moment to share with you the prospectus of Brooklyn Bridge LLC.

And when Facebook bought Oculus, they said no FB login would be required to use Oculus. FoxConn was supposed to ramp up production in the US according to a press release. That was then, now time has passed. bigCorp hopes your short term memory forgets the woohooism from a foregone press release.

I&#x27;m reminded of this recent development:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oculus.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;a-single-way-to-log-into-oculus-and-unlock-social-features&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oculus.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;a-single-way-to-log-into-oculus-...</a>Discussed here on HN, with the top comment being a copy and paste of Palmer Lucky&#x27;s acknowledgement that the early critics turned out to be correct:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24201306" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24201306</a>Different situation, different companies, but if you &quot;follow the money&quot; you&#x27;ll never be too far wrong.

Have you read the press release at all? It&#x27;s too early to judge this now.
ARM will stay in Cambridge and Nvidia wants to invest in this place.

love the armchair CEO perspectives that NVIDIA spent $40b only to flush the whole ARM ecosystem right down the drain, that&#x27;s definitely a rational thing to do, right?Jensen&#x27;s not an idiot, how many OG 90s tech CEOs are still at the helm of the company they founded? Any severely negative moves towards their customers just drives them into RISC-V and they know that.Yes, ARM customers will be paying more for their ARM IP. No, NVIDIA is not going to burn ARM to the ground.

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.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.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.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.[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>

Maybe? But somehow I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;ll be able to capitalize on it because Intel.

Even if&#x2F;when RISCV takes over, Intel and AMD will be in a unique position to offer &quot;combination&quot; chips with both x86 and RISCV cores which could milk the richest enterprise and government markets for decades to come.

Indeed, looking right now at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rioslab.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rioslab.org&#x2F;</a>.

Probably worth a second look at this RISC desktop thread<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19118642" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19118642</a>

Would love to see RISC-V catch up and be more widely adopted.

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

No to make a better ARM chip, with awesome graphics&#x2F;AI, not licence the design and take all the mobile CPU profits for 5-10 years?

There&#x27;s a huge number of synergies that this deal provides.(a) NVIDIA becomes a full-fledged full-stack house, they have both CPU and GPU now. They can now compete with AMD and Intel on equal terms. That has huge implications in the datacenter.(b) GeForce becomes the reference implementation of the GPU, ARM processors now directly fund NVIDIA&#x27;s desktop&#x2F;datacenter R&amp;D in the same way consoles and Samsung SOCs fund Radeon&#x27;s R&amp;D. CUDA can be used anywhere on any platform easily.(c) Acqui-hire for CPU development talent. NVIDIA&#x27;s efforts in this area have not been very good to date. Now they have an entire team that is experienced in developing ARM and can aim the direction of development where they want.Basically there&#x27;s a reason that NVIDIA was willing to pay more than anyone else for this property. And (Softbank&#x27;s) Son desperately needed a big financial win to show his investors that he&#x27;s not a fucking idiot for paying $32b for ARM and to make up for his other recent losses.

I think this is driven by partly embedded applications and more directly by the datacenter.Nvidia already own the parallel compute&#x2F;ML part of the datacenter and the Mellanox acquisition had brought the ability to compete in the networking part of the datacenter - but they were missing CPU IP, for tasks that aren&#x27;t well matched to the GPU. This plugs that hole. They are in control of a complete data-center solution now.

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

And Intel&#x27;s revenue remains 700% larger than Nvidia&#x27;s

Samsung and TSMC are both worth more. America&#x27;s largest chipmaker.

Nvidia might have been an underdog once, but they are now the world&#x27;s largest chipmaker, even surpassing Intel.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.extremetech.com&#x2F;computing&#x2F;312528-nvidia-overtakes-intel-as-worlds-most-valuable-chip-maker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.extremetech.com&#x2F;computing&#x2F;312528-nvidia-overtake...</a>

&gt; The comment identified the positive side of the nvidia story. Note that nvidia had not had large acquisition for many years.Not correct Mellanox was bought for $7B.

The comment identified the positive side of the nvidia story. Note that nvidia had not had large acquisition for many years.This acquisition can be seen as a beacon of nvidia&#x27;s past struggle against the market and the competitors.For whatever happened, nvidia innovated to their success, and had enabled possibly the biggest tech boom so far through deep learning. Might be one day everyone claimed nvidia to be the &quot;most important company&quot; on earth.

I love this, I was amongst early engineers on CUDA (compilers).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.NVIDIA was constantly attacked by a much bigger Intel (which changed interfaces to kill products and was made to pay by a court)Through innovation, developing new technologies (CUDA) they increased market cap, and have used that to buy Arm&#x2F;Mellanox.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!

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 .[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>

&gt; forces them to FRAND licensing of ARM IPFRAND licensing is worthless, if Qualcomm taught us anything.

There is a note at the end of the article:&quot;The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals for the U.K., China, the European Union and the United States. Completion of the transaction is expected to take place in approximately 18 months.&quot;Hopefully, the EU does its job, laughs at this and tells Nvidia to either go home or forces them to FRAND licensing of ARM IP.

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.)

Does Nvidia have a habit of killing acquisitions? I&#x27;m only familiar with their graphics business, but as far as I can see the only culture going on there is excellence.

It is less about them intentionally killing it and more about their culture and attitude killing it.

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.

Apple would not get antitrust approval (iPhone maker controls all android chips????). So that’s why.

I doubt Apple is dumb enough not to have basically a perpetual license for ARM.

I think Apple is not committed to ARM at all. Bitcode, Rosetta 2, &quot;Apple Silicon&quot; - it all suggests they want to keep ISA flexibility.

It seems to me that if Apple felt that Nvidia would limit them, they could have outbid them for ARM! So I think you are correct.

&gt; Their best move might be to forget about the architecture license and make the switch to something else with the rest of the market.This assumes that there isn&#x27;t some other factor in transitioning architecture - this argument could boil down in the mid 2000&#x27;s to &quot;Why not go x86&#x2F;amd64&quot;, but you couldn&#x27;t buy a license to that easily (would need to be 3-way with Intel&#x2F;AMD to further complicate things)Apple has done quite well with their ARM license, outperforming the rest of the mobile form factor CPU market by a considerable margin. I don&#x27;t doubt that they could transition - they&#x27;ve done it successfully 3 times already, even before the current ARM transition.Apple under Cook has said they want to &quot;to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make&quot;. I doubt they&#x27;d turn away from that now to become dependent on an outside technology, especially given how deep their pockets are.

&gt; 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 fineThere is one thing they would need to worry about though, which is that if the rest of the market moves to RISC-V or x64 or whatever else, it&#x27;s not implausible that someone might at some point make a processor which is superior to the ones those companies make in-house. If it&#x27;s the same architecture, you just buy them or license the design and put them in your devices. If it&#x27;s not, you&#x27;re stuck between suffering an architecture transition that your competitors have already put behind them or sticking with your uncompetitive in-house designs using the old architecture that nobody else wants anymore.Their best move might be to forget about the architecture license and make the switch to something else with the rest of the market.

Qualcomm used to design their own cores up until the last generation or two, but you&#x27;re right they use the reference designs now.EDIT: correction, make that the last generation or four (oops, time flies)

What happens if&#x2F;when Nvidia launches SoCs that compete with Qualcomm and MediaTek. Will it continue to offer the latest cores to competitors when it will make a lot more money on its own SoCs? This is the reason for the widepsread concern about Nvidia owning Arm.

Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek all currently just use off the shelf A5x &amp; A7x cores in their SoCs. Unless that part of the company is losing money I don&#x27;t expect nVidia to cut that off. Especially since that&#x27;s likely a key part of why nVidia acquired ARM in the first place - I can&#x27;t imagine they care about the Mali team(s) or IP.

If they do it that directly, sure. But on a large enough (time)scale, incentives are the only thing that matters. And they&#x27;ll certainly think hard about putting their fancy new research that would help a competitor into their openly licensed chips from now on.

&gt; nVidia could cut them off from any new designsWhy would they do that anyway? The downsides are obvious (immediate loss of revenue), the risks are huge (antitrust litigation, big boost to RiscV or even Mips), the possible benefits are nebulous.Those who are most obviously at risk are designers of mobile GPUs (Broadcom, PowerVR ...).

That&#x27;s untrue.(famously so, Intel used to ship arm chips with WMMX and Apple for example ships their CPU today with the AMX AI acceleration extension)

Well, regardless of whether this amendment is kosher or not, AMX definitely exists. Perhaps the $2T tech behemoth was able to work out a sweetheart deal with the $40B semiconductor company.&gt; There’s been a lot of confusion as to what this means, as until now it hadn’t been widely known that Arm architecture licensees were allowed to extend their ISA with custom instructions. We weren’t able to get any confirmation from either Apple or Arm on the matter, but one thing that is clear is that Apple isn’t publicly exposing these new instructions to developers, and they’re not included in Apple’s public compilers. We do know, however, that Apple internally does have compilers available for it, and libraries such as the Acclerate.framework seem to be able to take advantage of AMX. [0]my123&#x27;s instruction names leads to a very shallow rabbit hole on google, which turns up a similar list [1]Agreed upon: [&#x27;amxclr&#x27;, &#x27;amxextrx&#x27;, &#x27;amxextry&#x27;, &#x27;amxfma16&#x27;, &#x27;amxfma32&#x27;, &#x27;amxfma64&#x27;, &#x27;amxfms16&#x27;, &#x27;amxfms32&#x27;, &#x27;amxfms64&#x27;, &#x27;amxgenlut&#x27;, &#x27;amxldx&#x27;, &#x27;amxldy&#x27;, &#x27;amxldz&#x27;, &#x27;amxldzi&#x27;, &#x27;amxmac16&#x27;, &#x27;amxmatfp&#x27;, &#x27;amxmatint&#x27;, &#x27;amxset&#x27;, &#x27;amxstx&#x27;, &#x27;amxsty&#x27;, &#x27;amxstz&#x27;, &#x27;amxstzi&#x27;, &#x27;amxvecfp&#x27;, &#x27;amxvecint&#x27;]my123 also has [&#x27;amxextrh&#x27;, &#x27;amxextrv&#x27;].[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;14892&#x2F;the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review&#x2F;2#twitter-widget-0:~:text=A%20big%20change%20to%20the%20CPU,%E2%80%9Cmachine%20learning%20accelerators%E2%80%9D%20into%20the%20microarchitecture" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;14892&#x2F;the-apple-iphone-11-pro...</a>.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realworldtech.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;?threadid=187087&amp;curpostid=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realworldtech.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;?threadid=187087&amp;curpost...</a>

&quot;and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there&quot;No, they may not. People keep suggesting these kinds of things, but part of the license agreement is that you can&#x27;t modify the ISA. Only ARM can do that.

Curious as I don&#x27;t know the terms of a perpetual architectural ARM license. But, is it valid only for a specific architecture, say v8 or v9, or is it valid for all future architectures as well? Or is it one of those things, where it depends per licensee and how they negotiated?

<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>Broadcom has an architectural license. They do also license core designs.Really if nVidia locks up the lower end cores, then a lot of stuff breaks. Billions of super tiny ARM cores are everywhere. ARM has few competitors in the instruction set space for low end, low power, low cost cores. AVR, PIC, and MIPS are what come to mind. And AVR&#x2F;PIC are owned by Microchip corporation.These ARM chip unit licenses are dirt cheap, there&#x27;s hundreds of small manufacturers, and their chips go in everything, and in unexpected places. And these aren&#x27;t just little microprocessors anymore. They&#x27;re even in SoCs as little coprocessors that manage separate hardware components in realtime.The amount of penetration ARM has in hidden places cannot be underestimated. And there isn&#x27;t a quick replacement for them. Not one freely licensed to any manufacturer.

I see this going a few ways for different players: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.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.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.Hopefully they&#x27;ll also try to mend fences with the open source community, or at least avoid repeating past offenses.

Google, Habana (Intel), AMD in a year or two, Amazon in few years

There&#x27;s low power inference from Intel (Movidius) and Google (Coral Edge TPU). Nvidia doesn&#x27;t really have anything below the Jetson Nano. I think there are a smattering of other low power cores out there (also dedicated chips in phones). TPUs are used on the high performance end and there are also companies like Graphcore who do insane things in silicon. Also niche HPC products like Intel Knight&#x27;s Landing (Xeon Phi) which is designed for heterogeneous compute.There isn&#x27;t a huge amount of competition in the consumer&#x2F;midrange sector. Nvidia has almost total market domination here. Really we just need a credible cross platform solution that could open up gpgpu on AMD. I&#x27;m surprised Apple isn&#x27;t pushing this more, as they heavily use ML on-device and to actually train anything you need Nvidia hardware (eg try buying a Macbook for local deep learning training using only apple approved bits, it&#x27;s hard!). Maybe they&#x27;ll bring out their own training silicon at some point.Also you need to make a distinction between training and inference hardware. Nvidia absolutely dominate model training, but inference is comparably simpler to implement and there is more competition there - often you don&#x27;t even need dedicated hardware beyond a cpu.

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

Android, YouTube, Google Maps, DoubleClick, Applied Semantics (became AdSense), DeepMind, Urchin, ITA Software, etc.I think Google has done ok.

Because so many of Google&#x27;s acquisitions have ended up doing well...

AMD&#x27;s x86 licence isn&#x27;t transferrable. To acquire them is to destroy their value.

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?

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.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.

Who needs to block it? And why is it a clean case?

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

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

Look at their AI&#x2F;CUDA documentation and associated githubs. Many of their tools and libraries are open source.Tell me, what other AI platform works with x86 and PowerPC and ARM? Currently NVIDIA’s GPUs do.

I think the biggest concern is NVIDIA&#x27;s stance against OSS.

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.

are you suggesting a bunch of office space leases that are fully stocked with beer is not worth $40 billion?

$40 billion is a real valuation though, as opposed to WeWork’s.

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?

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.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.

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

Apple is an ARM founder. You can bet your boots they made sure they were safe through the history of ARM&#x27;s existence and sale to Softbank in the first place. No one can cite the deep magic to them, they were there when it was written.

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.Anyone has a proper analysis on the ramifications of this acquisition for Apple&#x27;s future in ARM?

as an embedded dev, the last 2-4 years of STM (major ARM provider) have seen a large degree of integration of specialized hardware into 32-bit microcontrollers. e.g. radios, motor control, AI, 64-bit FPUs, graphics, low-power, etc.I expect more of the same. The only way it could go wrong is if they lose customer focus. Microcontrollers are a competitive, near-commodity market, so companies have to provide valuable features.I don&#x27;t really know Nvidia well - I only buy their stock! - but they seem to be keeping their customers happy by paying attention to what they need. Perhaps their fabrication will be a boon to micros, as they&#x27;re usually a few gens behind laptop&#x2F;server processors.

&gt; Humanity would be better off of a single ISA does become truly universal.This is an interesting thought. I think I would agree with this in the CPU world of the last 20-30 years, but it makes me wonder a few things. Might a universal ISA eliminate major pieces of competitive advantage for chip makers, and&#x2F;or stall innovation? It does feel like non-vector instructions are somewhat settled, but vector instructions haven&#x27;t yet, and GPUs are changing rapidly (take NVIDIA&#x27;s Tensor cores and ray tracing cores for example). With Moore&#x27;s law coming to an end, a lot of people are talking about special purpose chips more and more, TPUs being a pretty obvious example, and as nice as it might be to settle on a universal ISA, it seems like we&#x27;re all about to start seeing larger differences more frequently, no?&gt; 80% of comments are low information, Dunning-Kruger effect in action.I really liked all of your comment except this. I have a specific but humble request aside from the negative commentary &amp; assumption about behavior. Please consider erasing the term &quot;Dunning-Kruger effect&quot; from your mind. It is being used here incorrectly, and it is very widely misunderstood and abused. There is no such effect. The experiments in the paper do not show what was claimed, the paper absolutely does not support the popular notion that confidence is a sign of incompetence. (Please read the actual paper -- the experiments demonstrated a positive correlation between confidence and competence!) There have been some very wonderful analyses of how wrong the Dunning-Kruger paper was, yet most people only seem to remember the (incorrect) summary that confidence is a sign of incompetence.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.talyarkoni.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2010&#x2F;07&#x2F;07&#x2F;what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.talyarkoni.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2010&#x2F;07&#x2F;07&#x2F;what-the-dunning-...</a>

You&#x27;re not wrong, but most of HN threads are like this. 80% of comments are low information, Dunning-Kruger effect in action. But among that, there are still some useful gems, so despite what you said, HN is still worth it. If you fold the first two top level comments, the rest have some useful , informed perspective.I don&#x27;t see this as having that much of an impact on any short to medium term. ARM has too much intricate business dependencies and contracts nVidia can&#x27;t just get out of.My speculation is that nVidia might be what it takes to push arm to overcome the final huddle into more general purpose and server cpu, and achieve that pipedream of a single binary&#x2F;ISA running everywhere. Humanity would be better off if a single ISA does become truly universal. Whether business&#x2F;technology politics will allow that to happen and whether nVidia has enough understanding and the shrewdness to pull that off is to be seen.

I know, right? It&#x27;s finally hitting me. I am realizing how much of an asshole I&#x27;ve become thanks to the validation of a handful of strangers on the internet. I have caught myself commenting on things I have only cursory knowledge of and being justified by the likes of strangers. I actually believed that the online communities I participated in actually represented the world at large.I&#x27;m not quite ready to end my participation in HN, but I&#x27;m close. I am looking back on the last 10 years of participation in forums like this and wondering what the hell good it did. I am also suddenly very worried for what sites like Reddit are doing to kids. That process of validation is going to produce some very anti-social, misguided adults.I would rather participate in an argument map style discussion, or, frankly, just read the thoughts of &#x27;experts&#x27;.

Agreed, upvotes are a failed experiment, especially for comments.

Totally. I see a future where people will have edge over others when they pay for information than relying on free sources (except Wikipedia due to its scale, but still, Wikipedia is not a replacement for a proper academic textbook).FT provides insightful commentary from finance&#x2F;business side of things and their subscription is expensive - rightfully so.

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?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.

Wave owns MIPS, about which I had no idea and googling that also returns that Wave went Chapter 11 this year.

Sounds like everyone is rallying around RISC-V. What does this mean for MIPS?&quot;ARM was probably what sank MIPS&quot; - saagarjha<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>

ouch I wrote a whole comment and systematically replaced Nvidia with AMD ... kind of impressive.Thanks!

How does AMD enter into this? Did you mean Nvidia?

Intel has been promising high-end graphics for decades, and delivering low end integrated graphics as a feature for their CPUs. Which makes sense, the market for CPUs is worth more than the market for game oriented GPUs. The rise of GPUs used in AI might change this calculation, but I doubt it. I suspect that nVidia just would like to move into the CPU market.

Nvidia could have bought a world-class CPU architects team, and build their own ARM or RISC-V chips (NVIDIA has an infinite ARM license already).

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.Edit: yes I meant nVidia not AMD!

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

Are they getting 10% of nvidia or keeping 10% of Arm

&gt; Why is this stake necessary?Edit: it’s not necessary&#x2F;a requirement.They’re noting that after the transaction, SoftBank will still fall under the 10% ownership threshold that requires more reporting from the SEC [1]:&gt; Section 16 of the Exchange Act applies to an SEC reporting company&#x27;s directors and officers, as well as shareholders who own more than 10% of a class of the company&#x27;s equity securities registered under the Exchange Act. The rules under Section 16 require these “insiders” to report most of their transactions involving the company&#x27;s equity securities to the SEC within two business days on Forms 3, 4 or 5.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;smallbusiness&#x2F;goingpublic&#x2F;officersanddirectors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;smallbusiness&#x2F;goingpublic&#x2F;officersanddir...</a>

The UK government never learns. Kraft made similar promises when buying Cadbury regarding jobs,but quietly reneged on them over time. The Kraft CEO was asked to show up before an UK parliament committee, but of course declined, and that was the end of the story.

Does this mean they are or aren&#x27;t buying treasure data?  What would happen if not?

There were two separate IoT business units: Platform (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pelion.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pelion.com</a>) and Data (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.treasuredata.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.treasuredata.com&#x2F;</a>). The Platform unit fits the Segars post-acquisition comment about end-to-end IoT software architecture, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24465005" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24465005</a>&gt; One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make commitments to the UK government over Arm’s future in Britain, where opposition politicians have recently insisted that any potential deal must safeguard British jobs.So the deal has already been influenced by one regulator. That should encourage other regulators.&gt; SoftBank will remain committed to Arm’s long-term success through its ownership stake in NVIDIA, expected to be under 10 percent.Why is this stake necessary?

In addition, it&#x27;s not even a valid argument if the cost was entirely in cash.One would be making the argument, &quot;the cost is essentially free because although we spent $40B, we acquired a company worth $40B&quot;. Obviously, that&#x27;s not any more correct than the case of paying in stock.

It&#x27;s rare for the acquiring companies stock to not decline, regardless of whether the market thinks they overpaid.

&gt;If investors thing Nvidia overpaid, its share price will declineYou realize that logic no longer matters in this economy. There&#x27;s an oversupply of printed money and stonks literally only going up.

&gt;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.This isn&#x27;t correct. If investors thing Nvidia overpaid, its share price will decline. There are many examples of acquiring companies losing significant value on announcements to buy other companies even in pure stock deals.

And note that the $12B is also owned by Nvidia&#x27;s shareholders (they own the company which owns the cash), so they&#x27;re paying for that too.It&#x27;s just different forms of shareholder assets being traded for other assets, by the shareholders (or rather, their majority vote).

To me, &quot;paying for&quot; and &quot;diluted&quot; connotates negative emotions.Cash paid in this instance is treated no different than cash in their normal operating expenses. If either generates profits in line with their current expected returns, the stock price stays the same, and everyone is indifferent to the transaction.Same goes for stock issuance. If the expectation of the use of proceeds from the issuance are in line with the company&#x27;s current expected returns, everyone is indifferent.Your statement is still true, and the stock market jumped today on the news, so I feel my connotation is misplaced.

It is not &quot;free&quot;, it means current shareholders of Nvidia are paying for the remaining money. Their stock is diluted on fresh issue of shares.[1]The $12B comes from Nvidia the company, the remaining money comes from Nvidia&#x27;s shareholders directly.[1] Only if the valuation of ARM is &quot;worth it&quot; the fresh issue of shares will not cost the current shareholders anything. This is rarely the case , if Nvida overvalued(or less likely undervalued) the deal then current shareholders are giving more than they got for it.

No one has seemed to notice the following two things:&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> )and&quot;The transaction does not include Arm’s IoT Services Group.&quot; (nvidia news.)which appear to contradict each other.I&#x27;m not sure about the significance of this. I would have guessed Nvidia would have wanted the IoT group to remain.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.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.)

hodl out for the Titan A-78 Super if you can, I hear it runs a bit faster

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

Allegedly it has been sorted, before this deal was announced. No idea how.

<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>Does this mean Nvidia will have to deal with the hot mess at China ARM?

Just noting that Apple doesn&#x27;t have a perpetual license, they have an architecture license[1], including for 64bit parts[2].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].[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>[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>[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>

China de-facto blocked Qualcomm-NXP merger during a trade talk by not providing a decision before the deadline to the deal.

Is it that hard to see that China might see this as an American company further monopolizing silicon tech, potentially cutting China off from Arm designs.But more to the point, this is also China. If you want to do business in China, you&#x27;re going to do as they tell you, or you get the stick. And if you don&#x27;t like it, what are you going to do?

is this a question or just sarcasm? The post said clearly &quot;The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals for the U.K., China, the European Union and the United States. Completion of the transaction is expected to take place in approximately 18 months.&quot;

On what grounds&#x2F;with what authority?

I really hope so. The UK government should block it also, but I don&#x27;t think they will.

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

Graviton is Neoverse, ARM&#x27;s Neoverse.

&gt; but server-ARM doesn&#x27;t sound like a focus.ARM doesn&#x27;t have good server CPU IP. Graviton, A64FX, etc. belong to other companies.

edge-AI!They&#x27;re also building an ARM supercomputer at Cambridge, but server-ARM doesn&#x27;t sound like a focus.I&#x27;m just hoping for some updated mobile Nvidia GPUs... and maybe the rumoured 4K Nintendo Switch.They say they won&#x27;t muck it up, and it seems sensible to keep it profitable:&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.

Maybe they are forced to choose behind the scene. Or, they know better opportunities and they need to cash out right now.

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

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>I wonder how Linux would react to this news.

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

Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B