
Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B - czr
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for-40-billion-creating-worlds-premier-computing-company-for-the-age-of-ai
======
DCKing
This is terrible. Not really just because of Nvidia - which has a lot of
problems I've previously commented on the rumors of this [1] - but Nvidia's
ownership completely changes ARM's incentives.

ARM created a business model for itself where they had to act as a "BDFL" 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's business model enabled a very
diverse and thriving ARM market. I think this is the _sole_ reason we see ARM
eating the chip world today.

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'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's open CPU and GPU ecosystem.
Will Nvidia allow selling ARM licenses to competitors of Nvidia's business?
Will Nvidia reserve ARM'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 "does Nvidia have a better
propietary purpose for this?". 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.

EDIT: ARM'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.

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's golden age.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24010821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24010821)

~~~
Wowfunhappy
To play devil’s advocate a bit, are nVidia's incentives necessarily so
different? Their goal will be to make as much money as possible, and it's
clear that licensing has been a winning strategy for ARM.

Samsung comes to mind as another company that makes their own TVs, phones,
SSDs, ect., but is also perfectly happy to license the underlying screens and
chips in those products to other companies. From my vantage point, the setup
seems to be working well?

~~~
klelatti
How do we know that Samsung hasn't stifled some potential competitors by
refusing to sell them screens or by selling them an inferior product?

~~~
baddox
Samsung makes (excellent) screens for iPhones, which are huge competitors to
Samsung's own flagship phones, but Samsung still seems happy to take the
profits from the screen sales. If there are smaller potential competitors that
Samsung won't work with it's most likely because the scale is too small to be
in their economic interest, not because they're rejecting profits in order to
stifle potential competitors.

~~~
babypuncher
Apple is a much bigger company than Samsung, they can't realistically turn
down a contract that big when LG is lying in wait to take all that money.

~~~
sfifs
Not really. Revenues and Profits of Samsung group and Apple are roughly
comparable and in many ways Samsung's revenue streams are more diversified and
sustainable.. stock valuation notwithstanding.

~~~
headsupftw
"stock valuation notwithstanding" Perhaps you were thinking of Samsung
Electronics, not Samsung Group.

~~~
tooltalk
There isn't really much outside Samsung Electronics in terms of
revenue/profit.

~~~
royroyroys
Samsung SDS made $635 million in profit in 2019 which I think was higher than
ARM? As far as I'm aware the 'Samsung Group' doesn't actually have all the
companies under that so it's difficult to see what the overall revenue/profit
is of the entire 'group'. It has quite a few other companies, like heavy
industries, insurance, asset management, etc and I think they all have
thousands of employees and are very large companies in their industries so I'd
be surprised that when combined the other companies weren't significant. Did
you have any data on this?

------
Blammar
No one has seemed to notice the following two things:

"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." (from
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/nvidia-reportedly-
to...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/nvidia-reportedly-to-acquire-
arm-holdings-from-softbank-for-40-billion/) )

and

"The transaction does not include Arm’s IoT Services Group." (nvidia news.)

which appear to contradict each other.

I'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 "free" since the value of the
corporation increases.

In other words, Nvidia is essentially paying $12 billion in cash for ARM up
front, and that's all. (The extra $5B in cash or stock depends on financial
performance of ARM, and thus is a second-order effect.)

~~~
walterbell
There were two separate IoT business units: Platform
([https://pelion.com](https://pelion.com)) and Data
([https://www.treasuredata.com/](https://www.treasuredata.com/)). The Platform
unit fits the Segars post-acquisition comment about end-to-end IoT software
architecture,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24465005](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24465005)

 _> 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.

 _> 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?

~~~
oxfordmale
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.

~~~
djmobley
Except the Cadbury-Kraft debacle led to major reforms in how the UK regulates
foreign takeovers.

In the case of Arm, the guarantees provided back in 2016 were legally binding,
which is why we’re here, four years and another acquisition later, with Nvidia
now eager to demonstrate it is standing by those commitments.

Maybe in this particular instance they did learn something?

~~~
bencollier49
They should learn to prevent the sale, period. Promises to retain some jobs
(for ever? What happens if profits decline? What happens if the core tech is
sold and ARM becomes a shell? Do the rules still apply?) address a tiny
fraction of the problems presented by the sale of one of our core national
tech companies.

~~~
tomalpha
I would have liked to see ARM remain owned in the UK. I think it's proven
itself capable of innovation and organic growth on its own.

But how can we evaluate the whether that will continue?

What if ARM is not sold, and then (for whatever reason) stagnates, doesn't
innovate, gets overtaken in some way, and enters gradual decline?

Perhaps that's unlikely, but _prevent the sale, period_ is feels too absolute.

~~~
bencollier49
That feels like giving up, to me. We should have the confidence that British
industry can development and flourish on its own merits without being sold off
to foreign interests.

~~~
fluffything
What have confidence when we can just look at ARM financials?

There are more ARM chips sold each year than those of all its competitors
together. Yet ARM's revenue is 300 million $.

Why? Because ARM lives from the ISA royalties, and their revenue on the cores
they license is actually small.

With RISC-V on the rise, and west sanctions against china, RISC-V competition
against ARM will only increase, and it is very hard to compete against
something that's good / better and has lower costs (RISC-V royalties are
"free").

I really have no idea why NVIDIA would adquire ARM. If they want a world-class
CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon,
Fujitsu, etc. are built and designed by better teams). ARM cores are used by
Qualcom and Samsung, but these aren't world-class and get beaten every gen by
Apple Silicon. If they want ARM royalties, that's high risk business, and very
low reward (there is little money to make there).

The only ok-ish cores ARM makes are embedded low-power cores (not mobile, but
truly IoT < 1W embedded). Hard to imagine that an architecture like Volta or
Ampere that perform well at 200-400W would perform well at the <1W envelope.
No mobile phone in the world uses nvidia accelerators, and mobile phones are
"supercomputers" when compared with the kind of devices ARM is "ok-ish" at.

So none of this makes sense to me, except if NVIDIA would want to "license"
GPUs with ARM cores to IoT and low power devices like ARM does, but that
sounds extremely far-fetched, because nvidia is super-far away from a product
there, and also because the margins for those products are very very thin, and
nvidia tends to like 40-60% margins. You just can have those when buying IoT
chips for 0.12$. Its also hard to sell a GPU to these use cases because they
often don't need it.

~~~
bogomipz
>" If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that
(Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu, etc. are built and designed by better
teams)."

The latest Fujitsus HPC offering the A64FX is also ARM based though.[1][2] And
it sounds as though this is replacing their SPARC64 in this role .

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_\(supercomputer\))

~~~
floatboth
Fujitsu is using custom cores, but AWS Graviton (1 and 2) actually uses Arm
Neoverse cores. The Ampere Altra will too.

------
fishermanbill
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.

I can not put into words how furious I am at the UK's Conservative party for
not protecting our last great tech company.

Europe has been fooled into the USA'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.

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't bought but Apple essentially mothballed them. Now ARM will
undoubtedly be the next via an intermediate buyout.

You look across Europe and there is nothing. Deepmind could have been a great
European tech company - it just needed the right investment.

~~~
alfalfasprout
And you really think more protectionism will help?

Maybe part of the problem is that due to so many regulations, there's not a
healthy startup ecosystem and the compensation isn't remotely high enough to
draw the best talent.

~~~
mytherin
Regulation has little to do with it. Most of the tech industry is inherently
winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most because of how easy it is to scale up
tech solutions. US companies get a huge head-start because of their large home
market compared to the fragmented EU market, and can easily carry that
advantage into also dominating the EU market.

There is a reason Russia and China have strong tech companies and Europe
doesn’t. That reason isn’t lack of money, lack of talent or regulations. The
only way for Europe to get big tech companies is by removing or crippling big
US companies so EU companies can actually compete. The US companies would be
quickly replaced by EU alternatives and those would offer high compensation
all the same.

Whether or not that is worth it from the perspective of the EU is not so black
and white - tech is obviously not everything - but the current situation where
all EU data gets handed to the US government on a silver platter is also far
from optimal from the perspective of the EU.

~~~
ngcc_hk
When is the time china and Russia has a lead in IT by not protectionist and
copycat. I can only think of tik tok.

The strange thing is if you do not count brexit, Arm is one of the many
example Uk can do it. And whilst we say Nokia, Sieman and japan fuji (sitting
in Hosiptal now and thinking those mri, ...) non-chinese and non-Russia do
dominate the tech world even they are not USA. But communist ideology
totalitarian I found tik tok is really the exception.

Hence I think Eu has their problem. But not because they are not as good as
Russia or china.

~~~
guorzhen
Tmall of Alibaba processed 544,000 transactions per second during the peak of
its Singles' Day in 2019. I believe this has set a new world record for an
e-commerce platform.

In case you didn't know about Singles' Day:
[https://graphics.reuters.com/SINGLES-DAY-
ALIBABA/0100B30E24T...](https://graphics.reuters.com/SINGLES-DAY-
ALIBABA/0100B30E24T/index.html)

------
zdw
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 "Apple Silicon" 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'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'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'll also try to mend fences with the open source community, or
at least avoid repeating past offenses.

~~~
mxcrossb
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.

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

~~~
kabacha
Exactly, Apple is already straddling the line (and imho way past it) on anti-
comp laws.

~~~
kzrdude
I'm not defending Apple, just thinking that can't we say this for many of the
biggest tech firms? They are way past the line on anticompetitive business.

~~~
wongarsu
Yes, Apple is not alone in this. Google is another example, and they are very
aware of this and are acting very carefully

------
ChuckMcM
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.

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

~~~
saagarjha
I suspect you'll be waiting for quite a long time, if not forever.

~~~
dmix
FWIW Apple isn't even listed on RISC-V's membership page:

[https://riscv.org/membership/members/](https://riscv.org/membership/members/)

While some like Google and Alibaba are listed as platinum founding members.

~~~
nickik
I agree that Apple wont do RISC-V but you don't need to be a member to us it.

------
ibains
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&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/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!

~~~
enragedcacti
Nvidia might have been an underdog once, but they are now the world's largest
chipmaker, even surpassing Intel.

[https://www.extremetech.com/computing/312528-nvidia-
overtake...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/312528-nvidia-overtakes-
intel-as-worlds-most-valuable-chip-maker)

~~~
mhh__
And Intel's revenue remains 700% larger than Nvidia's

------
walterbell
Talking points from the founders of Arm & Nvidia:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its-
officialnvidia-acquires-arm-for-40b-to-create-what-could-be-a-computing-
juggernaut/)

 _> 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._

 _> Arm CEO Simon Segars framed it well when he told me, “We're moving into a
world where software doesn'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's a huge task to do."_

 _> Huang ... “We're about to enter a phase, where we're going to create an
internet that is thousands of times bigger than the internet that we enjoy
today. A lot of people don't realize this. And so, so we would like to create
a computing company for this age of AI.”_

~~~
topspin
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't terrorize Arm licencees. The rest is
buzzwords.

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

~~~
jabl
Perhaps the parent prefers engineering notation, which uses exponents that are
a multiple of three?

~~~
topspin
Got me.

------
paulpan
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.

$40B is an obscene lot of money objectively and what's the endgame for Nvidia?
If it's to "fuse" ARM's top CPU designs with their GPU prowess, then couldn'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'.
Perhaps an appropriate analogy is Qualcomm's IP licensing shenanigans and how
they've crippled the non-iOS smartphone industry.

That said, there's also examples of companies making these purchases with
minimal insidious behavior and co-existing with their would-be competitors:
Microsoft's acquisition of Github, Google's Pixel smartphones, Sony'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).

I suppose if this acquisition ends up going through (big if), then we'll see
Nvidia's true intent in 3-5 years.

~~~
dijit
I see two ways of it playing out for Nvidia:

1) Adoption of ARM CPU's (AWS Graviton, rPi etc) will cause software to be
adapted to ARM anyway, meaning: Nvidia could come out with a full vertically
integrated cloud.

or

2) Leveraging full vertical integration with ML based super computers.

------
PragmaticPulp
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.

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

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

~~~
p1necone
NVIDIAs whole schtick is making a bunch of interesting software and
arbitrarily locking it to their own hardware. Doesn't seem compatible with
being the steward for what has up until now been a relatively open CPU
architecture.

~~~
ImprobableTruth
arbitrarily? Nvidia invests a lot in software R&D, why should they just give
it away to their competitor AMD who basically invest nothing in comparison?

~~~
rocqua
Arbitrary as in, without technical reasons.

An open architecture, and business model based on partnership doesn't really
synchronize with vendor locking your products for increased profits.

------
ckastner
Softbank paid $32B for ARM in 2016.

A 25% gain over a horizon of four years is not bad for your average investment
-- but this isn't an average investment.

First, compared to the SP500, this underperforms over the same horizon (even
compared to end of 2019 rather than the inflated prices right now).

Second, ARM's sector (semiconductors) has performed far, far better in that
time. The PHOX (Philadelphia Semiconductor Index) doubled in the same time
period.

And looking at AMD and NVIDIA, it feels as if ARM would have been in a
position to benefit from the surrounding euphoria.

On the other hand, unless I'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.

~~~
yreg
It vastly overperforms the Softbank ventures we usually hear about (excluding
BABA).

~~~
smcl
To be honest, cash deposited in a boring current account outperforms
Softbank's Vision Fund

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

~~~
ranbumo
Yes. It'd have been reasonable to block sales to non eu parties for national
security reasons.

Now arm is yet another US company.

~~~
scarface74
Isn’t the UK leaving the EU?

~~~
mkl
Yes, but the Brexit referendum was only 1 month before SoftBank acquired Arm
Holdings. The deal was probably already in progress, and finalised before the
UK had any real policies about Brexit, so EU requirements would have been
reasonable if decided ahed of time. But the timing may also explain the lack
of any national security focused requirement (general confusion).

------
jasoneckert
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.

------
zmmmmm
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!

~~~
jml7c5
How does AMD enter into this? Did you mean Nvidia?

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

Thanks!

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

~~~
m00dy
and this would be killer for intel

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

------
ykl
I wonder what this means for NVIDIA's recent RISC-V efforts [1]. Apparently
they've been aiming to ship (or already have been shipping?) RISC-V
microcontrollers on their GPUs for some time .

[1] [https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-
NVIDI...](https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDIA-
Sijstermans.pdf)

------
alexhektor
None of the top comments disuss the possibility of the deal not going through
due to antitrust or other concerns by regulators. While it's owned by a
Japanese company and being sold to an American one, China most likely doesn't
approve and it could be a diplomatic issue due to security and intelligence
concerns?

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'm obviously not an expert there..)

[1]
[https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1200871.shtml](https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1200871.shtml)

------
throwaway4good
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.

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.

~~~
vaxman
Qualcomm, Apple and NVidia will lose favor with the US government unless they
bring (at least a full copy of) their FAB partners and the rest of their
supply chains home to America (Southwest including USMCA zone). We love
Southeast Asia, but the pandemic highlighted our vulnerability and, as a
country, we’re not going to keep sourcing our critical infrastructure in China
—or it’s back yard. If those American CEOs keep balking at the huge investment
required, you will see the US government write massive checks to Intel (has
numerous, albeit obsolete, domestic FABs), DELL and upstarts (like System76 in
Colorado) to pick winners, while the elevator to hell gains a new stop in
Silicon Valley and San Diego (nationalizing patents, etc) during a sort of
“war effort” like we had in the early 1940s.

------
sharken
Related discussions:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24009177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24009177)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173539](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173539)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454958)

~~~
someperson
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467989)

------
nl
Just noting that Apple _doesn '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't seem to be included, since existing
32bit Arm licensees had to upgrade to a 64bit license[2].

[1] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-
part-1-h...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-how-
arms-business-model-works/3)

[2]
[https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-...](https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-
adds-architectural-licensee-2015-04/)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural_licence)

------
throw_m239339
Tangential, but when I hear about all these insane "start-up du jour"
valuations, does anyone else feel like $40B isn't a lot of a hardware company
sur as ARM?

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

~~~
incognition
Maybe referencing Nikola?

------
krick
We've been repeating the word "bad" for the last couple of weeks here, but I
don't really remember any insights on what can happen long term (and I'm
asking, because I have absolutely no idea). I mean, let's suppose
relationships with Qualcomm don't work out (which we all kind of suspect
already). What'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't want to depend
on NVIDIA?

------
axaxs
This seems fair, as long as it stays true(regarding open licensing and
neutrality). I'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.

~~~
andy_ppp
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.

~~~
fluffything
That's not what everyone thinks.

NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own ARM CPUs with an
unlimited ARM license.

ARM doesn't give NVIDIA a world-class CPU team like apple's, amazon's or
fujitsu. ARM own cores are "meh" at best. Buying such a team, would also have
been much cheaper than 40b$.

Mobile ARM chips are meh, but nvidia doesn't have GPUs for that segment, and
their current architectures probably don't work well there. The only ARM chips
that are ok-ish are embedded/IoT at < 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&D investments in ARM to allow the sale. And
ARMs bottom line is 300million $/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'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'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/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.

~~~
yvdriess
> NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own ARM CPUs with an
> unlimited ARM license.

Famously, the Tegra SoCs, as used in the Nintendo Switch.

~~~
Followerer
No. Precisely the Tegra SoC within the Nintendo Switch (X1) uses ARM Cores.
Specifically A57 and A53. NVIDIA's project to develop their own v8.2 ARM-based
chip is called Denver.

~~~
yvdriess
What do you define the difference between an in-house developed SoC with ARM-
IP Cores and Denver's "ARM-based chip"? It is going to be a new architecture,
but using a mix of ARM IP blocks and in-house IP following the ARM ISA?

------
WhyNotHugo
This it terrible news for the FLOSS community.

Nvidia has consistently for many years refused to properly support Linux and
other open source OSs.

Heck, Wayland compositors just say "if you're using nvidia then don't even try
to use our software" since they're fed up of Nvidia's lack of collaboration.

I really hope ARM doesn't go the same way. :(

~~~
janoc
ARM itself has little to no impact on open source community. They only license
chip IP, they don't make any chips themselves. And most of the ARM
architecture is documented and open, with the exception of things like the
MALI GPU.

Whether or not some SoC (e.g. in a phone) is going to be supported by Linux
doesn't depend on ARM but on the manufacturer of the given chip. That won't
change in any way.

ARM maintains the GCC toolchain for the ARM architecture but that is unlikely
to go anywhere (and even if it did, it is open source and anyone else can take
it over).

The much bigger problem is that Nvidia could now start putting squeeze on chip
makers who license the ARM IP for their own business reasons - Nvidia makes
its own ARM-based ICs (e.g. the Jetson, Tegra) and it is hard to imagine that
they will not try to use their position to stiffle the competition (e.g. from
Qualcomm or Samsung).

~~~
hajile
[https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-
sof...](https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-
software/linux-kernel)

ARM directly maintains the main ARM parts of the Linux kernel among other
things.

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

------
m0zg
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.

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.

~~~
buzzerbetrayed
A few weeks ago there were rumors that ARM was looking to be sold to Apple and
Apple turned them down. If an NVIDIA acquisition is such a deal breaker for
Apple, why wouldn't they have just acquired ARM to begin with?

------
totorovirus
nvidia is notorious for being not nice to oss developers as Linus Torvalds
claims:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&ab_channel=Silic...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&ab_channel=SiliconNews)

I wonder how Linux would react to this news.

------
maxioatic
> Immediately accretive to NVIDIA’s non-GAAP gross margin and EPS

Can someone explain this? (From the bullet points of the article)

I looked up the definition of accretive: "characterized by gradual growth or
increase."

So it seems like they expect this to increase their margins. Does that mean
ARM had better margins than NVIDIA?

Edit: I don't know what non-GAAP and EPS stand for

~~~
ericmay
EPS -> earnings per share

Non-GAAP -> 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).

~~~
salawat
Though note the intent of GAAP is to cut down on "creative accounting" which
can tend to mislead.

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

------
Lind5
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 [https://semiengineering.com/nvidia-to-buy-arm-
for-40b/](https://semiengineering.com/nvidia-to-buy-arm-for-40b/)

------
hastradamus
Why would Nvidia spend $40B to ruin Arm? I can't see them making a return on
this investment. No one wants to work with Nvidia they are notoriously
roothless. I'm sure everyone is making plans to move to something else ASAP.
Maybe RISC-V

~~~
mzs
Some decision makers there dislike Apple that much.

------
MangoCoffee
[https://semiwiki.com/ip/287846-tears-in-the-rain-arm-and-
chi...](https://semiwiki.com/ip/287846-tears-in-the-rain-arm-and-china-jvs/)

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

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

------
peterburkimsher
Sounds like everyone is rallying around RISC-V. What does this mean for MIPS?

"ARM was probably what sank MIPS" \- saagarjha

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24402107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24402107)

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

------
bleepblorp
This isn't going to do good things for anyone who doesn'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's no real alternative to ARM-based
phone SoCs. Given Nvidia's business practices, any manufacturer who doesn't
already have a perpetual ARM license should expect to have to pay a lot more
money into Jensen Huang'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.

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

~~~
bleepblorp
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.

~~~
seizethegdgap
Can confirm, just spun up Bliss OS on my Surface Book. Not at all the
smoothest experience I've ever had using an Android tablet, but it's nice.

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

~~~
zaptrem
On what grounds/with what authority?

~~~
genocidicbunny
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're going to do as they tell you, or you get the stick. And if you
don't like it, what are you going to do?

------
runeks
The root problem here is the concept of patents -- at least as far as I can
see.

If patents did not exist, and nVidia were to close down ARM and tell people "
_no more ARM GPUs; only nVidia GPUs from now on_ ", 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.

It's really no wonder nVidia did this given the profits they can extract from
this monopoly (on the ARM ISA).

------
filereaper
Excellent, can't wait for Jensen to pull out a Cortex A-78 TI from his oven
next year. /s

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

------
hyperpallium2
edge-AI!

They're also building an ARM supercomputer at Cambridge, but server-ARM
doesn't sound like a focus.

I'm just hoping for some updated mobile Nvidia GPUs... and maybe the rumoured
4K Nintendo Switch.

They _say_ they won't muck it up, and it seems sensible to keep it profitable:

> 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.

~~~
fluffything
> but server-ARM doesn't sound like a focus.

ARM doesn't have good server CPU IP. Graviton, A64FX, etc. belong to other
companies.

~~~
Followerer
Graviton is Neoverse, ARM's Neoverse.

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

------
mikorym
Wow, didn'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.)

On a different topic, how would this influence Raspberry Pis going forward?

------
netheril96
Well, China will surely block this, just like how it blocked the Qualcomm
attempt to buy NXP ([https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nxp-semicondtrs-m-a-
qualc...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nxp-semicondtrs-m-a-
qualcomm/qualcomm-ends-44-billion-nxp-bid-after-failing-to-win-china-approval-
idUSKBN1KF193)).

Otherwise ARM would become a US company, and then the US would have another
weapon in their arsenal to sanction China's tech companies (e.g. Huawei).

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

------
easton
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).

~~~
Wowfunhappy
I'm pretty sure they can't, but I also think there's no way in hell they'd do
it if they could. It's not in Apple's DNA. Better for them if no one else has
access to the instruction set.

I bet they'd make a completely custom ISA if they could. Heck, maybe they plan
to some day, and that's why they're calling the new Mac processors "Apple
Silicon".

~~~
pier25
> _I bet they 'd make a completely custom ISA if they could. Heck, maybe they
> plan to some day, and that's why they're calling the new Mac processors
> "Apple Silicon"._

That was my first thought.

I'd be surprised if Apple wasn't already working on this.

------
andy_ppp
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.

Is it possible/legal for nvidia to charge a billion dollars per cpu for the
isa license or are these things perpetual?

------
m00dy
Can anyone point me who would be competing with Nvidia in AI Market ?

~~~
joshvm
There's low power inference from Intel (Movidius) and Google (Coral Edge TPU).
Nvidia doesn'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's Landing (Xeon Phi) which is designed for
heterogeneous compute.

There isn't a huge amount of competition in the consumer/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'm surprised Apple
isn'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's hard!). Maybe
they'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't even need
dedicated hardware beyond a cpu.

------
naruvimama
(Nvidia - ARM) - Nvidia >> 40 Bn

Only about 50% is gaming and nascent divisions like data centres can get a big
boost from the acquisition.

We only connected Nvidia with GPUs, perhaps AI & ML. Now they are going to be
a dominant player everywhere from consumer devices, IOT, cloud, HPC & Gaming.

And since Nvidia does not FAB its own chips like intel, this transformation is
going to be pretty quick.

If only they go into public cloud business, we as costumers would have one
other strong vendor to choose from.

------
gumby
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?

~~~
askvictor
Because so many of Google's acquisitions have ended up doing well...

~~~
sib
Android, YouTube, Google Maps, DoubleClick, Applied Semantics (became
AdSense), DeepMind, Urchin, ITA Software, etc.

I think Google has done ok.

~~~
dbcooper
Has it had any successes with hardware acquisitions?

~~~
Zigurd
Google has steadily gained smart home device market share vs a very good
competitor and is now the dominant player.

------
yogrish
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

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

------
ComputerGuru
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.)

~~~
sgift
There is a note at the end of the article:

"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."

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.

~~~
kasabali
> forces them to FRAND licensing of ARM IP

FRAND licensing is worthless, if Qualcomm taught us anything.

------
deafcalculus
nVidia clearly wants to compete with Intel in data centers. But how does
buying ARM help with that? They already have an architectural license.

Right now, I can see nVidia replacing Mali smartphone GPUs in low to mid-end
Exynos SoCs and the like. But it's not like nVidia to want to be in that low-
margin area.

~~~
fluffything
> I can see nVidia replacing Mali smartphone GPUs in low to mid-end Exynos
> SoCs and the like.

Replacing these with what? What nvidia gpus can operate at that power envelope
?

~~~
deafcalculus
Lower power versions of what they put in Tegra / Switch? Or perhaps they can
whip up something in 1-2 years. I'd be astonished if nVidia doesn't take any
interest in smartphone GPUs after this acquisition.

~~~
fluffything
A nintendo switch has ~2 hours of battery...

There is a big difference between having interest in a market, and being able
to compete in it. There are also many trade-offs.

Nobody has designed yet a GPU architecture that works at all from 500W HPC
clusters to sub 1W embedded/IoT systems, much less that works well to be a
market leader in all segments. So AFAICT whether this is even possible is an
open research problem. If this were possible, there would already be nvidia
GPUs at least in some smartphones and IoT devices.

------
andy_ppp
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?

~~~
UncleOxidant
This has been out there in the news for well over a month, I guess I don't
understand why Apple didn't try to make a bid for ARM? Or why Apple didn'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.

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

------
curiousmindz
Why do you think Nvidia cares about Arm? Probably the "access" into a lot of
industries?

~~~
banjo_milkman
I think this is driven by partly embedded applications and more directly by
the datacenter.

Nvidia already own the parallel compute/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't well
matched to the GPU. This plugs that hole. They are in control of a complete
data-center solution now.

~~~
paulmd
There'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's desktop/datacenter R&D in the same way consoles and
Samsung SOCs fund Radeon's R&D. CUDA can be used anywhere on any platform
easily.

(c) Acqui-hire for CPU development talent. NVIDIA'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's a reason that NVIDIA was willing to pay more than anyone
else for this property. And (Softbank's) Son desperately needed a big
financial win to show his investors that he's not a fucking idiot for paying
$32b for ARM and to make up for his other recent losses.

~~~
RantyDave
Quite. Nvidia will be able to make a single chip CPU, GPU and Infiniband. Plus
they'll score some people that know about cache coherency from Arm. We can see
the future datacentre starting to form...

------
choiway
I'm confused. What is it that Nvidia can do by owning ARM that it can't do by
just licensing the architecture? Can't they just license and build all the
chips people think they'll build without buying the whole thing?

------
browserface
Vertical integration. It's the end products, not the producers that matter.

Or maybe, more accurately, the middle of the supply chain doesn't matter. The
most value is at either end: raw materials and energy, and end products.

Or so it seems :p ;) xx

------
gautamcgoel
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.

~~~
QuixoticQuibit
NVIDIA’s hardware works on x86, PowerPC, and ARM platforms.

Many of their AI libraries/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?

~~~
ianai
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.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Linus famously gave them the middle-finger.

~~~
paulmd
"linus went on a hyperbolic rant" isn't sufficient evidence for anything.

linus is a hyperbolic jerk (as he admitted himself for a few months before
resuming his hyperbolic ways) who is increasingly out of touch with anything
outside the direct sphere of his projects. Like his misguided and completely
unnecessary rants about ZFS or AVX.

if there are technical merits to discuss you can post those instead of just
appealing to linus' hyperbole.

(I won't even say "appeal to authority" because that's not what you're
appealing to. You're literally appealing to his middle finger.)

~~~
arp242
He just responded to a complaint that nVidia hardware wasn't working with
"nVidia is the worst company we've dealt with". I don't think that's "out of
touch", it's pretty much the kind of stuff his job description entails. If you
don't like his style, fair enough, but if the leader of a project says
"company X is the worst company we deal with" then that doesn't inspire a
whole lot of confidence.

~~~
paulmd
AFAIK the debate was mostly settled by NVIDIA submitting their own EGLStreams
backend for Wayland (that promptly exposed a bunch of Wayland bugs). _So_
difficult to work with, that NVIDIA, asking to do something different and then
submitting their own code to implement it!

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=EGLStrea...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=EGLStreams-
Merged-KWin-5.16)

AFAIK it also ended up being literally a couple thousand lines of code, not
some massive endeavor, so the Wayland guys don’t come off looking real great,
looks like they have their own Not Invented Here syndrome and certainly a lot
of generalized hostility towards NVIDIA. Like Torvalds, I'll be blunt, my
experience is that a lot of people just _know_ NVIDIA is evil because of these
dozens of little scandals they’ve drummed up, and they almost all fall apart
when you look into them, but people just fall back on asserting that NVIDIA
_must_ be up to something because of these 27 other things (that also fall
apart when you poke them a bit). It is super trendy to hate on NVIDIA in the
same way it’s super trendy to hate on Apple or Intel.

Example: everyone used to bitch and moan about G-Sync, the biggest innovation
in gaming in 10 years. Oh, it's this _proprietary_ standard, it's using a
_proprietary_ module, why are they doing this, why don't they support the
Adaptive Sync standard? Well, at the time they started doing it, Adaptive Sync
was a draft standard for power-saving in laptops that had languished for
years, there was no impetus to push the standard through, there were no
monitors that supported it, and no real push to implement monitors either. Why
take 10 years to get things through a standards group when you can just take a
FPGA and do it yourself? And once you've done all that engineering work, are
you going to give it away for free? Back in 2016 I outright said that sooner
or later NVIDIA would have to support Adaptive Sync or else lose the home
theater market/etc as consoles gained support. People told me I was loony, "
_NVIDIA 'S just not that kind of company_", etc. Well, turns out they were
that kind of company, weren't they? Turns out people were mostly mad that...
NVIDIA didn't immediately give all their engineering work away for free.

The GPP is the only thing I’ve seen that really stank and they backed off that
when they saw the reaction. Other than that they are mostly guilty of... using
a software license you don’t like. It says a lot about the success of copyleft
that anyone developing software with a proprietary license is automatically
suspect.

The truth is that NVIDIA, while proprietary, does a huge amount of really
great engineering in novel areas that HNers would really applaud if it were
any other company. Going and making your own monitor from scratch with a FPGA
so you can implement a game-changing technology is exactly the kind of go-
getter attitude that this site is supposed to embody.

Variable refresh rate/GSync is a game changer. DLSS 2.0 is a game changer.
Raytracing is a game changer. And you have NVIDIA to thank for all of those,
"proprietary" and all. They would not exist today without NVIDIA, AMD or Intel
would not have independently pushed to develop those, even though they do have
open-source drivers. What a conundrum.

~~~
arp242
I'm not sure if Linus was talking about the Wayland stuff specifically; the
answer was in response to a complaint that the nvidia/Intel graphics card
switching didn't work on Linux.

I haven't used nvidia products for about 10 years and I' m not really in to
gaming or graphics, so I don't really have an opinion on them either way,
either business or technical. I used their FreeBSD drivers back in the day and
was pretty happy it allowed me to play Unreal Tournament on my FreeBSD machine
:-)

Linus is not always right, but a lot of what he says is often considerably
more nuanced and balanced than his "worst-of" highlight reel suggests. There
are plenty of examples of that in the presentation/Q&A he did from which this
excerpt comes, for example (but of course, most people only see the "fuck you"
part).

So if Linus – the person responsible for writing operating systems with their
hardware – says they're the "worst company we deal with" then this strikes me
as a good reason to at least do your research if you plan to buy hardware from
them, if you intend to use it with Linux anyway. I'll take your word for it
that they're doing great stuff, but if it outright refuses to work on my Linux
box then that's kinda useless to me.

This was also 6 or 7 years ago I think, so perhaps things are better now too.

------
hn3333
Softbank buys low ($32B in 2016) and sells high ($40B in 2020). Nice trade!

~~~
tuananh
i thought that would be low in investment world.

~~~
unnouinceput
4 years, 8 billions. 2 B / year. I don't think that's low. And during this
time Arm was also filling its owner coffers. The only real question here is if
they filled the coffers at a greater 2B/year or not. My guess is they didn't.
Now SoftBank has a lot of cash to acquire more shining toys.

~~~
tuananh
i guess i watched too many tv shows where investors think anything below 50%
ROI is low

~~~
hajile
5% over inflation is average. US congress manages 25-30%, but that's on the
back of insider trading (technically illegal thanks to a law signed by Obama,
but also without much ability to actually investigate -- also law signed by
Obama a few months later without fanfare).

------
wpdev_63
What do 5 hurricanes, global pandemic, and Nvidia buying Arm have in common?

What a wild year! Let's not forget Apple announce they are transitioning from
x86 to Arm :b.

------
intricatedetail
Isn'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?

------
unixhero
It's so amazing Apple didn't win this M&A race.

~~~
rahoulb
Apple isn't interested in selling tech licences to other companies - they want
to own their core technologies so they can sell products to consumers. And, as
an original member of the Arm consortium, they have a perpetual licence to the
Arm IP (I have no inside knowledge about that, just many people who know more
than me have said it)

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

------
127
What does this change for STM32 and many other such low power MCUs? They're
pretty ubiquitous in electornics.

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

------
vletal
Nvidia being like "Apple did now want to use our tech? Let's just buy ARM!"

------
jl2718
This is all about NVLink in ARM.

------
kkielhofner
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.

Pure speculation (of course)...

To me (from a tech standpoint) this acquisition centers around three things we
already know about Nvidia:

\- Nvidia is pushing to own anything and everything GPGPU/TPU related, from
cloud/datacenter to edge. Nvidia has been an ARM licensee for years with their
Jetson line of hardware for edge GPGPU applications:

[https://developer.nvidia.com/buy-jetson](https://developer.nvidia.com/buy-
jetson)

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'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.

\- Nvidia has acquired Mellanox for high performance network I/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/O and data storage):

[https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect](https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect)

\- Nvidia already has publicly available software in place to effectively make
their CUDA compute available over the network using various APIs:

[https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server](https://github.com/triton-
inference-server/server)

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:

[https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/triton-inference-
server...](https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/triton-inference-server/user-
guide/docs/optimization.html#framework-specific-optimization)

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'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?

In the cloud/datacenter, why continue to give up watts in terms of TDP and
performance to sub-optimal Intel/AMP/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?

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.

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).

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.

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/Mellanox I/O, GPU, and ARM. Potentially (eventually) completely
transparently using standard CUDA libraries and existing frameworks (see work
like Apex):

[https://github.com/NVIDIA/apex](https://github.com/NVIDIA/apex)

I, for one, am excited to see what comes from this.

------
cowsandmilk
What is Amazon's license for ARM like to make graviton processors?

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

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

------
hankchinaski
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.

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

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

------
w_t_payne
Sounds like we need someone to found another ARM.

------
bfrog
So when does everyone switch to risc-v then

------
rvz
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 "world stage", 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's GPUs. This is a terrible outcome I have seen but from Nvidia's
perspective, it makes sense. From a FOSS perspective, ARM is dead, long live
RISC-V.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-
schm...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schmidt-
chairman-google-education)

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

~~~
boardwaalk
Corporations say these types of things with every acquisition. It might be
true initially and superficially, but that's all.

~~~
paulmd
One of the (many) synergies in this acquisition is that it's also an acqui-
hire for CPU development talent. NVIDIA's efforts in that area have not gone
very smoothly. They aren't going to fire all the engineers they just bought.

~~~
wmf
A bigger concern is that they would hoard future cores and not license them.

~~~
RantyDave
They might, just like Apple do. But then their forty billion dollar investment
would stagnate and be eaten by riscv, which is probably what they are hoping
to avoid.

------
poxwole
It was good while it lasted. RIP ARM

------
oldschoolrobot
This is horrible for Arm

------
geogra4
smic and Huawei better be prepared to have to dump arm asap

------
01100011
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'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't know
anything. I'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's sending
it down the tube. Maybe it's time for me to stop participating and get back to
work.

~~~
paxys
You are just starting to feel that now?

~~~
01100011
I know, right? It's finally hitting me. I am realizing how much of an asshole
I'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'm not quite ready to end my participation in HN, but I'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 'experts'.

~~~
cycloptic
It is best to limit your exposure to these type of sites. There was a post
yesterday about Wikipedia being an addictive MMORPG. Well, so are Hacker news,
twitter, reddit, and so on...

------
QuixoticQuibit
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.

~~~
japgolly
I think the biggest concern is NVIDIA's stance against OSS.

~~~
QuixoticQuibit
Look at their AI/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.

~~~
nolaspring
I spent most of this afternoon tying to get cuda in docker to work on my Mac
for a machine learning use case. It doesn’t. Because nvidia

~~~
diesal11
"Because NVIDIA" is blatantly false.

CUDA support for docker containers is provided through the open source Nvidia-
Docker project maintained by Nvidia[1]. If anything this is a great argument
_for_ NVIDIAs usage of open source.

Searching that project's issues shows that Nvidia-Docker support on MacOS is
blocked by the VM used by Docker for Mac(xhyve) not supporting PCI
passthrough, which is required for any containers to use host GPU
resources.[2]

xhyve has an issue for PCI passthrough, updated a few months ago, which notes
that the APIs provided by Apple through DriverKit are insufficient for this
use case[3]

So your comment should really say "Because Apple"

[1] [https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-
docker](https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker)

[2] [https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-
docker/issues/101#issuecomm...](https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-
docker/issues/101#issuecomment-294578633)

[3]
[https://github.com/machyve/xhyve/issues/108#issuecomment-616...](https://github.com/machyve/xhyve/issues/108#issuecomment-616052121)

------
RubberShoes
This is not good

~~~
chid
I have heard numerous arguments but they arguments don't feel that compelling,
what are reasons why this is bad?

~~~
RobLach
ARM will not be cheaper after this.

~~~
stupendousyappi
Conversely, Nvidia has done a solid job of advancing GPU performance even in
the face of weak competition, and with their additional resources, ARM
performance may advance even faster, and provide the first competition in
decades to x86 in servers and desktops.

~~~
teruakohatu
The tech may have advanced due to the insatiable hunger of machine learning,
but the weak competition has meant pricing has not decreased as much as it
should have or could have, only enough to move more GPUs. (nvidia biggest
competitor are the GPUs they manufactured two years earlier).

~~~
dannyw
Really? You get 2x perf per dollar with Ampere. That’s not good enough on the
pricing front?

~~~
teruakohatu
Yes really. Performance that is cleverly hampered by RAM (and driver
licensing) on the low end from an ML perspective. The only reason they can do
this is because of lack of competition. The performance of 3000 series cards
could be dramatically improved for large models at a modest increase in price
if RAM was doubled.

It really is possible to be critical of a monopoly without disparaging the
product itself. It is when a true competitor arises that we see the
monopolist's true capabilities (see Intel and AMD).

~~~
dannyw
The GeForce series is targeted at gamers. Video games are not making use of
more than ~8GB of VRAM.

There is literally no benefit to 90% of the audience if they doubled the RAM.
Of course, they also want to do market segmentation too, but you can’t blame
GeForce for not being designed for ML training.

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

~~~
iso8859-1
Who needs to block it? And why is it a clean case?

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

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

------
patfla
How does this get past the FTC? Oh right, it's been a dead letter since the
Reagan administration. Monopoly 'R Us.

Never mind the FTC - the rest of the semiconductor industry has to be [very]
strongly opposed.

------
hitpointdrew
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's.

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

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

~~~
hu3
Even perpetual license to future IP?

~~~
scarface74
Why would Apple need future ARM IP? They have more than enough in house talent
to take their license in any direction they wish.

~~~
hu3
Such deal could certainly benefit both players. Hence my question.

------
hetspookjee
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've known
this was happening but I guess they weren't willing to pay more than 40B for
this risky joint venture they're bound to go into.

Anyone has a proper analysis on the ramifications of this acquisition for
Apple's future in ARM?

~~~
renewiltord
Apple is an ARM founder. You can bet your boots they made sure they were safe
through the history of ARM'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.

------
shmerl
That'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.

