

Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA - profquail
http://www.cringely.com/2009/12/intel-will-buy-nvidia/

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

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

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

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

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

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rfreytag
Cringely called the HP-Compaq acquisition perfectly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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three14
If I'm not behind the times, wouldn't there be antitrust problems from the
huge percentage of the chipset market that would be held by the combined
company?

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shizcakes
AMD / ATI?

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

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

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

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

~~~
gvb
Setting aside the antitrust issues...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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sp332
No, Cringely is generally untrustworthy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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adatta02
would probably lead to some pretty crazy GPU/CPU rigs. especially if the CPUs
were "aware" that workloads could be offloaded to the GPU.

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

