> 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.”
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.
Makes sense. IoT was a buzzword in 2013. It is now a mature ecosystem and we've gotten a good taste and smell for it. Its on its way towards the plateau of productivity on the Gartner curve if I were to guess.
The sole meaning of the "Gartner Curve" is the amount of money available to be spent on hype, that Gartner can hope to get. It has the most tenuous imaginable relationship with the market for actual, you know, products.
The Gartner Hype Cycle might be branded but the basic delta between overhyped technology vs actual production processes has been observed for a long time.
There'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's) competitors, will surely mean extra selling points for all of ARM competitors like MIPS, RISC-V etc.
This is NVIDIA's "xbox one/PS4" moment. AMD has deals with console manufacturers, their clients pay for a huge amount of R&D that gets ported back into AMD's desktop graphics architecture. Even if AMD doesn't make basically anything on the consoles themselves, it's a huge win for their R&D.
Now, every reference-implementation ARM processor manufactured will fund GeForce desktop products, datacenter/enterprise, etc as well.
NVIDIA definitely needs something like this in the face of the new Samsung deal, as well as AMD's pre-existing console deals.
> Now, every reference-implementation ARM processor manufactured will fund GeForce desktop products, datacenter/enterprise, etc as well.
That's like throwing pennies onto a pile of gold. NVIDIA makes billions of yearly revenue. ARM makes ~300 million. NVIDIA revenue is 60% of a GPU price. ARM margins in IoT/embedded/phone chips are thin-to-non-existent. If anything, NVIDIA will need to cut GPU spending to push ARM to the moon. And the announcement already suggest that this will happen.
ARM doesn't make any chips. They license IP (CPU cores and the MALI GPU) needed to build those chips to companies like Apple, Samsung, TI, ST Micro, Microchip, Qualcomm ...
That margins on $1 microcontroller are "thin-to-non-existent" is thus completely irrelevant - those are margins of the silicon manufacturer, not ARM's.
So what's the marging of ARM per chip bought? ARM's IP isn't free. It is created by engineers that cost money. Those chip sell for 0.10$, so ARM's margin's can't be more than 0.10$ per chip, otherwise seller would be operating at a loss.
Console makers dictated that RDNA must use a forward-compatible version of the GCN ISA. While AMD might have wanted to make some changes of some ideas that turned out to be less-than-optimal, they cannot because they are stopped by the console makers paying the bills.
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'd have more uniform cross platform interfaces like CUDA.
Tegra open source support is great and actually supported by NVIDIA. Probably the best ARM GPU option for open source drivers.
Mali support is done by outside groups (not ARM). Midgard and Bifrost models are well supported (anything that starts with a T or G, respectively). Support for older models is a little worse, but better than some other GPUs.
Adreno support is done by outside groups (not Qualcomm) and is lagging behind new GPUs that come out considerably.
PowerVR GPUs (Imagination) have terrible open source support.
Tegra the chipset is supported by Nvidia, but even then they are not a paragon of cooperation with the Linux community. They have their own non-mainlined driver, while the mainlined one (tegra) is done by someone else.
They did contribute somewhat to the "tegra" driver at least.
Arm CEO really doesn't understand what'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't yet. You only run AI in the cloud if you want to monetize it with advertising.
> 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.”