>which raises the question why they are interested in buying Arm to begin with
Softbank needs to liquidate some of its asset due to the genius work of con-man WeWork losing them tens of billions. The original purchase price for ARM was something like 100 - 120 P/E in 2016. And the current earnings are still 100 -120 P/E with no immediate or short term profits growth. The prospect of the company's fundamentals and future growth hasn't changed since 2016.
Who in the right mind would want to buy a company for P/E 100+ with no visible growth factor?
And since no one wants to buy it, Softbank had to find a buyer. Softbank is one of the largest shareholders in Nvidia. And with its current stock price that was a perfect fit.
Of course that is ignoring Nvidia could have said No. I guess Softbank could decide to liquidate its position on Nvidia instead.
I think the outcome should be that Arm should have less control over who has a full license with the ability to add instructions etc.
It is somewhat ironic to me that, it is the software layer made available by gcc and clang that actually makes these billion dollar cpu vendors viable.
> It is somewhat ironic to me that, it is the software layer made available by gcc and clang that actually makes these billion dollar cpu vendors viable.
CPU vendor usually contribute to both GCC and Clang these days.
"Denver's binary translation layer runs in software, at a lower level than the operating system, and stores commonly accessed, already optimized code sequences in a 128 MB cache stored in main memory"
Is a custom core required to support the full standard instruction set? I thought I could license the rights to have my own, say, A53, and then I’d be able to customize it (as long as I don’t call it an A53 core). Is that not the case?
I wouldn't be surprised if their licensing terms require your chip to pass some kind of compliance test for the standard ISA, but probably only the licensees know that. I'm sure you can't use the ARM trademarks if it isn't compatible thought - that's pretty standard.
Because that requires investment. If they make that investment and are wildly successful at taking market share from x86 then ARM will become a much more valuable company. Buying ARM allows Nvidia to capture that value.
This is a real problem when some of that investment is porting/tuning various open source projects to make them run well on ARM. Such work would benefit the whole ARM ecosystem, including competitors who sell ARM based chips. At which point, owning ARM starts to look sensible.
The Tegra's aren't that bad are they? The CPU in the Xavier seems pretty decent, and it's only on a 12nm process. If they can get that shrunk down, it'd probably run even better.
Oh right, what B schools call, 'extracting the economic rents'. It makes sense why they'd want to purchase ARM, but to pay for the price/future earnings of this acquisition, I guess they'd need to increase the price of future licenses
Which wouldn't work, the whole ARM business Model has safe guards for their customers so they cant suddenly rise the price and extract as much as they could.
ARM is a first and foremost a British Company, not very good at extracting every single ounce of profits like their cousins.
I’m not sure ARM could have grown to the point it has without those safeguards. If they were to extract every ounce of profit their customers probably wouldn’t have picked them. Their model has been far more successful than most of their contemporaries.
Or indeed just license ARM like everyone else. It's not like they can't use ARM without buying them.