>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.
"With its proposed acquisition of Arm, NVIDIA will be able to turn new AI possibilities into realities much faster."
Which doesn’t make much sense to me, unless they wish to change aspects of Arm that is currently outside of any license.