News Nvidia Announces ARM Acquisition for $40 Billion

Shadowclash10

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first :p

OH MY. WHAT. okay then, just let me get this out of my system.

Well. I wonder if this means x86 is gonna die. Apple moving to x86, and Nvidia acquired ARM. When do you think we'll be putting ARM components inside out systems?

EDIT: I was thinking: we all know that Nvidia would love to enter the CPU market but can't, because of x86 rights etc etc. This is their chance. I just wonder if Jensen will have to pull CPUs out of his microwave instead cause they're smaller :p :p :p
 
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ARM's current licensees include industry leaders like Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon, and Samsung, among many others, and it remains to be seen how those companies will react to the acquisition.

Apple does not have a good friendship with Nvidia.

This ought to be funny.


TBH i expected them to get it.

They have the $ and ppl (and the brand) to make ARM grow.

doubt Nvidia will go into CPU like they do gpu's.
 

bit_user

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Will Nvidia get approval from all the regulatory bodies?
I expect so, though I wonder if there will be any strings attached by Europeans or other foreign regulators.

In the US, a rubber stamp would've been a foregone conclusion, until Trump decided to start wielding merger approvals as a political tool.
 
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bit_user

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I wonder if this means x86 is gonna die.
I think it possibly worsens ARM's long-term chances, a little. When ARM was independent, there was basically no conflict of interest in licensing from them. However, since Nvidia is in competition with some of ARM's customers, it could give some ARM licensees reason to reconsider.

Case in point: before Jim Keller left AMD, he reported designed an ARM CPU core for them. However, they mothballed it in order to focus their limited resources on finishing Zen. Even so, they already brought one ARM-based server CPU to market and could've been planning to return to that market with more, once it matured.

I could even believe Intel has been eyeing the ARM server market, if you believe what Nuvia has been touting about ARM's inherent efficiency advantages.

N1.png

(source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1596...0-st-performance-over-zen-2-for-only-33-power )
 
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hannibal

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This can be problem of companies that use arm...
Nvdia allready did say that They will make their own custom arm.
how long it takes Until open license arm cpus Are weak and nvidias own custom arm Are Great. It could kill the competition if nvdia only lisense old arm designs and keep the best themselves.
well Hopefully I am wrong in this case.
 

bit_user

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Nvdia allready did say that They will make their own custom arm.
They've already made several generations of custom ARM cores. See: Project Denver (and Carmel)

It could kill the competition if nvdia only lisense old arm designs and keep the best themselves.
I don't see that. I think they'll still license highly-competitive cores, but the question I have is: at what price?
 
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PapaCrazy

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I think it possibly worsens ARM's long-term chances, a little. When ARM was independent, there was basically no conflict of interest in licensing from them. However, since Nvidia is in competition with some of ARM's customers, it could give some ARM licensees reason to reconsider.

Case in point: before Jim Keller left AMD, he reported designed an ARM CPU core for them. However, they mothballed it in order to focus their limited resources on finishing Zen. Even so, they already brought one ARM-based server CPU to market and could've been planning to return to that market with more, once it matured.

I could even believe Intel has been eyeing the ARM server market, if you believe what Nuvia has been touting about ARM's inherent efficiency advantages.

N1.png

(source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1596...0-st-performance-over-zen-2-for-only-33-power )

Apple is killing it right now in performance/watt. So much wasted potential. If their chip division was its own company, it would probably be crushing the mobile market.
 

evil_72

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I imagine after this, anything with ARM pricing, after all of the dust settles will be back in the original tech market prices, as if these devices were brand new to market, i.e. $3,000.00 price range. They will wedge their GPU lineup into any and all new ARM licensing/physical product deals. I know their recent RTX lineup pricing is way more reasonable than the last, but why else would they spend $40 billion on ARM if they didn't want to milk this for all it's worth?
 
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Chung Leong

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I think it possibly worsens ARM's long-term chances, a little. When ARM was independent, there was basically no conflict of interest in licensing from them. However, since Nvidia is in competition with some of ARM's customers, it could give some ARM licensees reason to reconsider.

The licensees that will end up competing directly with Nvidia are all spinning their wheels in the sand anyway. ARM servers aren't really going anywhere. There were some market interest a few years ago when AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy. Now that healthy competition has returned to the x86 platform, that interest is waning.

Nvidia doesn't compete with the larger, more successful licensees. Qualcomm has ambitions in the automotive area, but that's not its core business.

In any event, conflict of interest is hardly an unmanageable problem. AMD has gotten pushed around by Intel for years. It's doing pretty well still compared to the dudes selling SPARC, MIPS, and PowerPC.
 
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The licensees that will end up competing directly with Nvidia are all spinning their wheels in the sand anyway. ARM servers aren't really going anywhere. There were some market interest a few years ago when AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy. Now that healthy competition has returned to the x86 platform, that interest is waning.

Nvidia doesn't compete with the larger, more successful licensees. Qualcomm has ambitions in the automotive area, but that's not its core business.

In any event, conflict of interest is hardly an unmanageable problem. AMD has gotten pushed around by Intel for years. It's doing pretty well still compared to the dudes selling SPARC, MIPS, and PowerPC.

To say NVIDIA doesn't play nice with 3rd parties is an understatement. Microsoft won't go near them after what happened with the original XBox. Neither will Apple. And now it appears they might be squeezing their board partners with their own FE versions. NVIDIA once made their own boards. I think they will go back that route by making it so unprofitable to 3rd parties that they can no longer stomach the prices to be competitive against FE versions.

As a whole this is a bad thing.

Side note: Bosch (yes the tool and appliance people) hold the biggest IP library and most number of technologies for automated automobile driving systems.
 
I don't see that. I think they'll still license highly-competitive cores, but the question I have is: at what price?
If they raise prices too much it will make more sense for everybody to make the jump over to x86, making smartphones compatible with windows software will be a great selling point as well, and x86 has no problems running android at no speed penalty.
I'm sure AMD will bend over backwards to provide custom chips for peanuts just like they do for the consoles.
The only problem would be the sheer volume of chips that would be needed.
 

Shadowclash10

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I imagine after this, anything with ARM pricing, after all of the dust settles will be back in the original tech market prices, as if these devices were brand new to market, i.e. $3,000.00 price range. They will wedge their GPU lineup into any and all new ARM licensing/physical product deals. I know their recent RTX lineup pricing is way more reasonable than the last, but why else would they spend $40 billion on ARM if they didn't want to milk this for all it's worth?
I hope not. And I can't really see that happening. Nvidia's smart - they proved that with the RTX 2000 series. Jacked up prices because AMD gave no competition really, and they knew people who were on 900s just wanted to upgrade. And when Pascal prices didn't really drop, you had to buy Turing for a new GPU.And now with Ampere, they've made pricing a bit better - they don't want Big Navi to kill their product stack. If they jack up prices on ARM - which affects everyone, not just us - and it affects phone makers. If Nvidia tries that, either regulatory bodies will have a fun time, or the mwrket will somehow switch from ARM to a new architecture.
 
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Shadowclash10

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If they raise prices too much it will make more sense for everybody to make the jump over to x86, making smartphones compatible with windows software will be a great selling point as well, and x86 has no problems running android at no speed penalty.
I'm sure AMD will bend over backwards to provide custom chips for peanuts just like they do for the consoles.
The only problem would be the sheer volume of chips that would be needed.
Yeah, if they raise prices either regulatory bodies will have a go, or mobile devices will switch to a different archtecture. But x86? Isn't the reason why we use ARM and not x86 for mobile is because x86 doesn't have nearly as good effeciency as ARM? What's stopping people from developing a new architecture, instead?

Honestly, I wish we were all on x86 and we never had to bother with software compatibility, etc etc :p.
 
Well. I wonder if this means x86 is gonna die. Apple moving to x86, and Nvidia acquired ARM. When do you think we'll be putting ARM components inside out systems?
Methinks thou dost severely overestimate nVidia's corporate power. There are no fanboys in business, they only exist among ignorant consumers. That right there completely eliminates the largest part of nVidia's power. The reason why ARM will never unseat x86 is because it was never designed to.

Now, ARM has a very important role in the tech market but it's only because it's extremely power and heat efficient. However, as with anything else designed by humans, there is a trade-off for that efficiency. Magic always comes with a price and ARM's magic comes at the cost of performance and versatility. While ARM will do very well in phones and Chromebooks, x86 will always rule in the data centre and high-performance computing because that's what it's designed to do. Even when using far more ARM cores than x86, ARM's lack of versatility means that it will never be the dominant architecture in the craptop, desktop and data centre segments.
Apple does not have a good friendship with Nvidia.

This ought to be funny.
Yup, two companies that I can't stand going at each other's throats for the very reasons that I can't stand them, greed and arrogance. Time to get the popcorn! :LOL:
TBH i expected them to get it.

They have the $ and ppl (and the brand) to make ARM grow.
The problem is that they don't have the core beliefs to make ARM grow. Since when has nVidia EVER been about open standards in technology? They've always been the champions of proprietary features like PhysX, CUDA, SLI and G-Sync. The idea of open standards is the antithesis of nVidia's philosophy. I guarantee you that nVidia will find a way to screw this up either through greed or arrogance.
doubt Nvidia will go into CPU like they do gpu's.
They couldn't even if they wanted to. Their acquisition of ARM is really going to hurt ARM. I foresee usage of the IBM Power and VIA low-power x86 architectures becoming A LOT more popular because of this acquisition. Let's be honest here, there are a crap-tonne of corporations who flatly refuse to work with nVidia. Remember what Linus Torvalds said to them because of their attitude when working with Linux. It's something that isn't appropriate to repeat here.
Will Nvidia get approval from all the regulatory bodies?
Of course they will, especially in the USA. The American government has been in the pockets of god-knows how many corporations for so long that the competition bureau has become an absolute joke. It should be called "the oligarchy and duopoly bureau" because that's what it allowing left and right. Look what it has allowed Amazon, Google and Microsoft to become. It's a joke.
...
This can be problem of companies that use arm...
Nvdia allready did say that They will make their own custom arm.
how long it takes Until open license arm cpus Are weak and nvidias own custom arm Are Great. It could kill the competition if nvdia only lisense old arm designs and keep the best themselves.
well Hopefully I am wrong in this case.
You're probably not wrong. They'll have their own ARM and since "Founder's Edition" was already taken, maybe they'll call it "The Big Huang". :LOL:

They'll also dramatically raise the prices for ARM licences which will push some companies to use ARM licences that are already held by the Chinese government. I'd love to see nVidia try to take them on. Also, since IBM made their Power architecture open-source, I expect that ARM will die because IBM Power is an extremely capable architecture and free is free.
They've already made several generations of custom ARM cores. See: Project Denver (and Carmel)

I don't see that. I think they'll still license highly-competitive cores, but the question I have is: at what price?
It'll be too high of a price because since when has nVidia NOT price-gouged when it could get away with it? Open standards have NEVER been nVidia's cup of tea which makes me question the wisdom in this acquisition. I foresee a HUGE increase in the usage of the IBM Power architecture because it really is open-source where ARM no longer is.
To say NVIDIA doesn't play nice with 3rd parties is an understatement. Microsoft won't go near them after what happened with the original XBox. Neither will Apple. And now it appears they might be squeezing their board partners with their own FE versions. NVIDIA once made their own boards. I think they will go back that route by making it so unprofitable to 3rd parties that they can no longer stomach the prices to be competitive against FE versions.

As a whole this is a bad thing.

Side note: Bosch (yes the tool and appliance people) hold the biggest IP library and most number of technologies for automated automobile driving systems.
If nVidia makes it hard for AIB partners to profit, they'll all jump ship to AMD and start loading their cards with ATi GPUs. Thus nVidia will have painted itself into a corner and will become nothing more than a boutique tech company because suddenly all the innovation from the AIB partners will be gone. No more EVGA, no more MSi, no more Zotac, etc.

I believe that nVidia will kill ARM through greed and arrogance which will make room for the rise of the IBM Power architecture which is both completely free and extremely capable. I can't wait to see how nVidia shoots themselves in the foot with this endeavour.

The biggest problem I see here is core values and philosophy. ARM has always been in the "support open standards" camp with Linux, AMD/ATi (Mantle, FreeSync), USB, PCI, ATX, VULKAN, OpenGL, OpenCL and Havok. This is in direct conflict with nVidia's policy of using closed, proprietary tech like PhysX, CUDA, SLI and G-Sync.

I'm sure that nVidia will find a way to alienate its ARM customers who, instead of kissing nVidia's butt like the AIB companies do, will just repeat Linus Tovald's message to nVidia and switch to developing CPUs based on the (now free-to-use) IBM Power architecture which is both free and extremely capable. I think that this may have been as big a blunder as when AMD bought ATi because I can't see nVidia succeeding with this.
I hope not. And I can't really see that happening. Nvidia's smart - they proved that with the RTX 2000 series. Jacked up prices because AMD gave no competition really, and they knew people who were on 900s just wanted to upgrade. And when Pascal prices didn't really drop, you had to buy Turing for a new GPU.And now with Ampere, they've made pricing a bit better - they don't want Big Navi to kill their product stack. If they jack up prices on ARM - which affects everyone, not just us - and it affects phone makers. If Nvidia tries that, either regulatory bodies will have a fun time, or the mwrket will somehow switch from ARM to a new architecture.
The very fact that many companies absolutely despise nVidia means that several will probably immediately switch to the IBM Power architecture simply because it's extremely capable and means that they won't have to deal with the Green Goblin. The core philosophies of nVidia have always been "Greed, arrogance, market control and profit at any cost." which are the antithesis of (semi-)open technology standards like ARM.

Get ready to see a new rise for the IBM Power CPU architecture.
 
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Methinks thou dost severely overestimate nVidia's corporate power. There are no fanboys in business, they only exist among ignorant consumers. That right there completely eliminates the largest part of nVidia's power. The reason why ARM will never unseat x86 is because it was never designed to.

Now, ARM has a very important role in the tech market but it's only because it's extremely power and heat efficient. However, as with anything else designed by humans, there is a trade-off for that efficiency. Magic always comes with a price and ARM's magic comes at the cost of performance and versatility. While ARM will do very well in phones and Chromebooks, x86 will always rule in the data centre and high-performance computing because that's what it's designed to do. Even when using far more ARM cores than x86, ARM's lack of versatility means that it will never be the dominant architecture in the craptop, desktop and data centre segments.

Yup, two companies that I can't stand going at each other's throats for the very reasons that I can't stand them, greed and arrogance. Time to get the popcorn! :LOL:

The problem is that they don't have the core beliefs to make ARM grow. Since when has nVidia EVER been about open standards in technology? They've always been the champions of proprietary features like PhysX, CUDA, SLI and G-Sync. The idea of open standards is the antithesis of nVidia's philosophy. I guarantee you that nVidia will find a way to screw this up either through greed or arrogance.

They couldn't even if they wanted to. Their acquisition of ARM is really going to hurt ARM. I foresee usage of the IBM Power and VIA low-power x86 architectures becoming A LOT more popular because of this acquisition. Let's be honest here, there are a crap-tonne of corporations who flatly refuse to work with nVidia. Remember what Linus Torvalds said to them because of their attitude when working with Linux. It's something that isn't appropriate to repeat here.

Of course they will, especially in the USA. The American government has been in the pockets of god-knows how many corporations for so long that the competition bureau has become an absolute joke. It should be called "the oligarchy and duopoly bureau" because that's what it allowing left and right. Look what it has allowed Amazon, Google and Microsoft to become. It's a joke.

You're probably not wrong. They'll have their own ARM and since "Founder's Edition" was already taken, maybe they'll call it "The Big Huang". :LOL:

They'll also dramatically raise the prices for ARM licences which will push some companies to use ARM licences that are already held by the Chinese government. I'd love to see nVidia try to take them on. Also, since IBM made their Power architecture open-source, I expect that ARM will die because IBM Power is an extremely capable architecture and free is free.

It'll be too high of a price because since when has nVidia NOT price-gouged when it could get away with it? Open standards have NEVER been nVidia's cup of tea which makes me question the wisdom in this acquisition. I foresee a HUGE increase in the usage of the IBM Power architecture because it really is open-source where ARM no longer is.

If nVidia makes it hard for AIB partners to profit, they'll all jump ship to AMD and start loading their cards with ATi GPUs. Thus nVidia will have painted itself into a corner and will become nothing more than a boutique tech company because suddenly all the innovation from the AIB partners will be gone. No more EVGA, no more MSi, no more Zotac, etc.

I believe that nVidia will kill ARM through greed and arrogance which will make room for the rise of the IBM Power architecture which is both completely free and extremely capable. I can't wait to see how nVidia shoots themselves in the foot with this endeavour.

The biggest problem I see here is core values and philosophy. ARM has always been in the "support open standards" camp with Linux, AMD/ATi (Mantle, FreeSync), USB, PCI, ATX, VULKAN, OpenGL, OpenCL and Havok. This is in direct conflict with nVidia's policy of using closed, proprietary tech like PhysX, CUDA, SLI and G-Sync.

I'm sure that nVidia will find a way to alienate its ARM customers who, instead of kissing nVidia's butt like the AIB companies do, will just repeat Linus Tovald's message to nVidia and switch to developing CPUs based on the (now free-to-use) IBM Power architecture which is both free and extremely capable. I think that this may have been as big a blunder as when AMD bought ATi because I can't see nVidia succeeding with this.

The very fact that many companies absolutely despise nVidia means that several will probably immediately switch to the IBM Power architecture simply because it's extremely capable and means that they won't have to deal with the Green Goblin. The core philosophies of nVidia have always been "Greed, arrogance, market control and profit at any cost." which are the antithesis of (semi-)open technology standards like ARM.

Get ready to see a new rise for the IBM Power CPU architecture.

Interesting perspective. Other's also mentioned MIPS coming back from the grave. The problem with these theories is companies have heavily invested into an eco system they know works. Retooling is a lot more expensive than you realize.

Intel was practically footing the entire bill to get Atom into tablets and phones and it got them nowhere. There were a few interesting products. I owned two. Both were returned and exchanged because Intel's memory controller kept burning out. (Not exactly a promising start for integrators, and I believe one of the many things that make 3rd parties cautious.)

How Apple proceeds will be a very big question mark considering how much they have invested in ARM. I can see them pulling a few levers to prevent this from happening behind the scenes. Nobody tells Apple what to do.

I'm going to watch the stock indicators to see how the industry reacts to this (Samsung, Motorola, Intel, AMD, Google, Apple) Microsoft doesn't really have a dog in this fight.
 

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I am really surprised that Apple did not buy ARM, given they are abandoning x86 ..

Apple did a huge mistake here , the same mistake Intel did when they let AMD to buy ATI.

More over , Google not buying ARM ?? had they bought it , Google would have controlled both the software and the hardware of the whole mobile industry.
 
I am really surprised that Apple did not buy ARM, given they are abandoning x86 ..

Apple did a huge mistake here , the same mistake Intel did when they let AMD to buy ATI.

More over , Google not buying ARM ?? had they bought it , Google would have controlled both the software and the hardware of the whole mobile industry.

Intel at the time didn't have the foresight to predict the AI Revolution and how big vector math computing would be. They saw a embroiled battle with thin profit margins. So Intel wasn't interested because it didn't bring anything to the table. They already had a graphics IP portfolio. (Even if it was crappy at the time)
 

Chung Leong

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To say NVIDIA doesn't play nice with 3rd parties is an understatement. Microsoft won't go near them after what happened with the original XBox.

Uh, how exactly can one "be nice" in a cut-throat business? Microsoft was losing its shirt on the original, mainly due to the inclusion of a hard drive. It wanted its suppliers to cut their margins. Why should Nvidia or Intel go along? Just to be charitable to a company sitting on a mountain of cash?
 
ARM Holdings only did how much in revenue last year, $400 million in Q1'20, so maybe $1.5 billion for the year? And Nvidia is paying $40 billion! I think a big part of why ARM Holding is selling out is because it doesn't know how to properly monetize, if you will.

Given the number of companies using ARM tech, you'd think ARM would have earned far more money. Even a few dollars per smartphone chip would have been a big chunk of money. That's probably where Nvidia will take things. It hurts the (crappy!) $15 chips more, but the stuff like Apple's A13 and such can easily absorb several dollars of additional cost to the new license owner.

Certainly Nvidia isn't planning on taking 40 / 1.5 ~= 27 years to recover its investment. I think Nvidia plans to take the ARM license and turn it into a multi-billion dollar revenue stream to compete with Intel and AMD. Some of that will be servers, some of it will be consumer PC chips maybe, and a bunch of it will also be smartphone licensing. That's my guess anyway.

(Note: I didn't take a ton of time to research ARM's earnings, so if my math is bad, cut me some slack -- I'm busy with RTX 3080 testing!)
 

Shadowclash10

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Interesting perspective. Other's also mentioned MIPS coming back from the grave. The problem with these theories is companies have heavily invested into an eco system they know works. Retooling is a lot more expensive than you realize.
AFAIK this is the same reason why, for instance, OEMs haven't made a drastic switch to AMD even though AMD has generaly been wrecking Intel.
 
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