News UK Regulators Fear Inflated Prices From Nvidia-Arm Acquisition, Launch Deeper Probe

InvalidError

Titan
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Fear of inflated prices? I'm pretty much certain this was the whole point and a practically foregone conclusion. Companies rarely buy or merge with another to squeeze less money out of their customers. Especially not in today's already heavily vertically integrated markets where acquisitions and mergers rarely serve any purpose other than eliminating customer choices and jacking up prices.
 

artk2219

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I'd been hoping this would not go through since news of it initially broke. Thats a bad partnership, Nvidia has a habit of fleecing anyone they can, whenever they can, and not exactly being the friendliest with the open source community, and burying or making proprietary tech from acquired companies (Physx, sli). On the plus as mentioned by thisisaname, it would likely speed up the push towards RISC-V being the dominant architecture most devices are built on in the future.
 

spongiemaster

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Of course prices are going to go up. ARM has been losing money in recent years. Nvidia isn't going to pay $40 billion for a company and let it continue losing money. Not sure how that is within a gov't's jurisdiction to only approve a merger if the acquisition prices can't be raised forcing it to continue bleeding money. Who's going to want to buy ARM with those conditions?
 
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spongiemaster

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Nvidia has a habit of fleecing anyone they can, whenever they can, and not exactly being the friendliest with the open source community, and burying or making proprietary tech from acquired companies (Physx, sli).

Physx is open source and SLI was proprietary to 3dfx before NVidia acquired it. By the time Nvidia acquired 3dfx, their method of SLI was useless for gaming and there is no indication Nvidia ever used it.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Push the price up to much and you just incentivize the customers to invest in RISC-V
People have been saying that ARM will take over x86 for over a decade. Although ARM is finding its way into more embedded, mobile computing and special-purpose applications, x86 is still the uncontested king of general-purpose computing with no end in sight.

Even if Nvidia decided to be absolute jerks with ARM, it would likely take 10+ years for companies to completely migrate away from it.

In all likelihood, most major ARM licensees have long-term licenses that Nvidia wouldn't be able to change much any time soon precisely to shield themselves from this sort of BS - you don't want to invest billions of dollars into an ISA and related ecosystem when the provider can unilaterally pull the carpet from under you at the drop of a hat.
 

TheOtherOne

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In a bid to sweeten the proposed takeover to UK authorities, Nvidia proposed to pour in at least $100 million in the country's most powerful supercomputer and additional investments in Arm.

this is CLEARLY under over the table bribe offer and yet it's Ok. for multi billion dollar corps. to do this. But when an average person tries, they are charged with bribery and might even be put in jail. :ptdr:
 

dalek1234

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this is CLEARLY under over the table bribe offer and yet it's Ok. for multi billion dollar corps. to do this. But when an average person tries, they are charged with bribery and might even be put in jail. :ptdr:

I haven't read your comment before posing mine, but exactly. It's a bribe and that Kowk $ucker Jensen Huang will get away with it.
 
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