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Please, no. I work with both IBM and Nvidia and I can say such an acquisition would be a cultural mismatch that would make Daimler/Chrysler look like a boardroo
by krona 10y ago
Please, no. I work with both IBM and Nvidia and I can say such an acquisition would be a cultural mismatch that would make Daimler/Chrysler look like a boardroom tea party.
IBM is hollowed out and tries to cover that up with headline-making acquisitions and effective marketing. It's aimless and sclerotic, trying to pursue growth markets but is largely incapable of making good products; constantly over-promising and under-delivering.
NVidia has it's best days ahead of it. I think the direction it's going with ARM has more legs than what they're doing with POWER. They make innovative products that work, and have fantastic partnerships across the industry.
Perhaps more importantly, the target markets of these two companies are diverging, not converging. IBM is desperately trying to move up the value chain, away from hardware, to remain competitive. You could hardly say the same about Nvidia in how it's pursuing the automotive industry.
- phkahler 10y ago>> NVidia has it's best days ahead of it. I think the direction it's going with ARM has more legs than what they're doing with POWER. I'm thinking NVidia doesn't really like ARM, they are putting a RISC-V core on future GPUs after all.
- baobrien 10y agoI think the RISC-V cores they're putting on their chips are more for management than as application processors. If they didn't use RISC-V there, it'd probably run one of their own ISAs rather than ARM.
- phkahler 10y agoIt is for management, but it is also replacing the one they had with their own ISA. One of the slides also indicated a desire for "Rich OS support" - see the third slide: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_RISCV_Story_V2.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_... I keep thinking their future may eventually be Tegra with Risc-V replacing ARM.
- kogepathic 10y ago> I keep thinking their future may eventually be Tegra with Risc-V replacing ARM. Why? RISC-V doesn't have nearly the acceptance that ARM does, and they already get ARM for minimal cost (e.g. licensing fees). No one is forcing NVidia to design their own cores that conform to the ARM ISA (as Project Denver [0] was rumoured to be NVidia's take at x86 re-purposed for ARM after they were refused an x86_64 license). So if they just want to slap their GPU onto a reference ARM design and sell it, they'll be like a bunch of other ARM players (Hisilicon, Amlogic, <insert not Apple/Samsung/Qualcomm chip maker here>). The only reason I can see for including RISC-V in their GPU is that they'll get it for free, and they can modify it to their hearts content without having to tell anyone about it due to RISC-V BSD style license. This is about NVidia locking down their platform more, through proprietary modifications to RISC-V, than it is about anything else. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver
- phkahler 10y agoSometimes I live in fantasy land. Imagine the Android Runtime is ported to RISC-V in the next year or two - IIRC it uses LLVM which is already there. Go is expected to make it in 2017 - Google likes riscv a lot but hasn't said much about what they want to use it for. I would not be surprised, but neither would I hold my breath.
- puzzle 10y agoI knew lots of good people at IBM, but they're almost all gone now. Nvidia can be a pain in the butt (read: how they cram their software stack to run on Linux), but I can only see things getting bad quickly if they were to be acquired by today's IBM.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoNobody every got fired for choosing IBM... 'cept for the IBMers.
- justin66 10y agoYou're going a little easy on IBM.
- guitarbill 10y agoWhile IBM has made some good acquisition * , the executives are either clueless or too busy with infighting. Their wild flailing around has caused several good acquisitions to be squandered and if the "blue-washing" (aka. onboarding) doesn't alienate the staff, then neglecting the product and asking them to work on/with horrible IBM technologies will. NVidia would be doomed instantly, but it might take a few years until the effects were felt. * I believe when this happens, distinguished engineers or architects were consulted and their advice was followed.
- basch 10y agowhat is the verdict on compose.io? will it be blue-washed?
- guitarbill 10y agowell, like e.g. Ustream and unlike the infamous storage mergers (Softlayer, Cleversafe, Cloudant, XIV, Storwize, TMS, etc) it seems to have remained a separate company. maybe because it doesn't fit an existing IBM division? so it might be safe, as long as it isn't incorporated into the shitshow that is bluemix.
- johnward 10y agoIt's typical to be a separate company until bluewashing occurs.
- mrkurt 10y agoMost compose.io people are still there. Integration is/was pretty thoughtful, so lots of what crushes tiny companies within IBM was delayed. I think these acquisitions go wrong for customers _after_ the original team leaves, for the most part.
- Lramseyer 10y agoWow! My thoughts exactly! Having worked at both companies, I can confirm.
- amelius 10y ago> IBM is hollowed out But they have Watson, right? They could use NVidia for the hardware side.
- raverbashing 10y agoThe Watson technology and playing Jeopardy is nice, but it's not that great when applied to some real world problems, as much as Press Releases try to convince people otherwise