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This is quite concerning honestly. I don't mind ARM being acquired, and I don't mind Nvidia acquiring things. But I'm concerned about this combination. Nvidia

by DCKing 6y ago

This is quite concerning honestly. I don't mind ARM being acquired, and I don't mind Nvidia acquiring things. But I'm concerned about this combination. Nvidia is a pretty hostile company to others in the market. They have a track record of vigorously pushing their market dominance and their own way of doing things. They view making custom designs as beneath them. Their custom console GPU designs - in the original Xbox, in the Playstation 3 - were considered a failure because of terrible cooporation with Nvidia [0]. Apple is probably more demanding than other PC builders and have completely fallen out with them. Nvidia has famously failed to cooporate with the Linux community on the standardized graphics stack supported by Intel and AMD and keeps pushing propietary stuff. There are more examples. It's hard to not make "hostile" too much of a value judgement. Nvidia has been an extremely successful company because of it too. It's alright if it's not in their corporate culture to work well with others. Clearly it's working, and Nvidia for all their faults is still innovating. But this culture won't fly well if your core business is developing chip designs for others. It's also a problem if you are the gatekeeper of a CPU instruction set that a metric ton of other infrastructure increasingly depends on. I really, really hope ARM's current business will be allowed to run independently as ARM knows how to do this and Nvidia has time and time again shown not to understand this at all. But I'm pessimistic about that. I'm afraid Nvidia will gut ARM the company, the ARM architectures, and the ARM instruction set in the long run. [0]: An interesting counterpoint would the Nintendo Switch running on an Nvidia Tegra hardware, but all the evidence points to that this chip is a 100% vanilla Nvidia Tegra X1 that Nvidia was already selling themselves (to the point its bootloader could be unlocked like a standard Tegra, leading to the Switch Fusee-Gelee exploit).

Symmetry 6y ago
Also, it must be hard to trust them as the creator of the designs you use if they also compete with you directly in the market.
jonny_eh 6y ago
At this point, do Apple and Qualcomm even depend on ARM's new designs? In the same way that AMD branched from Intel but are still mostly compatible, can the same thing happen in mobile chipsets?
- DCKing 6y ago
  Apple very much does not and is reported to have a perpetual license to the ISA. Apple will most likely be fine even in the worst case scenario. Qualcomm however has been rebranded/tweaked (which is unclear) ARM standard CPU core designs since 2017. They very much depend on ARM doing a lot of heavy lifting.
  - close04 6y ago
    A few years ago 15 companies, among which Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei and more had an architecture license which is perpetual so that probably puts them all on safe ground. I'm sure that the specific licensing terms can vary but I doubt someone like Qualcomm didn't take any precautions for exactly such eventuality given how much they rely on being able to ship new ARM based SoCs. They probably gave up on designing custom cores because of the effort/costs involved and the fact that 99% of the Android market doesn't really require it. But they'd still have to ship ARM cores, standard or not. Apple is probably the safest of the bunch given how they helped build ARM. ARM announced it would cut ties with Huawei after the US ban but reconsidered the decision less than half a year later so I assume that the architecture license is either usually iron clad or simply too valuable to both sides to give up.
    - DCKing 6y ago
      Ah, I was not aware of this agreement. Qualcomm has shown in the past to be able to build great custom ARM CPUs not based on an ARM standard design. But it seems they decided the investment was not worth it after their custom Kryo design (which was not a complete failure but definitely not better than what ARM was producing at the time). But I think they'll need to go back to their own silicon at some point if this acquisition happens. For sure Huawei and Samsung (and smaller manufacturers like Rockchip, Mediatek, Allwinner) don't have an impressive track record designing custom CPU IP and definitely not custom GPU IP. These guys should be terribly alarmed if this were to happen.
    - kasabali 6y ago
      > more had an architecture license which is perpetual Architectural license is not necessarily perpetual > Drew declined to comment on whether the deal was multi-generational https://www.eetimes.com/microsoft-takes-arm-architectural-license/ https://www.eetimes.com/microsoft-takes-arm-architectural-li... So they may have license for ARMv8 but not future ISAs like ARMv9.
cogman10 6y ago
On the plus side it will probably really give RISC-V (and other platforms) a boost for the risk averse businesses.
- dragonelite 6y ago
  Given the geopolitical/geoeconomic struggle between the US and China i wouldn't be surprised if China will pivot into RISC-V arch. And given that Nvidia is a US company, that makes them quiet toxic for a Chinese company to source from.
  - grandmczeb 6y ago
    China is pushing hard both on alternative ISAs like RISC-V and for control of ARM IP. https://www.techradar.com/news/arm-sacks-china-boss-over-secret-cayman-islands-activity-but-he-wont-leave https://www.techradar.com/news/arm-sacks-china-boss-over-sec...
    - egsmi 6y ago
      I’m not saying your claim is wrong but it’s not clear to me how that article backs the claim that China is pushing hard on RISC-V. It seems more like the old CEO of Arm China was doing no good very bad things, most likely for his own benefit. “Arm revealed that an investigation had uncovered undisclosed conflicts of interest as well as violations of employee rules.”
      - grandmczeb 6y ago
        That was intended to support the second part of my comment (although I can definitely see how that wasn’t clear - sorry about that). A lot of Chinese companies have come out with new RISC-V designs and it’s clear they’re prioritizing making it a possible alternative platform in the case that Arm can no longer be used. The RISC-V foundation also decided to move from the US to Switzerland to avoid the exact sorts of restrictions that have been placed on Arm. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-semiconductors-insight/u-s-based-chip-tech-group-moving-to-switzerland-over-trade-curb-fears-idUSKBN1XZ16L https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-semiconductors-...
gigatexal 6y ago
Yeah, I, too am worried about this. I would have rather had a conglomerate of companies with Apple being one buying them and keeping them private. But oh well. Hopefully Nvidia does right by all of ARM’s existing customers. With this buy Nvidia has GPUs, CPUs, networking, what else do they need to be a vertically integrated shop?
- fluffything 6y ago
  RAM, manufacturing, storage, cooling, power supply, ... depends on how far you want to vertically integrate everything.
naringas 6y ago
if so, could this end up as good for RISC-V in the long run?
- Followerer 6y ago
  Definitely in the short run, because of the understandable fear from NVIDIA's competitors to use their (now) technology. Maybe in the mid run if those fears begin to crystallize. Unlikely in the long run, I'd assume NVIDIA would spin ARM off before killing it entirely, buying ARM would be a multi-billion investment.
GloriousKoji 6y ago
Don't forget the GeForce Partner Program they pushed a while back which required partners to make their gaming brands exclusive to GeForce products. They ended up cancelling it and I bet the reason was due to all the anti-competitive violations the FTC would have slapped on them.
- ta29 6y ago
  But it still killed Kaby Lake G. What could have been... sigh
- dsl 6y ago
  While Nvidia has a vastly superior product to AMD and Intel, they have less than 20% of the GPU market. Intel has held greater than 50% market share since 2010. It is very hard to make an anti-competition case against someone who is consistently 2nd and 3rd in the market.
  - fluffything 6y ago
    It's a tough spot to be in. AMD and Intel split the largest chunk of the cake because their products are cheap, so they make money in volume. The only reason nvidia has 20% of the GPU market at all is because their products are better, but without volume, there is very little separating you from losing the market. If NVIDIA slips over AMD and Intel perf wise during one generation, the competition will have cheaper and better products, so it's pretty much game over.
    - Dahoon 6y ago
      >If NVIDIA slips over AMD and Intel perf wise during one generation It has happened many times.
      - fluffything 6y ago
        In both graphics and compute ? Its ok for nvidia to release an architecture that does compute very well, but barely improves graphics, and vice-versa. But I don't recall any compute generation where there was a better product from the competition.
fluffything 6y ago
You are not wrong, but the facts you have cherry picked fail to portrait the whole picture. For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past. The claim that Nintendo is the only company nvidia successfully collaborates with is just wrong: - nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards - nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology - nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully - nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it - nvidia collaborates with ARM today... The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well... I mean, this is not nvidia specific. You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don't open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.). I mean, you even try to paint this as if Nvidia is the only company that Apple has parted ways with, yet Apple has long track record of parting ways with other companies (IBM PowerPC processors, Intel, ...). I'm pretty sure that the moment Apple is able to produce a competitive GFX card, they will part ways with AMD as well.
- robert_foss 6y ago
  Speaking as a Linux graphics developer, I can confirm that NVidia indeed is a pretty terrible actor. There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing, NVidia knows this. A NVidia purchase of ARM would also create a lot of conflicts of interest.
  - fluffything 6y ago
    > There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source. Do you have a source explaining what licensing changes they would have to make and what impact would that have for Linux and Nvidia ? I'd like to read that.
shmerl 6y ago
Indeed. Nvidia shouldn't be allowed to buy it, given their status (not just a reputation) of an anti-competitive bully. But anti-trust is so diluted and toothless these days, that the deal will probably be simply rubber stamped. If they aren't stopping existing anti-competitive behavior, why wouldn't they allow such bullies to gain even more power?
jacquesm 6y ago
If all 'closed' companies would support Linux as well as NVIDIA does then I would throw a party. Keep in mind that they don't have to open up their stuff. Instead, they support it to the hilt and as long as I've been using Linux and Nvidia together (2006 or so) they've never let me down.
5andwich 6y ago
Let Nvidia have ARM, they'll run it into the ground and speed up Risk V adoption.
monocasa 6y ago
I'm not normally one to defend Nvidia (paratiulalrly not from my Linux laptop), but at least the Xbox and PS3 issues never really seemed to be their fault from what I've heard on the grapevine. Xbox: The Xbox's security was broken, and Nvidia apaprently took the high road, claimed a loss on all existing chips in the supply chain (claiming a loss fo the quarter out of nowhere and tanking their stock for a bit) and allowed Microsoft to ship a new initial boot ROM as quickly as possible for a minimum of cost to Microsoft. When that new mask ROM was cracked within a week of release Microsoft went back to Nvidia looking for the same deal and Nvidia apparently told them to pound sand and in fact said that they would be doing no additional work on these chips, not even die shrinks (hence why there was no OG Xbox Slim). There are other reasons why Microsoft felt like Nvidia still owed them albeit, but it was a bit of a toxic relationship for everyone involved. PS3: they were never supposed to be the GPU until the eleventh hour. The Cell was supposed to originally crank up to 5GHz (one of the first casualties of the end of Dennard scaling, and how it affected Moore's law as we conceived it) and there were supposed to be two Cell processors in the original design, and no dedicated GPU. When that fell through and they could only crank them up to 3.2GHz, they made a deal with Nvidia at the last second to create a core with an new bus interconnect to attach to the Cell. And that chip was very close to the state of the art from Nvidia. Most of it's problems were centered around duck taping in a discrete PC GPU into the console with time running out on the clock, and don't think that anyone else would have been able to deliver a better solution under those circumstances. Like I said, Nvidia is a scummy company in a lot of respects, but I don't think the Xbox/PS3 issues are necessarily their fault.
- DCKing 6y ago
  I would agree that general Nvidia troubles don't particularly stand out in the PS3 hardware design clusterfuck, but Microsoft's and Nvidia's falling out really is indicative of terrible relationship management even if it was from both sides. Again my point is that Nvidia just doesn't understand how to work together, how not to view everything as a zero sum game. That doesn't mean that Nvidia is the only bad actor in these situations, but Nvidia really does end up in these situations quite a lot.
  - 6y ago
einpoklum 6y ago
> This is quite concerning honestly. I don't mind ARM being acquired, and I don't mind Nvidia acquiring things. You should mind both of these things. The more oligopolistic technology is, the worse. Other than that - fully agree with your concern. As a GPU developer I'm often frustrated with NVIDIA's attitude towards OpenCL, for example.

by DCKing 6y ago

Symmetry 6y ago

Also, it must be hard to trust them as the creator of the designs you use if they also compete with you directly in the market.

jonny_eh 6y ago

At this point, do Apple and Qualcomm even depend on ARM's new designs? In the same way that AMD branched from Intel but are still mostly compatible, can the same thing happen in mobile chipsets?

DCKing 6y ago
Apple very much does not and is reported to have a perpetual license to the ISA. Apple will most likely be fine even in the worst case scenario. Qualcomm however has been rebranded/tweaked (which is unclear) ARM standard CPU core designs since 2017. They very much depend on ARM doing a lot of heavy lifting.
- close04 6y ago
  A few years ago 15 companies, among which Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei and more had an architecture license which is perpetual so that probably puts them all on safe ground. I'm sure that the specific licensing terms can vary but I doubt someone like Qualcomm didn't take any precautions for exactly such eventuality given how much they rely on being able to ship new ARM based SoCs. They probably gave up on designing custom cores because of the effort/costs involved and the fact that 99% of the Android market doesn't really require it. But they'd still have to ship ARM cores, standard or not. Apple is probably the safest of the bunch given how they helped build ARM. ARM announced it would cut ties with Huawei after the US ban but reconsidered the decision less than half a year later so I assume that the architecture license is either usually iron clad or simply too valuable to both sides to give up.
  - DCKing 6y ago
    Ah, I was not aware of this agreement. Qualcomm has shown in the past to be able to build great custom ARM CPUs not based on an ARM standard design. But it seems they decided the investment was not worth it after their custom Kryo design (which was not a complete failure but definitely not better than what ARM was producing at the time). But I think they'll need to go back to their own silicon at some point if this acquisition happens. For sure Huawei and Samsung (and smaller manufacturers like Rockchip, Mediatek, Allwinner) don't have an impressive track record designing custom CPU IP and definitely not custom GPU IP. These guys should be terribly alarmed if this were to happen.
  - kasabali 6y ago
    > more had an architecture license which is perpetual Architectural license is not necessarily perpetual > Drew declined to comment on whether the deal was multi-generational https://www.eetimes.com/microsoft-takes-arm-architectural-license/ https://www.eetimes.com/microsoft-takes-arm-architectural-li... So they may have license for ARMv8 but not future ISAs like ARMv9.

cogman10 6y ago

On the plus side it will probably really give RISC-V (and other platforms) a boost for the risk averse businesses.

dragonelite 6y ago
Given the geopolitical/geoeconomic struggle between the US and China i wouldn't be surprised if China will pivot into RISC-V arch. And given that Nvidia is a US company, that makes them quiet toxic for a Chinese company to source from.
- grandmczeb 6y ago
  China is pushing hard both on alternative ISAs like RISC-V and for control of ARM IP. https://www.techradar.com/news/arm-sacks-china-boss-over-secret-cayman-islands-activity-but-he-wont-leave https://www.techradar.com/news/arm-sacks-china-boss-over-sec...
  - egsmi 6y ago
    I’m not saying your claim is wrong but it’s not clear to me how that article backs the claim that China is pushing hard on RISC-V. It seems more like the old CEO of Arm China was doing no good very bad things, most likely for his own benefit. “Arm revealed that an investigation had uncovered undisclosed conflicts of interest as well as violations of employee rules.”
    - grandmczeb 6y ago
      That was intended to support the second part of my comment (although I can definitely see how that wasn’t clear - sorry about that). A lot of Chinese companies have come out with new RISC-V designs and it’s clear they’re prioritizing making it a possible alternative platform in the case that Arm can no longer be used. The RISC-V foundation also decided to move from the US to Switzerland to avoid the exact sorts of restrictions that have been placed on Arm. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-semiconductors-insight/u-s-based-chip-tech-group-moving-to-switzerland-over-trade-curb-fears-idUSKBN1XZ16L https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-semiconductors-...

gigatexal 6y ago

Yeah, I, too am worried about this. I would have rather had a conglomerate of companies with Apple being one buying them and keeping them private. But oh well. Hopefully Nvidia does right by all of ARM’s existing customers. With this buy Nvidia has GPUs, CPUs, networking, what else do they need to be a vertically integrated shop?

fluffything 6y ago
RAM, manufacturing, storage, cooling, power supply, ... depends on how far you want to vertically integrate everything.

naringas 6y ago

if so, could this end up as good for RISC-V in the long run?

Followerer 6y ago
Definitely in the short run, because of the understandable fear from NVIDIA's competitors to use their (now) technology. Maybe in the mid run if those fears begin to crystallize. Unlikely in the long run, I'd assume NVIDIA would spin ARM off before killing it entirely, buying ARM would be a multi-billion investment.

GloriousKoji 6y ago

Don't forget the GeForce Partner Program they pushed a while back which required partners to make their gaming brands exclusive to GeForce products. They ended up cancelling it and I bet the reason was due to all the anti-competitive violations the FTC would have slapped on them.

ta29 6y ago
But it still killed Kaby Lake G. What could have been... sigh
dsl 6y ago
While Nvidia has a vastly superior product to AMD and Intel, they have less than 20% of the GPU market. Intel has held greater than 50% market share since 2010. It is very hard to make an anti-competition case against someone who is consistently 2nd and 3rd in the market.
- fluffything 6y ago
  It's a tough spot to be in. AMD and Intel split the largest chunk of the cake because their products are cheap, so they make money in volume. The only reason nvidia has 20% of the GPU market at all is because their products are better, but without volume, there is very little separating you from losing the market. If NVIDIA slips over AMD and Intel perf wise during one generation, the competition will have cheaper and better products, so it's pretty much game over.
  - Dahoon 6y ago
    >If NVIDIA slips over AMD and Intel perf wise during one generation It has happened many times.
    - fluffything 6y ago
      In both graphics and compute ? Its ok for nvidia to release an architecture that does compute very well, but barely improves graphics, and vice-versa. But I don't recall any compute generation where there was a better product from the competition.

fluffything 6y ago

You are not wrong, but the facts you have cherry picked fail to portrait the whole picture. For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past. The claim that Nintendo is the only company nvidia successfully collaborates with is just wrong: - nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards - nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology - nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully - nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it - nvidia collaborates with ARM today... The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well... I mean, this is not nvidia specific. You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don't open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.). I mean, you even try to paint this as if Nvidia is the only company that Apple has parted ways with, yet Apple has long track record of parting ways with other companies (IBM PowerPC processors, Intel, ...). I'm pretty sure that the moment Apple is able to produce a competitive GFX card, they will part ways with AMD as well.

robert_foss 6y ago
Speaking as a Linux graphics developer, I can confirm that NVidia indeed is a pretty terrible actor. There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing, NVidia knows this. A NVidia purchase of ARM would also create a lot of conflicts of interest.
- fluffything 6y ago
  > There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source. Do you have a source explaining what licensing changes they would have to make and what impact would that have for Linux and Nvidia ? I'd like to read that.

shmerl 6y ago

Indeed. Nvidia shouldn't be allowed to buy it, given their status (not just a reputation) of an anti-competitive bully. But anti-trust is so diluted and toothless these days, that the deal will probably be simply rubber stamped. If they aren't stopping existing anti-competitive behavior, why wouldn't they allow such bullies to gain even more power?

jacquesm 6y ago

If all 'closed' companies would support Linux as well as NVIDIA does then I would throw a party. Keep in mind that they don't have to open up their stuff. Instead, they support it to the hilt and as long as I've been using Linux and Nvidia together (2006 or so) they've never let me down.

5andwich 6y ago

Let Nvidia have ARM, they'll run it into the ground and speed up Risk V adoption.

monocasa 6y ago

I'm not normally one to defend Nvidia (paratiulalrly not from my Linux laptop), but at least the Xbox and PS3 issues never really seemed to be their fault from what I've heard on the grapevine. Xbox: The Xbox's security was broken, and Nvidia apaprently took the high road, claimed a loss on all existing chips in the supply chain (claiming a loss fo the quarter out of nowhere and tanking their stock for a bit) and allowed Microsoft to ship a new initial boot ROM as quickly as possible for a minimum of cost to Microsoft. When that new mask ROM was cracked within a week of release Microsoft went back to Nvidia looking for the same deal and Nvidia apparently told them to pound sand and in fact said that they would be doing no additional work on these chips, not even die shrinks (hence why there was no OG Xbox Slim). There are other reasons why Microsoft felt like Nvidia still owed them albeit, but it was a bit of a toxic relationship for everyone involved. PS3: they were never supposed to be the GPU until the eleventh hour. The Cell was supposed to originally crank up to 5GHz (one of the first casualties of the end of Dennard scaling, and how it affected Moore's law as we conceived it) and there were supposed to be two Cell processors in the original design, and no dedicated GPU. When that fell through and they could only crank them up to 3.2GHz, they made a deal with Nvidia at the last second to create a core with an new bus interconnect to attach to the Cell. And that chip was very close to the state of the art from Nvidia. Most of it's problems were centered around duck taping in a discrete PC GPU into the console with time running out on the clock, and don't think that anyone else would have been able to deliver a better solution under those circumstances. Like I said, Nvidia is a scummy company in a lot of respects, but I don't think the Xbox/PS3 issues are necessarily their fault.

DCKing 6y ago
I would agree that general Nvidia troubles don't particularly stand out in the PS3 hardware design clusterfuck, but Microsoft's and Nvidia's falling out really is indicative of terrible relationship management even if it was from both sides. Again my point is that Nvidia just doesn't understand how to work together, how not to view everything as a zero sum game. That doesn't mean that Nvidia is the only bad actor in these situations, but Nvidia really does end up in these situations quite a lot.
- 6y ago

einpoklum 6y ago

> This is quite concerning honestly. I don't mind ARM being acquired, and I don't mind Nvidia acquiring things. You should mind both of these things. The more oligopolistic technology is, the worse. Other than that - fully agree with your concern. As a GPU developer I'm often frustrated with NVIDIA's attitude towards OpenCL, for example.