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Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster
- maxdo 6y agoAny other real non US company can benefit from it except Chinese companies ?
- PaulHoule 6y agoThere are all kinds of Euro-based electronics firms such as Alcatel or Phillips or Siemens.
- maxdo 6y agoI’m aware of them but do they really develop any mainstream devices ? I might be wrong but aren’t those companies working in their niche eg cell towers etc. Isn’t that a way tooo narrow application of such a great tech ?
- perryizgr8 6y agoNone of them can afford arm though.
- GoOnThenDoTell 6y agoSome companies business models are simply better when they are independent rather than taking ‘strategic’ guidance from a parent company. If Nvidia does buy ARM it’s time to buy stock in anyone who does RISC-V
- ETHisso2017 6y agoInfineon?
- rjsw 6y agoNXP Semiconductors.
- 01100011 6y agoSounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. "most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia" Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).
- Scoundreller 6y ago> Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. Should've thought of that before they sold it to a Japanese fund.
- pvitz 6y agoWell, he has according to the article.
- jcheng 6y agoTegra (as found in Nintendo Switch). Have they given up on that line of SoCs?
- coldtea 6y ago>Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. Yeah, so? If the 21st century taught us anything, is that protectionism makes sense for many products/services (not that big countries really forgot it - they only "forgot" it when for the time that their products was the only game in town).
- leeoniya 6y agoconversely, it may be just what RISC-V needs to go mainstream sooner.
- awalton 6y agoI'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) But, on the plus side, it's the biggest opportunity RISC-V will ever get. Almost overnight anyone who was building ARM cores will suddenly see investments in RISC-V prudent as a hedge against nVidia's future core designs not being licenseable. SiFive will very quickly become a multi-billion dollar organization...
- mud_dauber 6y ago"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.
- foota 6y agoCUDA is probably the biggest thing here, also I don't think they open source much.
- rl3 6y ago>... also I don't think they open source much. You could say that: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
- shaklee3 6y agoThis is increasingly becoming not true. See cutlass and the new release of cufftdx.
- ris 6y agoThese are both things that are unlikely to ever be able to run on anything other than nvidia hardware. It's hardly a mark in their favour over abusive lock-in practices.
- jarym 6y agoI think he's right. A sale to Nvidia would be detrimental to ARM's current business model - now Nvidia may have other plans but the thought of that would certainly scare existing licensees even more. Should the UK government intervene? Yes. Will they? Probably not. The detail here is more nuanced than protectionist vs free market - but I don't think most people realise that and see it as just protectionism. It isn't I don't think.
- valuearb 6y agoIt’s just protectionism with different justifications. There is no evidence the UK government could run ARM better than NVidia. In fact the opposite is true.
- MilnerRoute 6y agoThe Observer proposed an interesting solution last weekend: "The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors — some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers — to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry..." https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/08/10/0358216/should-the-uk-government-form-a-coalition-to-buy-arm https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/08/10/0358216/should-the-...
- rpastuszak 6y agoI feel like with the current political climate in the UK this solution is fairly unlikely to happen.
- klelatti 6y agoActually the UK government has started taking stakes in technology firms where it deems it has a strategic interest. [1] I can easily see the man now running the UK (Dominic Cummings) deciding to take a stake in ARM. Maybe other ARM customers would also be willing to take (non controlling) stakes to keep it away from Nvidia (Apple of course used to be a big shareholder). [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53279783 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53279783
- jabirali 6y agoSo basically an ARMsrace against Nvidia?
- Shivetya 6y agoNo, no, no. Government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers and this is more about denying someone else that benefiting the whole. Oh its wrapped up in pretty paper with a ribbon on it but the true reason is they don't want "those people" to have it. (being Nvidia but I am certain there are a few more suitors they don't like either)
- klelatti 6y ago
- rgbrenner 6y ago--
- throwaway5792 6y agoI think you're confused. He didn't own ARM, it wasn't his choice to sell. Hauser was vehemently against the SoftBank sale.
- rgbrenner 6y agoYou're right. I retract my criticism of his position. It's completely consistent. Thank you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- QuixoticQuibit 6y agoSeems like alarmist FUD to me. While I agree that having Arm owned by any one of its major customers creates some potential conflicts of interests, I think the notion that NVIDIA or any other company would start to drive licensees away with draconian terms/costs with some poor business planning pretty silly. The more interesting question to me is what would any single (major customer of Arm) company gain from owning Arm? For instance, if NVIDIA wants to be competitive in data center CPUs (which would put them at equal footing with AMD and Intel, not more monopolistic), why couldn’t they go the Apple approach with a perpetual license and design it entirely custom (or not) as they see fit? (AFAIK they already design custom mobile CPUs.) What do you gain by buying out an expensive, large licensing company that essentially makes no money that leaves you in a weird position with various rivals? Doesn’t quite click for me.
- foota 6y agoThe most cynical view would be that they could not reup licenses for competitors.
- the-dude 6y agoWouldn't they be forced into RAND? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...
- foota 6y agoAfaict that seems to be an agreement that a patent holder enters into a third party with to promise to license their patents to implementors of the standard. In this case there is no standard, just the patents and associates technology, so I'm not sure that applies. I would be shocked though if big players didn't have similar long term agreements with Arm.
- valuearb 6y agoNo one is going to pay $32B for a business, then cut off its key customers and revenues.
- H8crilA 6y agoNVIDIA's stock is so massively pumped up. They will simply make an all-stock offer that's pretty much impossible to refuse and that will be the end of it (most likely).
- enos_feedler 6y agoThis is why I think it is likely to happen too. NVDA needs to replace the pumped value with real value and this is a great way to do it.
- mvn9 6y agoNVIDIA is the only hardware company that takes software serious. In every hardware thread, someone complains about hardware people being behind on software technology. And then there is NVIDIA, the company that provides the best development environment for GPU development, the company that used chip simulation for their first processor. AMD was kept alive by oil money and console contracts. NVIDIA made it on their own. They were innovative in the past, they can be innovate in the future. To me, that's an opportunity for much more future growths. How much is too much if NVIDIA can take Intel's market? And we are only at the start of machine learning and product simulations.
- axaxs 6y agoI for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV. That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at the spec level, we'd have real competition again from Samsung, Mediatek, and potentially others.
- m4rtink 6y agoEven with the potential for some positive outcomes I'm not sure it's worth the potential disruption.
- xvilka 6y agoIt will be the end of Linux on ARM. They will choke platform with blobs until the inevitable death. NVIDIA and open-source is like matter and antimatter - they simply cannot coexist in the same place and time.
- axaxs 6y agoARM has little use except for open source. They have zero incentive to kill it, as they don't compete with it.
- duskwuff 6y ago> ARM has little use except for open source. Huh?? ARM is probably the most popular CPU architecture in use today -- unlike x86, which is largely limited to desktop/laptop and server computing, ARM is used in a lot of embedded applications.
- axaxs 6y agoHave you the counts of systems using ARM on Linux(Android) vs ARM in everything else? It's not even close.
- jimbob45 6y agoYeah, Hermann? Where was this grave concern when you sold to SoftBank? Why don’t you man up and just admit you play favorites? Edit: His concern was far more muted when it came to SoftBank in 2016 https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/690588/ARM-Holdings-Hermann-Hauser-24bn-SoftBank-a-very-sad-day-Theresa-May https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/690588/ARM-Holdings-...
- rswail 6y agoSo you're arguing about the level of concern? I can think of lots of reasons to be more concerned about a chip manufacturer buying the design/licensing business literally at the core of the majority of mobile phones than of a technology investment firm. Or maybe you should just admit that your original comment was not well founded?
- 2mylesaway 6y agoCompetition breeds innovation they never should have sold in the first place. If an investment firm won't hold them they should start an IPO instead of seeking value validation from contending clients and players in the hardware industry. I'm tired of the tech industry's standard duopolies. ARM breaks that trend by licensing to Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, MediaTek, & others; surrendering independence today could hurt the future of tomorrow.
- tinktank 6y agoSurely a sale would be allowed if regulatory compliance compliance is met? I was part of a private semiconductor company bought by a public American company and the buying company had to convince the US gov they would not turn the product line into a captive portal. I expect it's the same here?
- mjcohen 6y agoSo what happened?
- tinktank 6y agoThey had to get clearance and satisfy the USG the products would still be available to third parties. Had to do this in Korea and China too. Once the governments were satisfied, the acquisition was completed.
- bemmu 6y agoBtw. I'm still curious about your fiction writing side gig. Post an update about that again some time?
- georgewfraser 6y agoI find it baffling that SoftBank isn’t simply taking ARM public. If ever there was a company that should be independent, it’s ARM. Is there a good explanation out there for why this isn’t the obvious choice?
- jokowueu 6y agoThis IS good news . If nvidia's history is something we can go by then the arm licencing etc will be so miserable that people will flock to riscV
- tedk-42 6y agoI suspect Apple would buy ARM before NVIDIA would ever get a chance to. That is of course, to protect their own interests as opposed to making it into a successful business in its own right.
- MangoCoffee 6y agoAMD have to license their cpu to China in order to get a life line. when AMD stock was in the toilet. Softbank doesn't want ARM anymore. what do Hermann Hauser proposed? Let ARM holding die(?). He offer no solution.
- thayne 6y agoIf I understand correctly, his solution is to make ARM a publicly traded independent company, rather than selling to another company like nVidia.
- kasabali 6y ago> Let ARM holding die Why would ARM die? it's very healthy and financially stable right now. it's softbank who's bleeding money.
- monadic2 6y agoHow could it not be?
- klelatti 6y agoHe's absolutely right. Unless there is a 100% firewall between ARM and Nvidia then Nvidia will influence ARM to move in directions that help Nvidia's wider business and not the ARM ecosystem as a whole - and that will adversely affect everyone who uses an ARM CPU - and that's basically everyone. I don't believe that such a firewall is possible in any event. Who will enforce it? For those who are saying that it's great as it will give RISC-V a boost. Fine in principle, but how long will it take before the RISC-V ecosystem is anywhere near comparable to ARM in mobile? One final point: the UK government is now considerably more interventionist than at any time in the recent past. Not completely impossible that they intervene in this in some way.
- sharken 6y agoI agree that this deal is good for Nvidia only and will hurt ARM CPU usage. Nvidia is right now not in the same league as Intel/Apple, but having the most successful consumer and corporate GPU business along with control of Arm architecture CPUs puts them in the same league in my opinion. That kind of dominance is never good for consumers. Having worked for a company that was acquired and became a daughter company, such a setup is not enough of a firewall. Slowly, the acquiring company will modify internal systems and internal processes until there is not much left of the original company. And many key employees will leave as they don't identify with the way things are being done. I would like to think that acquisitions can be a good thing, but that's not the case in my experience.
- thrwyoilarticle 6y agoNvidia are worth more than Intel.
- sharken 6y agoIt is, although it's just in the last month: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-stock-beats-intel https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-stock-beats-intel In October 2019 the market cap was 226B vs 108B in favor of Intel. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/10/10/how-does-nvidias-valuation-compare-to-its-peers/#bf4a6d535c08 https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/10/10/ho...
- nojvek 6y agoCould someone explain me what the huge deal about ARM is since they only licence but don’t actual fab the chips but intel, Apple and nvidia do. Also what’s the difference between ARM and RISC-V. Why chose one over the other ?
- stragies 6y agoRISC-V sounds like a good idea, but (imo) could lead to a situation, where all/many device manufacturers make custom processors based of the liberally licensed code-base. At first, this sounds great, "Yah, no more reliance on Intel/ARM/, no more ME/Trustzone". But then you realize, that although you, the user/buyer, can build/run some custom code on there, you'll never be able to tell for sure, if you did not get a version/series with a gimped HWRND, or other (security-reducing) goodies. Targeted attacks will become very easy for anybody, who can pressure companies/engineers into adding something for (a subset of) the customers, or can reroute/intercept device shipments to you. ARM is a "known" situation. They have TrustZone, we know it exists, but buyers/end-users do not get full control of it (outside of some niche products, or dev-boards). That situation will not change. With ARM, get already got used to the idea, that you'll never "own" the machine, you are merely allowed to execute some code in a walled-off area of your Telescreen. So, with RISC-V, you have even less assurance, that the processor IC really contains what you expect, and nothing more.
- young_unixer 6y agoRISC-V allows companies to make closed systems, but it also allows them to make open systems, which wasn't viable before. Most people will keep using closed systems because they don't care about computer architecture, but us hackers will finally have a chance at having a (small) portion of the market. A small industry of open hardware.
- stragies 6y ago> RISC-V allows companies to make closed systems, but it also allows them to make open systems True, but can you recall any moment in history, where market forces did not actually make producing "open" devices unprofitable? So, (imo) in theory, you are right, but in practice, (successful) companies will use the technology to create "even more closed" system, and worse: Make systems, where the user can't even tell, if he got an "open" system. > A small industry of open hardware That you will only be able to use in a lab/isolated_env, or illegally, because mandatory signing of FWs/BLs/OSs/APPs is just around the corner for consumer devices capable of speaking to the internet.
- gigatexal 6y agoit's been said before, they need to just IPO.
- timwaagh 6y agoBritish government should not bother to clean up the mess capitalists make. They will have a hard enough time living with the consequences of brexit and corona without buying up companies.
- nix23 6y agoNot for RiscV ;)
- guiriduro 6y agoI would dearly love for the industry sh1tstorm that would happen if Huawei would buy ARM (please!) Would like to see Donny try to ban a Huawei ARM, or order Google to only supply to hot slow Intel Atom mobiles, with everyone of the asian makers walking away from the US market, while the world switches to an OSS Android fork. Although I still for the life of me can't understand why Miyoshi son is holding on to wework and selling ARM.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoBecause ARM is one of the few things he invested in that actually makes money. It's a cash-crunch driven deal, nothing else.
- guiriduro 6y agoYep - I was always told, keep your dividend-paying winners, sell your losers. Wework is definitely a loser, ARM is a winner - its completely upside down. If he wants cash, he should sell his trash. And avoid future losses by not buying trash in the first place.
- Danieru 6y agoRather Alibaba and Yahoo Japan are Softbank's dividend-payers. ARM has proven nothing more than a bargaining chip to kickstart the vision fund and now a crunch zone to keep the group liquid. ARM's valuation has barely moved despite the continued dominance of the platform. Selling ARM lets Softbank keep WeWork living for a couple more years, enough time to bring the non-japan markets into cashflow positive status. Japan by some miricle was cash flow position from the start, he must think the model can work overseas.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoThat would never happen. Huawei has made their own bed by consorting and being inextricably tied to the Chinese Communist Party, they deserve everything they're getting, while on a personal level I despise Trump, I don't mind that he's sticking it to China on privacy and industrial imbalances between the USA and China, while also stating the obvious that it's bad to use Chinese state controlled hardware at the heart of your communications systems
- klelatti 6y agoThere would be a certain symmetry if Apple took a (non controlling) stake in ARM to keep it independent given that sales of ARM shares in the 1990s were a significant factor in giving Apple financial stability in the 1990s. [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/06/09/how-arm-has-already-saved-apple---twice https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/06/09/how-arm-has-alrea...
- pecker458 6y agoMe too in agreement. NVIDIA got interested in ARM after the launch news of Japan Supercomputer. They want to suppress, I think.. as it's bad for their business. (Twice faster than First Supercomputer ) ...