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Jensen Huang’s vision for data center dominance may destroy the Arm ecosystem

135 points by kasabali 6y ago

kanox 6y ago
So the fear here is that nvidia becomes a major provider of arm-based server chips and the rest of the arm ecosystem is forced to move to risc-v? Both of these events would be very positive for the industry.
- justin66 6y ago
  > the rest of the arm ecosystem is forced to move to risc-v? In addition to selling hardware, it seems like ARM-owning Nvidia would probably be happy to sell whatever amazing new ARM cores they cook up to whoever is willing to pay to use the design. It's not obvious RISC-V will benefit from any of this. Somebody, somewhere would need to create equally amazing RISC-V cores and find a way to sell them.
  - ckocagil 6y ago
    Big cloud companies can all chip in a few billions, like they're doing with Linux. TSMC fabs everything for everyone anyway. The big cloud boys have too much money to tolerate being screwed over.
  - rvense 6y ago
    A few years ago, an ST rep told me they were making one million STM32 per day (microcontroller class), and I can only assume that that's increased since then. My impression is that the Cortex-Ms are popular because of the price, the rich sets of peripherals they tend to come with, and not least because they come with a proven, performant C compiler. I don't think it's impossible that a RISC-V core could make some dents in this markey fairly quickly, especially if Nvidia make the future of the platform look uncertain.
    - justin66 6y ago
      Nothing would make me happier than to see RISC-V really take off. I agree that the ARM architecture becoming untenable would speed that along. I'm still not sure, after reading all these comments, why anyone thinks an Nvidia that owned ARM would do anything other than continue to sell ARM cores and ARM IP rights to other companies, as well as continuing to sell actual hardware products using ARM cores. Suspecting the worst in everything is sort of standard nowadays, but buying ARM Ltd. so Nvidia can stop promoting the platform and selling the IP does not make much sense. (unless they literally have a master plan to drive everyone back to AMD64, which doesn't make any business sense since they can't make that hardware, or drive everyone to RISC-V and profit off of that, which doesn't make any business sense since they could attempt that without buying ARM Ltd. and spending tens of billions of dollars)
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    So far RISC-V market is still wishful thinking, beyond a couple of maker boards. First get C, C++, Go, Rust, Java, Erlang, .NET,.... generating competitive native code, port all their main libraries and IDE tooling, and then it might stand a chance.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      RISC-V is far past "couple of maker boards" now. The last year has seen a lot of activity. You're right that a number of mainstream software packages are still work in progress, for example V8 doesn't target it yet. But RISC-V is thriving in other areas like industrial controllers, and Alibaba Cloud just announced a few days ago they are using it in a new server processor, positioned as an eventual competitor to AWS Graviton. Topically: Nvidia uses RISC-V in some GPUs as a controller (not the GPU core). Not sure if those are released yet, but they gave a presentation on it at a recent RISC-V meet-up.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Point is, how much use do those controllers get versus more traditional CPU with years of mature ecosystem, so far it looks like testing waters to me, not something that even PIC has to worry about.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
The text and background makes it hard to read.
discodave 6y ago
> The rational for purchasing Arm seems ridiculous to many, but Jensen’s vision is for the datacenter being a computer and Nvidia being the one to build it. The thing is, there are 3 companies that control the future of datacenter growth. Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They can move the industry to RISC-V if NVidia doesn't play ball, or convince Intel to manufacture on TSMC's process. Nvidia won't be in a particularly strong negotiating position. My understanding is that lots of ARM licenses are perpetual, or very broad. The existing players can just keep making ARM chips, what can NVidia do to extract more money from them, new instructions?
- walterbell 6y ago
  It took Arm 20 years to achieve current success with substantial inroads into networking, mobile, automotive, servers (AWS & others) and desktops (Apple Silicon imminent). This is not the time to give up and start over. There are society-wide opportunity costs.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  > what can NVidia do to extract more money from them, new instructions? I don't know what those perpetual licenses look like, but, if there are any strings attached at all, perhaps Nvidia can tug on them in order to apply a little good old-fashioned embrace-extend-extinguish to ARM? Extend ARM with new instructions that offer performance improvements when you've bought 100% into Nvidia hardware, maybe, and then stifle competition by making them implement these features in order to claim ARM compatibility, thereby making it more difficult/expensive for anyone else to pair ARM CPUs with other companies' GPUs?
  - michaelt 6y ago
    In a string-tugging fight between AWS and ARM, you'd bet on ARM?
    - mumblemumble 6y ago
      I don't see a fight between AWS and ARM as a realistic scenario. In The Great British Bake-Off, Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood were competing against neither the contestants nor the baking challenges. Their involvement was defining the scoring rubric and selecting the winners. Similarly, AWS is in competition with nobody in this context. AWS just influences the competitive landscape and chooses who wins by awarding contracts.
crb002 6y ago
https://oxide.computer/ https://oxide.computer/ has a simple mission. Build hyperscale racks with open firmware/drivers - cut the wasted components like HDMI ports that Dell/HP still throw on racks by default. ARM/RISCV/x86/GPU/TPU/storage ... those are just configuration options. Companies like Lightedge will take on the HVAC and physical security. The future is chiplets and computational memory: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Stumm/publication/3250200_Computational_RAM_implementing_processors_in_memory_Des_Test_Comput_161_32-41/links/02e7e530f8ffbdec94000000/Computational-RAM-implementing-processors-in-memory-Des-Test-Comput-161-32-41.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Stumm/publicati...
- otoburb 6y ago
  >>ARM/RISCV/x86/GPU/TPU/storage ... those are just configuration options. But ISA still matters. Switching from Intel to AMD likely isn't much of a switch, but switching to a different ISA in the datacenter will continue to be an uphill battle. As the article notes, the uphill battle will take longer for RISC-V and if Nvidia follows the strategy laid out they hope to profit in the intervening gap.
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    Apple took the spearhead by promising ARM laptops. As soon as that happen it unlocks the final puzzle for ARM based datacenter. Running on local is essential - things are so much easier to debug, especially things deep in the dependency tree.
    - crb002 6y ago
      I almost guarantee the delay in the build out of their Waukee Iowa data center is so they can fill racks with server grade Apple Silicon.
      - Aperocky 6y ago
        Why Apple Silicon? Things are hard primarily because of different ISA and the necessity to recompile everything, of which some doesn't. Apple Silicon is still ARM.
m0zg 6y ago
I hope this leads to serious interest in RISC-V ecosystem. It's been what, a decade? And we still don't have a cheap Raspberry-Pi like board.
MangoCoffee 6y ago
>The datacenter is a 3 legged stool, and the remaining missing piece is a CPU. AMD, Intel, and various hyperscalers are also working to build out their own 3-legged stool. Intel/AMD is allowed to build a moat in data center but Nvidia can't(?) >Nvidia’s endgame isn’t more revenue from licensing costs. Their endgame is a fully vertically integrated data center provider. They will want to make and control every part of the three legged stool. This means they slowly destroy the idea of Neoverse. Whether through making that IP extremely costly, or having their own in house designs be a generation ahead, Nvidia will build a moat around Arm server CPUs. Over time, Jensen Huang will muscle out other Arm vendors Intel doesn't even licensed out x86. AMD is grandfathered in. So Intel is allowed to control x86 but Nvidia can't. this is like Oracle bought MySQL along with Sun and Michael Widenius cry about it. You know what you are doing when you sold MySql to Sun. another company can come along to buy it. this is what closed ecosystem/software does. MySql is saved by dual licenses so maybe its time to ditch this idea of building an ecosystem on closed hardware/software.
- wmf 6y ago
  x86 has been (effectively) a duopoly for over 20 years but breaking the ARM ecosystem would be a new thing. Building a moat is one thing but privatizing an existing ecosystem is different.
bitxbit 6y ago
I simply do not understand current demand for data centers and more specifically GPU/ASIC. Are companies really squeezing that much out of data to justify this level of investments?
- ahmedalsudani 6y ago
  Have you looked at Google’s earnings? ;)
alynn 6y ago
> With the US Department of Energy dumping money into SCYL and many in the industry congregating around it, the software front is accelerating rapidly. Anybody know what SCYL is? Based on the low number of google hits I'm thinking it's a typo
- bcatanzaro 6y ago
  SYCL
- zdw 6y ago
  I would assume https://www.khronos.org/sycl/ https://www.khronos.org/sycl/
geogra4 6y ago
Me being negative really I think there is significant push for an American company to purchase ARM so that Chinese companies can no longer license the ISA?
- baybal2 6y ago
  "ARM China" has got perpetual licensing rights from ARM Co. in China. This is how they keep licensing to Huawei.
klelatti 6y ago
Nvidia already has the ability to build world beating data-center products using the three 'legs' of GPU (where it already dominates), the Mellanox technology it's acquired and Arm CPUs (where of course with an architecture license its free to improve on existing Arm designs). It already has a potential moat by virtue of its unique access to these three technologies together. So why would it pay $30bn+ to own Arm? Because it would have the ability to directly hinder the businesses (and customers) of its current and potential competitors who have invested in the development of Arm based products. Not just in the data center but in mobile and in products that are used by billions of people around the world. That can't be right.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  > it would have the ability to directly hinder the businesses They have extensive contracts in place. It's not like ARM instruction set is provided to nVidia and then they can just revoke it because they don't like nVidia.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    I think the parent is saying that the only value add for Nvidia to purchase ARM itself rather than just purchasing an architectural licence is to use ARM in an anticompetitive way.
    - Dahoon 6y ago
      > to use ARM in an anticompetitive way If so Nvidia will surely buy ARM.
    - rubber_duck 6y ago
      That's not much of a value gain it would just push the industry further away from ARM. x86 has a lot of legacy power and it enjoyed being the only relevant platform for a long time in a lot of markets so there's a lot of cost in making stuff that was architecture specific cross platform. ARM doesn't really have that, people that deal with ARM already have to worry about infrastructure set portability (all of them also have x86 support) once you add ARM the way is open for other ISA
Spooky23 6y ago
This story is pretty hilarious in its breathless hype factor. Nvidia is going to dominate the datacenter with the three legged stool of GPUs, Inifiband and ARM? Sounds like the bullshit that IBM salespeople were peddling about POWER circa 2008. The real strategy was licensing capacity with physical segmentation. Nvidia would probably pursue a similar strategy -- sell chips with lots and lots of cores and lease capacity on demand. You could pave a road with the gravestones of technology vendors who pursued industry dominance with faster, more expensive chips. If IBM, Sun, Unisys, HP, Digital, SGI and a dozen others failed, why would a company with almost zero datacenter presence succeed? Even with the pitiful state of 2020 Intel, I'd put my money on commodity ethernet and x86 in the datacenter. Most datacenter architecture doesn't require GPU. Nvidia could market with a kick-ass Oracle-like engineered solution for high-performance compute, game hosting or AI. But I don't think Oracle moved the needle in how we buy database compute, and I doubt Nvidia would do so here.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > You could pave a road with the gravestones of technology vendors who pursued industry dominance with faster, more expensive chips. If IBM, Sun, Unisys, HP, Digital, SGI and a dozen others failed, why would a company with almost zero datacenter presence succeed? I have very much the same opinion, and I think that Huang is at least aware of that. > Nvidia would probably pursue a similar strategy -- sell chips with lots and lots of cores and lease capacity on demand. But this will be pretty much the same IBM thing. Some banks, and Oracle/SAP buyer types may buy in, but that will be it. It does not change anything to how the companies in the above list of "big iron" vendors attempted to do it before. I want to remind that Huang is also, a very big "investment relations" player, and he likes to make an impression of "grandiose" plans to impressionable investor guys.
  - mrandish 6y ago
    > impressionable investor guys. Impressionable investor guys tend not to be investor guys for very long. Big-vision bluster can can work with media and some end users but it turns off real market analysts.
lowdose 6y ago
We should put a cap on M&A activities concerning more than 100 people on the payroll on either side.
ilaksh 6y ago
Its not about Huang. Its the structure of the markets and companies that makes this an obvious anti-trust problem.
jjtheblunt 6y ago
Is there a corollary to Betteridge's Law, asserting that titles with a subjunctive verb from the set {may,might,could} also evaluate to false? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...)
xvilka 6y ago
NVIDIA is famous for row of anticompetitive practices. On the other hand such a disaster will clear up the road for other, more modern alternatives - be it RISC-V or something entirely new.
- yissp 6y ago
  Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule of Hitler analogies) is an Internet adage asserting that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1".
  - xvilka 6y ago
    Yeah, was a bit too much. Edited.
exikyut 6y ago
The way the title of this was phrased made a little lightbulb go on: What if Intel asked NVIDIA to buy ARM?
coldtea 6y ago
Speaking of RISC-V, does RISC-V have any real traction? Not niche traction and announcements here and there, actual heavy investments... Or is it more like an "open arch" fantasy thing, kind of the cpu analogous to Ogg Vorbis and Open Moko?
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  Western Digital is using it on their hdd controllers. SiFive licenses IP for big cores and China apparently plans to work with it in the future. Also I don't know why you count Ogg Vorbis as a fantasy kind of thing, it's used for pretty much any conference app and it has support on most consumer hardware and softwware for playback. Programs like EAC and dbpoweramp support it. I use it for my music collection on my phone, at half the size of mp3 it sounds completely transparent to me with my earbuds.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Basically as much as PIC and similar chipsets, just without the tooling ecosystem.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >Also I don't know why you count Ogg Vorbis as a fantasy kind of thing, it's used for pretty much any conference app and it has support on most consumer hardware and softwware for playback. The idea in the day was it would replace mp3/aac/etc which it obviously didn't. That players support it is also not a mark of great success, since most people don't and won't care to use it. It just means that for the rare person caring enough, it will work. From that aspect, the fact that conference apps use it as the internal format is hardly relevant, they could license and use whatever and we wouldn't know any difference.
    - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
      >The idea in the day was it would replace mp3/aac/etc which it obviously didn't. It did for anyone that cares about it and about file size. My portable library is vorbis. Mp3 is just very popular and there are a lot of mp3 files out there that can't be converted without further degradation of the sound quality so mp3 will remain relevant for a long time. >From that aspect, the fact that conference apps use it as the internal format is hardly relevant, they could license and use whatever and we wouldn't know any difference. It's relevant in terms of market support. Vorbis isn't going anywhere. The random codecs that have popped over the years, open or proprietary never got a lot of support from other companies so they went away.

135 points by kasabali 6y ago

So the fear here is that nvidia becomes a major provider of arm-based server chips and the rest of the arm ecosystem is forced to move to risc-v? Both of these events would be very positive for the industry.

justin66 6y ago
> the rest of the arm ecosystem is forced to move to risc-v? In addition to selling hardware, it seems like ARM-owning Nvidia would probably be happy to sell whatever amazing new ARM cores they cook up to whoever is willing to pay to use the design. It's not obvious RISC-V will benefit from any of this. Somebody, somewhere would need to create equally amazing RISC-V cores and find a way to sell them.
- ckocagil 6y ago
  Big cloud companies can all chip in a few billions, like they're doing with Linux. TSMC fabs everything for everyone anyway. The big cloud boys have too much money to tolerate being screwed over.
- rvense 6y ago
  A few years ago, an ST rep told me they were making one million STM32 per day (microcontroller class), and I can only assume that that's increased since then. My impression is that the Cortex-Ms are popular because of the price, the rich sets of peripherals they tend to come with, and not least because they come with a proven, performant C compiler. I don't think it's impossible that a RISC-V core could make some dents in this markey fairly quickly, especially if Nvidia make the future of the platform look uncertain.
  - justin66 6y ago
    Nothing would make me happier than to see RISC-V really take off. I agree that the ARM architecture becoming untenable would speed that along. I'm still not sure, after reading all these comments, why anyone thinks an Nvidia that owned ARM would do anything other than continue to sell ARM cores and ARM IP rights to other companies, as well as continuing to sell actual hardware products using ARM cores. Suspecting the worst in everything is sort of standard nowadays, but buying ARM Ltd. so Nvidia can stop promoting the platform and selling the IP does not make much sense. (unless they literally have a master plan to drive everyone back to AMD64, which doesn't make any business sense since they can't make that hardware, or drive everyone to RISC-V and profit off of that, which doesn't make any business sense since they could attempt that without buying ARM Ltd. and spending tens of billions of dollars)
- pjmlp 6y ago
  So far RISC-V market is still wishful thinking, beyond a couple of maker boards. First get C, C++, Go, Rust, Java, Erlang, .NET,.... generating competitive native code, port all their main libraries and IDE tooling, and then it might stand a chance.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    RISC-V is far past "couple of maker boards" now. The last year has seen a lot of activity. You're right that a number of mainstream software packages are still work in progress, for example V8 doesn't target it yet. But RISC-V is thriving in other areas like industrial controllers, and Alibaba Cloud just announced a few days ago they are using it in a new server processor, positioned as an eventual competitor to AWS Graviton. Topically: Nvidia uses RISC-V in some GPUs as a controller (not the GPU core). Not sure if those are released yet, but they gave a presentation on it at a recent RISC-V meet-up.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Point is, how much use do those controllers get versus more traditional CPU with years of mature ecosystem, so far it looks like testing waters to me, not something that even PIC has to worry about.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago

The text and background makes it hard to read.

discodave 6y ago

> The rational for purchasing Arm seems ridiculous to many, but Jensen’s vision is for the datacenter being a computer and Nvidia being the one to build it. The thing is, there are 3 companies that control the future of datacenter growth. Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They can move the industry to RISC-V if NVidia doesn't play ball, or convince Intel to manufacture on TSMC's process. Nvidia won't be in a particularly strong negotiating position. My understanding is that lots of ARM licenses are perpetual, or very broad. The existing players can just keep making ARM chips, what can NVidia do to extract more money from them, new instructions?

walterbell 6y ago
It took Arm 20 years to achieve current success with substantial inroads into networking, mobile, automotive, servers (AWS & others) and desktops (Apple Silicon imminent). This is not the time to give up and start over. There are society-wide opportunity costs.
mumblemumble 6y ago
> what can NVidia do to extract more money from them, new instructions? I don't know what those perpetual licenses look like, but, if there are any strings attached at all, perhaps Nvidia can tug on them in order to apply a little good old-fashioned embrace-extend-extinguish to ARM? Extend ARM with new instructions that offer performance improvements when you've bought 100% into Nvidia hardware, maybe, and then stifle competition by making them implement these features in order to claim ARM compatibility, thereby making it more difficult/expensive for anyone else to pair ARM CPUs with other companies' GPUs?
- michaelt 6y ago
  In a string-tugging fight between AWS and ARM, you'd bet on ARM?
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    I don't see a fight between AWS and ARM as a realistic scenario. In The Great British Bake-Off, Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood were competing against neither the contestants nor the baking challenges. Their involvement was defining the scoring rubric and selecting the winners. Similarly, AWS is in competition with nobody in this context. AWS just influences the competitive landscape and chooses who wins by awarding contracts.

crb002 6y ago

https://oxide.computer/ https://oxide.computer/ has a simple mission. Build hyperscale racks with open firmware/drivers - cut the wasted components like HDMI ports that Dell/HP still throw on racks by default. ARM/RISCV/x86/GPU/TPU/storage ... those are just configuration options. Companies like Lightedge will take on the HVAC and physical security. The future is chiplets and computational memory: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Stumm/publication/3250200_Computational_RAM_implementing_processors_in_memory_Des_Test_Comput_161_32-41/links/02e7e530f8ffbdec94000000/Computational-RAM-implementing-processors-in-memory-Des-Test-Comput-161-32-41.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Stumm/publicati...

otoburb 6y ago
>>ARM/RISCV/x86/GPU/TPU/storage ... those are just configuration options. But ISA still matters. Switching from Intel to AMD likely isn't much of a switch, but switching to a different ISA in the datacenter will continue to be an uphill battle. As the article notes, the uphill battle will take longer for RISC-V and if Nvidia follows the strategy laid out they hope to profit in the intervening gap.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  Apple took the spearhead by promising ARM laptops. As soon as that happen it unlocks the final puzzle for ARM based datacenter. Running on local is essential - things are so much easier to debug, especially things deep in the dependency tree.
  - crb002 6y ago
    I almost guarantee the delay in the build out of their Waukee Iowa data center is so they can fill racks with server grade Apple Silicon.
    - Aperocky 6y ago
      Why Apple Silicon? Things are hard primarily because of different ISA and the necessity to recompile everything, of which some doesn't. Apple Silicon is still ARM.

m0zg 6y ago

I hope this leads to serious interest in RISC-V ecosystem. It's been what, a decade? And we still don't have a cheap Raspberry-Pi like board.

MangoCoffee 6y ago

>The datacenter is a 3 legged stool, and the remaining missing piece is a CPU. AMD, Intel, and various hyperscalers are also working to build out their own 3-legged stool. Intel/AMD is allowed to build a moat in data center but Nvidia can't(?) >Nvidia’s endgame isn’t more revenue from licensing costs. Their endgame is a fully vertically integrated data center provider. They will want to make and control every part of the three legged stool. This means they slowly destroy the idea of Neoverse. Whether through making that IP extremely costly, or having their own in house designs be a generation ahead, Nvidia will build a moat around Arm server CPUs. Over time, Jensen Huang will muscle out other Arm vendors Intel doesn't even licensed out x86. AMD is grandfathered in. So Intel is allowed to control x86 but Nvidia can't. this is like Oracle bought MySQL along with Sun and Michael Widenius cry about it. You know what you are doing when you sold MySql to Sun. another company can come along to buy it. this is what closed ecosystem/software does. MySql is saved by dual licenses so maybe its time to ditch this idea of building an ecosystem on closed hardware/software.

wmf 6y ago
x86 has been (effectively) a duopoly for over 20 years but breaking the ARM ecosystem would be a new thing. Building a moat is one thing but privatizing an existing ecosystem is different.

bitxbit 6y ago

I simply do not understand current demand for data centers and more specifically GPU/ASIC. Are companies really squeezing that much out of data to justify this level of investments?

ahmedalsudani 6y ago
Have you looked at Google’s earnings? ;)

alynn 6y ago

> With the US Department of Energy dumping money into SCYL and many in the industry congregating around it, the software front is accelerating rapidly. Anybody know what SCYL is? Based on the low number of google hits I'm thinking it's a typo

bcatanzaro 6y ago
SYCL
zdw 6y ago
I would assume https://www.khronos.org/sycl/ https://www.khronos.org/sycl/

geogra4 6y ago

Me being negative really I think there is significant push for an American company to purchase ARM so that Chinese companies can no longer license the ISA?

baybal2 6y ago
"ARM China" has got perpetual licensing rights from ARM Co. in China. This is how they keep licensing to Huawei.

klelatti 6y ago

Nvidia already has the ability to build world beating data-center products using the three 'legs' of GPU (where it already dominates), the Mellanox technology it's acquired and Arm CPUs (where of course with an architecture license its free to improve on existing Arm designs). It already has a potential moat by virtue of its unique access to these three technologies together. So why would it pay $30bn+ to own Arm? Because it would have the ability to directly hinder the businesses (and customers) of its current and potential competitors who have invested in the development of Arm based products. Not just in the data center but in mobile and in products that are used by billions of people around the world. That can't be right.

fermienrico 6y ago
> it would have the ability to directly hinder the businesses They have extensive contracts in place. It's not like ARM instruction set is provided to nVidia and then they can just revoke it because they don't like nVidia.
- monocasa 6y ago
  I think the parent is saying that the only value add for Nvidia to purchase ARM itself rather than just purchasing an architectural licence is to use ARM in an anticompetitive way.
  - Dahoon 6y ago
    > to use ARM in an anticompetitive way If so Nvidia will surely buy ARM.
  - rubber_duck 6y ago
    That's not much of a value gain it would just push the industry further away from ARM. x86 has a lot of legacy power and it enjoyed being the only relevant platform for a long time in a lot of markets so there's a lot of cost in making stuff that was architecture specific cross platform. ARM doesn't really have that, people that deal with ARM already have to worry about infrastructure set portability (all of them also have x86 support) once you add ARM the way is open for other ISA

Spooky23 6y ago

This story is pretty hilarious in its breathless hype factor. Nvidia is going to dominate the datacenter with the three legged stool of GPUs, Inifiband and ARM? Sounds like the bullshit that IBM salespeople were peddling about POWER circa 2008. The real strategy was licensing capacity with physical segmentation. Nvidia would probably pursue a similar strategy -- sell chips with lots and lots of cores and lease capacity on demand. You could pave a road with the gravestones of technology vendors who pursued industry dominance with faster, more expensive chips. If IBM, Sun, Unisys, HP, Digital, SGI and a dozen others failed, why would a company with almost zero datacenter presence succeed? Even with the pitiful state of 2020 Intel, I'd put my money on commodity ethernet and x86 in the datacenter. Most datacenter architecture doesn't require GPU. Nvidia could market with a kick-ass Oracle-like engineered solution for high-performance compute, game hosting or AI. But I don't think Oracle moved the needle in how we buy database compute, and I doubt Nvidia would do so here.

baybal2 6y ago
> You could pave a road with the gravestones of technology vendors who pursued industry dominance with faster, more expensive chips. If IBM, Sun, Unisys, HP, Digital, SGI and a dozen others failed, why would a company with almost zero datacenter presence succeed? I have very much the same opinion, and I think that Huang is at least aware of that. > Nvidia would probably pursue a similar strategy -- sell chips with lots and lots of cores and lease capacity on demand. But this will be pretty much the same IBM thing. Some banks, and Oracle/SAP buyer types may buy in, but that will be it. It does not change anything to how the companies in the above list of "big iron" vendors attempted to do it before. I want to remind that Huang is also, a very big "investment relations" player, and he likes to make an impression of "grandiose" plans to impressionable investor guys.
- mrandish 6y ago
  > impressionable investor guys. Impressionable investor guys tend not to be investor guys for very long. Big-vision bluster can can work with media and some end users but it turns off real market analysts.

lowdose 6y ago

We should put a cap on M&A activities concerning more than 100 people on the payroll on either side.

ilaksh 6y ago

Its not about Huang. Its the structure of the markets and companies that makes this an obvious anti-trust problem.

jjtheblunt 6y ago

Is there a corollary to Betteridge's Law, asserting that titles with a subjunctive verb from the set {may,might,could} also evaluate to false? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...)

xvilka 6y ago

NVIDIA is famous for row of anticompetitive practices. On the other hand such a disaster will clear up the road for other, more modern alternatives - be it RISC-V or something entirely new.

yissp 6y ago
Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule of Hitler analogies) is an Internet adage asserting that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1".
- xvilka 6y ago
  Yeah, was a bit too much. Edited.

exikyut 6y ago

The way the title of this was phrased made a little lightbulb go on: What if Intel asked NVIDIA to buy ARM?

coldtea 6y ago

Speaking of RISC-V, does RISC-V have any real traction? Not niche traction and announcements here and there, actual heavy investments... Or is it more like an "open arch" fantasy thing, kind of the cpu analogous to Ogg Vorbis and Open Moko?

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
Western Digital is using it on their hdd controllers. SiFive licenses IP for big cores and China apparently plans to work with it in the future. Also I don't know why you count Ogg Vorbis as a fantasy kind of thing, it's used for pretty much any conference app and it has support on most consumer hardware and softwware for playback. Programs like EAC and dbpoweramp support it. I use it for my music collection on my phone, at half the size of mp3 it sounds completely transparent to me with my earbuds.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Basically as much as PIC and similar chipsets, just without the tooling ecosystem.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Also I don't know why you count Ogg Vorbis as a fantasy kind of thing, it's used for pretty much any conference app and it has support on most consumer hardware and softwware for playback. The idea in the day was it would replace mp3/aac/etc which it obviously didn't. That players support it is also not a mark of great success, since most people don't and won't care to use it. It just means that for the rare person caring enough, it will work. From that aspect, the fact that conference apps use it as the internal format is hardly relevant, they could license and use whatever and we wouldn't know any difference.
  - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
    >The idea in the day was it would replace mp3/aac/etc which it obviously didn't. It did for anyone that cares about it and about file size. My portable library is vorbis. Mp3 is just very popular and there are a lot of mp3 files out there that can't be converted without further degradation of the sound quality so mp3 will remain relevant for a long time. >From that aspect, the fact that conference apps use it as the internal format is hardly relevant, they could license and use whatever and we wouldn't know any difference. It's relevant in terms of market support. Vorbis isn't going anywhere. The random codecs that have popped over the years, open or proprietary never got a lot of support from other companies so they went away.