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I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need

by BluSyn 6y ago

I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal. ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likely use that position to strong-arm competition. This will push vendors out of ARM and into some alternative ISA. While long-term this might end up being great for RISC-V, it's going to cause a huge fracture in software stacks at the exact WORST time. Finally we're starting seeing huge convergence on ARM in Mobile/Desktop/Server space. One ISA to rule them all! Nope, now Nvidia is going to destroy that progress and set everything back another 5+ years. Please, somebody tell me I'm wrong. I really don't want to be so pessimistic about this.

nickff 6y ago
So you think ARM should be spun-off rather than sold? It seems like Softbank is having some issues unrelated to ARM, and needs the money. I'm also not sure that Softbank ownership has contributed anything to ARM's success.
- almost_usual 6y ago
  I’d think SoftBank’s ownership has probably resulted in more cash burn for ARM.
- hosh 6y ago
  The issue is with the well-being of the tech ecosystem and less with SoftBank or ARM's well-being as a business. SoftBank may not have contributed to ARM's success, but their neutrality allows ARM to license their IP without the kind of self-dealing you would get if Nvidia owns it. Further, Nvidia has a poor track record in global citizenship. The net result is that the overall ecosystem is going towards a degenerative state, rather than fostering innovation and diversity in tech.
znpy 6y ago
Maybe this will accelerate RISC-v, we'll see
- PedroBatista 6y ago
  It will ( don't know about success ) and the Chinese will benefit from it because they are already doubling down on RISC-V because they tried but could not become relevant with x86.
rvz 6y ago
Unfortunately, you are correct. This is what Nvidia was looking for since out of the big 3 US semiconductor manufacturers, it doesn't have its own IP on CPUs. Now it will soon be able to control ARM to its advantage against the competition. This will indeed push the urgency for RISC-V to be worth looking at in the next few years to be used by hardware vendors soon. But it will be a long wait. As for the UK now realizing SoftBank's expensive 'pass the parcel game' with ARM since 2016, I'd say you only appreciate something until it is gone. [0][1] In terms of technology, the UK simply didn't know what they had. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54122692 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54122692 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24362846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24362846
- noir_lord 6y ago
  The techies here including myself did, it was a deal the government should have looked into. It was a crown jewel of a company, hard to imagine the French government letting it slide or the US government letting a intel be sold to a foreign company.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    Even though I've long followed Arm (I went to a presentation in Cambridge from Steve Furber about the Arm 1 in 1985ish even before the first commercial chips shipped) I'm a bit sceptical about how much value would ever be generated for the UK economy by Arm. The business model is about low margins and selling to everyone around the world so its hard to see how being next door to Arm (geographically) would be a big advantage.
    - gumby 6y ago
      The theory is that clusters form around “anchor tenants”; Cambridge has the University (and its excellent CS departments), ARM and some others, and is close to he largest capital marketplaces in the world, grandiosely bundled into a so-called “silicon fen”. So school leavers can get jobs, network, start companies, develop other tech in a virtuous circle. Well that’s the theory; nobody has actually been able to reproduce Silicon Valley except arguably in SF (it’s more like the valley grew a tentacle is the peninsula, though the distance is far enough that the culture is slightly different). As far as Cambridge goes, I don’t see that this purchase makes any difference for those factors, except bragging rights in Whitehall.
MangoCoffee 6y ago
>ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. Softbank needs cash. sells ARM. not a good reason?
- Animats 6y ago
  Softbank has to prop up Uber and WeWork with something. I dunno, would you rather have ARM technology owned by a US company or by a front for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund?
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > Softbank has to prop up Uber and WeWork with something. Softbank has a chainsaw prince as a main creditor. This is a very compelling reason to get cash in any way possible.
    - athriren 6y ago
      to be pedantic i believe it was a hacksaw
  - MangoCoffee 6y ago
    i agree with you but it look like Softbank want money more than ARM. it doesn't matter what you and i think. its whatever Softbank CEO think.
  - adrian_b 6y ago
    Unfortunately, after the last years any non-US citizen would rather have ARM technology owned by a Saudi fund or by any other non-US entity. When you choose to include ARM technology in some of your products, then you will spend a lot of time and money for the implementation and you will need a long term availability of that technology, to be able to recover you costs and to give you time to switch to another technology, if desired. Now any long-term commitment for providing any US-owned technology can no longer be believed, because precedents show that such commitments can be unilaterally canceled at any time, without an early enough warning.
gumby 6y ago
> While long-term this might end up being great for RISC-V... set everything back another 5+ years. Five years is no big deal. In fact there’s so much in the pipeline it’s likely little will be different For 3-5 years. The bigger problem is RISC-V is immature and to use ARM as an example will need another decade to get its act together (for which I have high hopes BTW). I agree with you that this will definitely be a shot in the arm for RISC-V. > it's going to cause a huge fracture in software stacks at the exact WORST time [due to platform convergence] This is far from the worst time, and platform monoculture is not something to be celebrated. So from that perspective you’ve given me some encouragement from the news of this deal.
- pbronez 6y ago
  > The bigger problem is RISC-V is immature and to use ARM as an example will need another decade to get its act together (for which I have high hopes BTW). Do you think that RISC-V can overcome the inefficiencies discussed elsewhere in this thread with time? Specifically, can they improve the instruction set with more powerful addressing tools and reduce the number of instructions needed within loops?
  - neltnerb 6y ago
    Isn't the only reason it couldn't be improved the threat of other companies with patents? I thought that was usually the underlying culprit for missing capability. I wonder what the best ISA we could create would be in a universe where there were no rent-seekers looking to recoup their R&D investment by limiting what a new ISA could contain.
xxpor 6y ago
I'll never forget when I was applying for internships back in 2010, Nvidia was the ONLY company I came across with an GPA requirement (3.5). I happened to be below that, so I didn't even bother applying. None of the FAANGs cared in the slightest. I bring this up just because I feel it probably probably represents their arrogance well, in addition to everything else they do.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
bartread 6y ago
> Nope, now Nvidia is going to destroy that progress and set everything back another 5+ years. You're blaming Nvidia. You should be blaming SoftBank and Masayoshi Son: bunch of fucking hucksters misleading people and making bad investments. Now they need to sell ARM to fill some of the gaping void that has resulted. They couldn't care less who they sell to and what the outcome of that sale will be. I have nothing but contempt for them. An absolutely miserable turn of events.
- willtim 6y ago
  Well Brexit caused the pound to plummet and supposedly made ARM tempting. I find it ironic that the current UK Brexiteer government talk constantly about soveignty and control, yet were quite happy to allow this sale.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > You're blaming Nvidia. You should be blaming SoftBank and Masayoshi Son: bunch of fucking hucksters misleading people and making bad investments. You shouldn't be blaming bad investors. They pay for their decisions with their, or more often somebody's else, money. Blame the collective ownership of means of production, which in form of public companies have dominated the Western world for the last 30+ years. When people think of of selling their business, which is their life's work, as a raison d'etre, something is really messed up with the business culture in that person's coutnry.
  - hosh 6y ago
    Have you, by chance, looked into any of Carol Sandford’s work?
    - baybal2 6y ago
      No
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > When people think of of selling their business, which is their life's work That's a bit of a grandiloquent take on reasons that could lead one to start a business.
cwhiz 6y ago
It seems a little dramatic to think Nvidia would spend $40 billion just to run ARM into the ground.
- ianai 6y ago
  Agree. I really think they want to eat Intels lunch.
- manquer 6y ago
  Large M&A have always been a mixed bag of success. Large ones have failed spectacularly in the past so not an unreasonable expectation In this case the ROI does not depend on nvidia able to leverage ARM in their portfolio, even if they stopped developing ARM now , the licensing alone is worth a lot, while they hope to do more than that they don't have to. IP can be extremely valuable in a merger like this , Google bought motorola and Microsoft bought nokia for largely IP reasons at 15B and 8 B
- QuixoticQuibit 6y ago
  People here have an axe to grind against Nvidia it seems. Somehow seen as Intel but for GPUs despite being highly innovative and continuously so.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I don’t think the issue is that they aren’t doing well, it’s that they have historically not done good.
  - Twixes 6y ago
    Their GPUs are great. But their business practices are bad, and if they apply them to ARM, that will hurt us all.
stefan_ 6y ago
Why on earth would we want to converge on ARM? The first ARM architecture that was somewhat palatable was ARMv7, everything before that an unusable mess of different chips with vastly different capabilities. Their extensions are bad (read: subtly incompatible) late copies of what Intel and AMD are driving. Most of the innovation happens not at ARM, but their respective licensees. It took others inventing EFI to get some form of BIOS-equivalent for ARM, but even today the company gives the impression that they couldn't care less.
- luxurycommunism 6y ago
  Someone finally talking sense here.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  The Intel hate is so big that ARM fans don't acknowledge what they will lose in the process.
- petre 6y ago
  I just wonder what implications is the Arm sale to Nvidia going to have on Apple, who is switching their MacOS hardware from Intel to Arm.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Hopefully MacBooks will be able to have GPUs that aren’t pitiful and outdated?
  - ksec 6y ago
    Apple owns a perpetual ARMv8.2 license. And since they work closely with ARM on ARMv9 they might already have a license for that as well. Basically doesn't concern Apple at all.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Apple is already shipping devices with ARMv8.4; do they need a specific license for that?
valuearb 6y ago
Nvidia isn’t likely to invest $40B and then do anything to damage ARMs licensing efforts. They are likely to look to find synergies so ARM can incorporate Nvidia technologies and Nvidia can better utilize ARM technologies.
- techdragon 6y ago
  That sounds like a great strategy to announce and do for a year or two... before changing course to “maximise value” by merging operations, jacking up licensing costs, making nvidia gpus part of the arm ISA, etc...
  - rrss 6y ago
    > making nvidia gpus part of the arm ISA what would this mean? are there any CPU ISAs with a GPU integrated into the ISA instead of just a peripheral?
    - justaguy88 6y ago
      it doesn't have to be 'technically' integrated, it could be something buisness-y like "licences now cost 2x, but you also get a licence for some nvidia stuff you didn't really need"
  - marticode 6y ago
    > making nvidia gpus part of the arm ISA That would be amazing. Nvidia has arguably the best GPU designs in the market, this would be a boost for ARM IP business.
  - QuixoticQuibit 6y ago
    Does Nvidia have a history of doing this?
- adrian_b 6y ago
  I hope that NVIDIA does not have any plans to damage the development and licensing of Cortex-M and Cortex-R microcontrollers. This is a business that has no overlap over what NVIDIA does and maybe NVIDIA could spin off this part of ARM as a separate company, because I can hardly imagine the NVIDIA management focusing in this business, where they do not have any experience. On the other hand, ARM Cortex-A CPUs are better than those designed by NVIDIA and they are used in products (e.g. by Qualcomm) that directly compete with NVIDIA products. I cannot imagine that NVIDIA will continue to design better Cortex-A cores and then give them immediately to their competitors.
syshum 6y ago
You are not wrong "Nvidia has been the single worst company we have ever delt with so Nvidia F_ck You!" -- Linus Torvalds [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw&t=86 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw&t=86
arvinsim 6y ago
> While long-term this might end up being great for RISC-V, it's going to cause a huge fracture in software stacks at the exact WORST time. Finally we're starting seeing huge convergence on ARM in Mobile/Desktop/Server space. One ISA to rule them all! Nope, now Nvidia is going to destroy that progress and set everything back another 5+ years. As someone who is not that well versed in hardware, can someone explain to me why it would be good to converge towards ARM? Why there is disdain for x86?
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  There is plenty disdain for both. However ARM is (was?) gaining mindshare and starting to take even more marketshare and mindshare from Intel. Intel is a bit on the ropes right now because they can't keep up with TSMC on miniaturization and other chip technologies. I think it's popular to be against the 800lb gorilla. This deal is likely really bad for the platform as Nvidia doesn't have the greatest history for being a "nice" player in the tech world either. I think the primary fear is they will stop licensing the ARM IP to other companies and claim it solely for themselves in hopes of going even more head to head with Intel across the entire spectrum of chip technology.
- Moto7451 6y ago
  I’m sure there are people who have legitimate issues with x86 and its extensions. I’m not one of them. What I believe most people are concerned with are low power high performance devices. ARM owns that space. It would be at the very least disruptive to have ARM platforms die. On the high end Intel CPUs in servers are very expensive. Many people on HN have expressed hope that cheap ARM cores become good enough and drive down the cost of both on-prem and cloud servers.
mgh2 6y ago
What will happen with Apple Silicon?
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  Why would you expect anything to happen? Apple has obviously already negotiated and signed the licensing deal.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Inability to resign a V2 deal might lead to "Apple ARM" diverging from "Everyone Else's Arm".
    - neilalexander 6y ago
      That may happen but ultimately it’s not like that matters. Apple tend not to worry much about compatibility outside of their own ecosystem and certainly haven’t worried about making breaking changes in the past (think 68k, PowerPC, x86, ARM) when it suits them — it’s not like they need to. They have managed migrations like this in the past with fat binaries and, more recently, they have even accommodated differences in architecture on iOS devices by using intermediate presentations (“bitcode”). Any other compatibility with Apple devices tends to be a matter of coincidence. When they moved to x86 hardware, running Windows on Macs became so easy that building Boot Camp — effectively an install wizard and a few driver packs — was easy, therefore Apple giveth. However Apple Silicon Macs will drop without Boot Camp for the obvious reasons and Apple won’t apologise as they taketh away.
sfifs 6y ago
Given how SoftBank has mismanaged things across their portfolio companies, wouldn't literally anyone else be a net positive to get ARM out of SoftBank? For all the PR ARM's old founder has been doing, i don't see he's been able to scare up a buyout partnership.
Causality1 6y ago
My first thought at this news was "but nvidia's not even that into it anymore!" Sure, they make SoCs for the Switch and some cars and a media dongle, but they used to be so much more interested. They basically owned the Android gaming market with Tegra 2 and 3, made a really cool handheld and licensed a incredibly economical tablet design to EVGA with Tegra 4, and released their own gaming tablet with the Shield. Then they stopped. Why spend the last five years whittling down their ARM product line and then try to buy ARM?
robot 6y ago
RISC-V is pretty awesome as an ISA. Give it a few years and it can solve all of these problems.

by BluSyn 6y ago

nickff 6y ago

So you think ARM should be spun-off rather than sold? It seems like Softbank is having some issues unrelated to ARM, and needs the money. I'm also not sure that Softbank ownership has contributed anything to ARM's success.

almost_usual 6y ago
I’d think SoftBank’s ownership has probably resulted in more cash burn for ARM.
hosh 6y ago
The issue is with the well-being of the tech ecosystem and less with SoftBank or ARM's well-being as a business. SoftBank may not have contributed to ARM's success, but their neutrality allows ARM to license their IP without the kind of self-dealing you would get if Nvidia owns it. Further, Nvidia has a poor track record in global citizenship. The net result is that the overall ecosystem is going towards a degenerative state, rather than fostering innovation and diversity in tech.

znpy 6y ago

Maybe this will accelerate RISC-v, we'll see

PedroBatista 6y ago
It will ( don't know about success ) and the Chinese will benefit from it because they are already doubling down on RISC-V because they tried but could not become relevant with x86.

rvz 6y ago

Unfortunately, you are correct. This is what Nvidia was looking for since out of the big 3 US semiconductor manufacturers, it doesn't have its own IP on CPUs. Now it will soon be able to control ARM to its advantage against the competition. This will indeed push the urgency for RISC-V to be worth looking at in the next few years to be used by hardware vendors soon. But it will be a long wait. As for the UK now realizing SoftBank's expensive 'pass the parcel game' with ARM since 2016, I'd say you only appreciate something until it is gone. [0][1] In terms of technology, the UK simply didn't know what they had. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54122692 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54122692 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24362846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24362846

noir_lord 6y ago
The techies here including myself did, it was a deal the government should have looked into. It was a crown jewel of a company, hard to imagine the French government letting it slide or the US government letting a intel be sold to a foreign company.
- klelatti 6y ago
  Even though I've long followed Arm (I went to a presentation in Cambridge from Steve Furber about the Arm 1 in 1985ish even before the first commercial chips shipped) I'm a bit sceptical about how much value would ever be generated for the UK economy by Arm. The business model is about low margins and selling to everyone around the world so its hard to see how being next door to Arm (geographically) would be a big advantage.
  - gumby 6y ago
    The theory is that clusters form around “anchor tenants”; Cambridge has the University (and its excellent CS departments), ARM and some others, and is close to he largest capital marketplaces in the world, grandiosely bundled into a so-called “silicon fen”. So school leavers can get jobs, network, start companies, develop other tech in a virtuous circle. Well that’s the theory; nobody has actually been able to reproduce Silicon Valley except arguably in SF (it’s more like the valley grew a tentacle is the peninsula, though the distance is far enough that the culture is slightly different). As far as Cambridge goes, I don’t see that this purchase makes any difference for those factors, except bragging rights in Whitehall.

MangoCoffee 6y ago

>ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. Softbank needs cash. sells ARM. not a good reason?

Animats 6y ago
Softbank has to prop up Uber and WeWork with something. I dunno, would you rather have ARM technology owned by a US company or by a front for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund?
- baybal2 6y ago
  > Softbank has to prop up Uber and WeWork with something. Softbank has a chainsaw prince as a main creditor. This is a very compelling reason to get cash in any way possible.
  - athriren 6y ago
    to be pedantic i believe it was a hacksaw
- MangoCoffee 6y ago
  i agree with you but it look like Softbank want money more than ARM. it doesn't matter what you and i think. its whatever Softbank CEO think.
- adrian_b 6y ago
  Unfortunately, after the last years any non-US citizen would rather have ARM technology owned by a Saudi fund or by any other non-US entity. When you choose to include ARM technology in some of your products, then you will spend a lot of time and money for the implementation and you will need a long term availability of that technology, to be able to recover you costs and to give you time to switch to another technology, if desired. Now any long-term commitment for providing any US-owned technology can no longer be believed, because precedents show that such commitments can be unilaterally canceled at any time, without an early enough warning.

gumby 6y ago

> While long-term this might end up being great for RISC-V... set everything back another 5+ years. Five years is no big deal. In fact there’s so much in the pipeline it’s likely little will be different For 3-5 years. The bigger problem is RISC-V is immature and to use ARM as an example will need another decade to get its act together (for which I have high hopes BTW). I agree with you that this will definitely be a shot in the arm for RISC-V. > it's going to cause a huge fracture in software stacks at the exact WORST time [due to platform convergence] This is far from the worst time, and platform monoculture is not something to be celebrated. So from that perspective you’ve given me some encouragement from the news of this deal.

pbronez 6y ago
> The bigger problem is RISC-V is immature and to use ARM as an example will need another decade to get its act together (for which I have high hopes BTW). Do you think that RISC-V can overcome the inefficiencies discussed elsewhere in this thread with time? Specifically, can they improve the instruction set with more powerful addressing tools and reduce the number of instructions needed within loops?
- neltnerb 6y ago
  Isn't the only reason it couldn't be improved the threat of other companies with patents? I thought that was usually the underlying culprit for missing capability. I wonder what the best ISA we could create would be in a universe where there were no rent-seekers looking to recoup their R&D investment by limiting what a new ISA could contain.

xxpor 6y ago

I'll never forget when I was applying for internships back in 2010, Nvidia was the ONLY company I came across with an GPA requirement (3.5). I happened to be below that, so I didn't even bother applying. None of the FAANGs cared in the slightest. I bring this up just because I feel it probably probably represents their arrogance well, in addition to everything else they do.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

bartread 6y ago

> Nope, now Nvidia is going to destroy that progress and set everything back another 5+ years. You're blaming Nvidia. You should be blaming SoftBank and Masayoshi Son: bunch of fucking hucksters misleading people and making bad investments. Now they need to sell ARM to fill some of the gaping void that has resulted. They couldn't care less who they sell to and what the outcome of that sale will be. I have nothing but contempt for them. An absolutely miserable turn of events.

willtim 6y ago
Well Brexit caused the pound to plummet and supposedly made ARM tempting. I find it ironic that the current UK Brexiteer government talk constantly about soveignty and control, yet were quite happy to allow this sale.
baybal2 6y ago
> You're blaming Nvidia. You should be blaming SoftBank and Masayoshi Son: bunch of fucking hucksters misleading people and making bad investments. You shouldn't be blaming bad investors. They pay for their decisions with their, or more often somebody's else, money. Blame the collective ownership of means of production, which in form of public companies have dominated the Western world for the last 30+ years. When people think of of selling their business, which is their life's work, as a raison d'etre, something is really messed up with the business culture in that person's coutnry.
- hosh 6y ago
  Have you, by chance, looked into any of Carol Sandford’s work?
  - baybal2 6y ago
    No
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > When people think of of selling their business, which is their life's work That's a bit of a grandiloquent take on reasons that could lead one to start a business.

cwhiz 6y ago

It seems a little dramatic to think Nvidia would spend $40 billion just to run ARM into the ground.

ianai 6y ago
Agree. I really think they want to eat Intels lunch.
manquer 6y ago
Large M&A have always been a mixed bag of success. Large ones have failed spectacularly in the past so not an unreasonable expectation In this case the ROI does not depend on nvidia able to leverage ARM in their portfolio, even if they stopped developing ARM now , the licensing alone is worth a lot, while they hope to do more than that they don't have to. IP can be extremely valuable in a merger like this , Google bought motorola and Microsoft bought nokia for largely IP reasons at 15B and 8 B
QuixoticQuibit 6y ago
People here have an axe to grind against Nvidia it seems. Somehow seen as Intel but for GPUs despite being highly innovative and continuously so.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I don’t think the issue is that they aren’t doing well, it’s that they have historically not done good.
- Twixes 6y ago
  Their GPUs are great. But their business practices are bad, and if they apply them to ARM, that will hurt us all.

stefan_ 6y ago

Why on earth would we want to converge on ARM? The first ARM architecture that was somewhat palatable was ARMv7, everything before that an unusable mess of different chips with vastly different capabilities. Their extensions are bad (read: subtly incompatible) late copies of what Intel and AMD are driving. Most of the innovation happens not at ARM, but their respective licensees. It took others inventing EFI to get some form of BIOS-equivalent for ARM, but even today the company gives the impression that they couldn't care less.

luxurycommunism 6y ago
Someone finally talking sense here.
pjmlp 6y ago
The Intel hate is so big that ARM fans don't acknowledge what they will lose in the process.
petre 6y ago
I just wonder what implications is the Arm sale to Nvidia going to have on Apple, who is switching their MacOS hardware from Intel to Arm.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Hopefully MacBooks will be able to have GPUs that aren’t pitiful and outdated?
- ksec 6y ago
  Apple owns a perpetual ARMv8.2 license. And since they work closely with ARM on ARMv9 they might already have a license for that as well. Basically doesn't concern Apple at all.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Apple is already shipping devices with ARMv8.4; do they need a specific license for that?

valuearb 6y ago

Nvidia isn’t likely to invest $40B and then do anything to damage ARMs licensing efforts. They are likely to look to find synergies so ARM can incorporate Nvidia technologies and Nvidia can better utilize ARM technologies.

techdragon 6y ago
That sounds like a great strategy to announce and do for a year or two... before changing course to “maximise value” by merging operations, jacking up licensing costs, making nvidia gpus part of the arm ISA, etc...
- rrss 6y ago
  > making nvidia gpus part of the arm ISA what would this mean? are there any CPU ISAs with a GPU integrated into the ISA instead of just a peripheral?
  - justaguy88 6y ago
    it doesn't have to be 'technically' integrated, it could be something buisness-y like "licences now cost 2x, but you also get a licence for some nvidia stuff you didn't really need"
- marticode 6y ago
  > making nvidia gpus part of the arm ISA That would be amazing. Nvidia has arguably the best GPU designs in the market, this would be a boost for ARM IP business.
- QuixoticQuibit 6y ago
  Does Nvidia have a history of doing this?
adrian_b 6y ago
I hope that NVIDIA does not have any plans to damage the development and licensing of Cortex-M and Cortex-R microcontrollers. This is a business that has no overlap over what NVIDIA does and maybe NVIDIA could spin off this part of ARM as a separate company, because I can hardly imagine the NVIDIA management focusing in this business, where they do not have any experience. On the other hand, ARM Cortex-A CPUs are better than those designed by NVIDIA and they are used in products (e.g. by Qualcomm) that directly compete with NVIDIA products. I cannot imagine that NVIDIA will continue to design better Cortex-A cores and then give them immediately to their competitors.

syshum 6y ago

You are not wrong "Nvidia has been the single worst company we have ever delt with so Nvidia F_ck You!" -- Linus Torvalds [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw&t=86 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw&t=86

arvinsim 6y ago

> While long-term this might end up being great for RISC-V, it's going to cause a huge fracture in software stacks at the exact WORST time. Finally we're starting seeing huge convergence on ARM in Mobile/Desktop/Server space. One ISA to rule them all! Nope, now Nvidia is going to destroy that progress and set everything back another 5+ years. As someone who is not that well versed in hardware, can someone explain to me why it would be good to converge towards ARM? Why there is disdain for x86?

stjohnswarts 6y ago
There is plenty disdain for both. However ARM is (was?) gaining mindshare and starting to take even more marketshare and mindshare from Intel. Intel is a bit on the ropes right now because they can't keep up with TSMC on miniaturization and other chip technologies. I think it's popular to be against the 800lb gorilla. This deal is likely really bad for the platform as Nvidia doesn't have the greatest history for being a "nice" player in the tech world either. I think the primary fear is they will stop licensing the ARM IP to other companies and claim it solely for themselves in hopes of going even more head to head with Intel across the entire spectrum of chip technology.
Moto7451 6y ago
I’m sure there are people who have legitimate issues with x86 and its extensions. I’m not one of them. What I believe most people are concerned with are low power high performance devices. ARM owns that space. It would be at the very least disruptive to have ARM platforms die. On the high end Intel CPUs in servers are very expensive. Many people on HN have expressed hope that cheap ARM cores become good enough and drive down the cost of both on-prem and cloud servers.

mgh2 6y ago

What will happen with Apple Silicon?

_-___________-_ 6y ago
Why would you expect anything to happen? Apple has obviously already negotiated and signed the licensing deal.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Inability to resign a V2 deal might lead to "Apple ARM" diverging from "Everyone Else's Arm".
  - neilalexander 6y ago
    That may happen but ultimately it’s not like that matters. Apple tend not to worry much about compatibility outside of their own ecosystem and certainly haven’t worried about making breaking changes in the past (think 68k, PowerPC, x86, ARM) when it suits them — it’s not like they need to. They have managed migrations like this in the past with fat binaries and, more recently, they have even accommodated differences in architecture on iOS devices by using intermediate presentations (“bitcode”). Any other compatibility with Apple devices tends to be a matter of coincidence. When they moved to x86 hardware, running Windows on Macs became so easy that building Boot Camp — effectively an install wizard and a few driver packs — was easy, therefore Apple giveth. However Apple Silicon Macs will drop without Boot Camp for the obvious reasons and Apple won’t apologise as they taketh away.

sfifs 6y ago

Given how SoftBank has mismanaged things across their portfolio companies, wouldn't literally anyone else be a net positive to get ARM out of SoftBank? For all the PR ARM's old founder has been doing, i don't see he's been able to scare up a buyout partnership.

Causality1 6y ago

My first thought at this news was "but nvidia's not even that into it anymore!" Sure, they make SoCs for the Switch and some cars and a media dongle, but they used to be so much more interested. They basically owned the Android gaming market with Tegra 2 and 3, made a really cool handheld and licensed a incredibly economical tablet design to EVGA with Tegra 4, and released their own gaming tablet with the Shield. Then they stopped. Why spend the last five years whittling down their ARM product line and then try to buy ARM?

robot 6y ago

RISC-V is pretty awesome as an ISA. Give it a few years and it can solve all of these problems.