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I would have liked to see ARM remain owned in the UK. I think it's proven itself capable of innovation and organic growth on its own. But how can we evaluate t

I would have liked to see ARM remain owned in the UK. I think it's proven itself capable of innovation and organic growth on its own. But how can we evaluate the whether that will continue? What if ARM is not sold, and then (for whatever reason) stagnates, doesn't innovate, gets overtaken in some way, and enters gradual decline? Perhaps that's unlikely, but prevent the sale, period is feels too absolute.

bencollier49 6y ago
That feels like giving up, to me. We should have the confidence that British industry can development and flourish on its own merits without being sold off to foreign interests.
- fluffything 6y ago
  What have confidence when we can just look at ARM financials? There are more ARM chips sold each year than those of all its competitors together. Yet ARM's revenue is 300 million $. Why? Because ARM lives from the ISA royalties, and their revenue on the cores they license is actually small. With RISC-V on the rise, and west sanctions against china, RISC-V competition against ARM will only increase, and it is very hard to compete against something that's good / better and has lower costs (RISC-V royalties are "free"). I really have no idea why NVIDIA would adquire ARM. If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu, etc. are built and designed by better teams). ARM cores are used by Qualcom and Samsung, but these aren't world-class and get beaten every gen by Apple Silicon. If they want ARM royalties, that's high risk business, and very low reward (there is little money to make there). The only ok-ish cores ARM makes are embedded low-power cores (not mobile, but truly IoT < 1W embedded). Hard to imagine that an architecture like Volta or Ampere that perform well at 200-400W would perform well at the <1W envelope. No mobile phone in the world uses nvidia accelerators, and mobile phones are "supercomputers" when compared with the kind of devices ARM is "ok-ish" at. So none of this makes sense to me, except if NVIDIA would want to "license" GPUs with ARM cores to IoT and low power devices like ARM does, but that sounds extremely far-fetched, because nvidia is super-far away from a product there, and also because the margins for those products are very very thin, and nvidia tends to like 40-60% margins. You just can have those when buying IoT chips for 0.12$. Its also hard to sell a GPU to these use cases because they often don't need it.
  - lumberingjack 6y ago
    Apple mobile beating arm mobile is pretty irrelevant considering they can barely run the same type of tasks it's a miracle they both have the same benchmarks since they're operating systems are totally different. Beyond that it doesn't even really matter which one's faster because you got all that overhead of the os's that are so different. I would also like to say that Apple users are going to buy the newer chip whether it's faster or not. Because of planned obstinance at a software level. I've never heard an Apple user talk about speed or The benchmark of the phones because that marketing segment is clueless to that. My guess is that Nvidia needs arm for their self-driving stuff.
  - als0 6y ago
    > If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton Graviton uses Neoverse CPU cores, which are designed by ARM. To say that ARM is not a world-class CPU team is unfair. Especially as Ampere just announced an 80 core datacenter SoC using Neoverse cores.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - bogomipz 6y ago
    >" If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu, etc. are built and designed by better teams)." The latest Fujitsus HPC offering the A64FX is also ARM based though.[1][2] And it sounds as though this is replacing their SPARC64 in this role . [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      The core is not designed by ARM.
djmobley 6y ago
Who is to say ARM was “owned in the UK” prior to the SoftBank acquisition? Prior to that it was a publicly traded company, presumably with a diverse array of international shareholders.

bencollier49 6y ago

That feels like giving up, to me. We should have the confidence that British industry can development and flourish on its own merits without being sold off to foreign interests.

fluffything 6y ago
What have confidence when we can just look at ARM financials? There are more ARM chips sold each year than those of all its competitors together. Yet ARM's revenue is 300 million $. Why? Because ARM lives from the ISA royalties, and their revenue on the cores they license is actually small. With RISC-V on the rise, and west sanctions against china, RISC-V competition against ARM will only increase, and it is very hard to compete against something that's good / better and has lower costs (RISC-V royalties are "free"). I really have no idea why NVIDIA would adquire ARM. If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu, etc. are built and designed by better teams). ARM cores are used by Qualcom and Samsung, but these aren't world-class and get beaten every gen by Apple Silicon. If they want ARM royalties, that's high risk business, and very low reward (there is little money to make there). The only ok-ish cores ARM makes are embedded low-power cores (not mobile, but truly IoT < 1W embedded). Hard to imagine that an architecture like Volta or Ampere that perform well at 200-400W would perform well at the <1W envelope. No mobile phone in the world uses nvidia accelerators, and mobile phones are "supercomputers" when compared with the kind of devices ARM is "ok-ish" at. So none of this makes sense to me, except if NVIDIA would want to "license" GPUs with ARM cores to IoT and low power devices like ARM does, but that sounds extremely far-fetched, because nvidia is super-far away from a product there, and also because the margins for those products are very very thin, and nvidia tends to like 40-60% margins. You just can have those when buying IoT chips for 0.12$. Its also hard to sell a GPU to these use cases because they often don't need it.
- lumberingjack 6y ago
  Apple mobile beating arm mobile is pretty irrelevant considering they can barely run the same type of tasks it's a miracle they both have the same benchmarks since they're operating systems are totally different. Beyond that it doesn't even really matter which one's faster because you got all that overhead of the os's that are so different. I would also like to say that Apple users are going to buy the newer chip whether it's faster or not. Because of planned obstinance at a software level. I've never heard an Apple user talk about speed or The benchmark of the phones because that marketing segment is clueless to that. My guess is that Nvidia needs arm for their self-driving stuff.
- als0 6y ago
  > If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton Graviton uses Neoverse CPU cores, which are designed by ARM. To say that ARM is not a world-class CPU team is unfair. Especially as Ampere just announced an 80 core datacenter SoC using Neoverse cores.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- bogomipz 6y ago
  >" If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu, etc. are built and designed by better teams)." The latest Fujitsus HPC offering the A64FX is also ARM based though.[1][2] And it sounds as though this is replacing their SPARC64 in this role . [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    The core is not designed by ARM.

djmobley 6y ago

Who is to say ARM was “owned in the UK” prior to the SoftBank acquisition? Prior to that it was a publicly traded company, presumably with a diverse array of international shareholders.