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The comments about edge, and combining Nvidia / graphics tech with Arm makes a lot of sense to me. I suspect that's where most of the value of this merger will
by discodave 6y ago
The comments about edge, and combining Nvidia / graphics tech with Arm makes a lot of sense to me. I suspect that's where most of the value of this merger will come from. When it comes to Arm in the datacenter, my question is: How do they actually plan to extract money from ARM displacing x86?
AWS has been deploying at least one ARM chip (Annapurna/Nitro) on every single EC2 server for 5+ years. Surely they would have made sure their license ensures future rights to keep using ARM at a reasonable price. Their Graviton instances are effectively just one more ARM chip, so an Intel instance has 2 Arm chips (1 for EBS, 1 for networking) while a Graviton/Arm instance has 3 (EBS, networking, CPU).
Unless the Arm license reads something like "If you make a really big multi-core chip we get to charge you more"... how does the x86 -> Arm transition actually move the needle for Arm Holdings / Nvidia?
- freeone3000 6y agoArm licensing of their processor includes a royalty. More processor sales make more money for Arm.
- discodave 6y agoThis estimate has 6 billion Arm chips shipped in Q4 2019: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1131983/arm-based-chip-unit-shipments-as-reported-by-licensees-worldwide https://www.statista.com/statistics/1131983/arm-based-chip-u... The hyperscale/cloud datacenter market is single-digit millions of CPUs shipped per year. So if the whole cloud went to Arm tomorrow it would be less than 1% of total Arm chip shipments. My point is that unless there's a way to extract higher $ per chip in the datacenter then actually it doesn't make a difference for Arm. Edit: By datacenter market I'm really referring to AWS/GCP/Azure... the rest of the market ain't going en-masse to Arm anytime soon.
- btian 6y agoWhat makes you think ARM charges the same for a Neoverse N1 CPU as a Cortex M0 CPU? That wouldn't make business sense.
- discodave 6y agoI don't know what's in those licenses. Feel free to enlighten me :) But it also wouldn't make business sense for Amazon to hang their hat on ARM without assurances or contractual guarantees that they can keep selling ARM chips for a reasonable price into the future. Where I define "reasonable" as Arm taking a much, much smaller cut of the final price than what Intel can do.
- klelatti 6y ago1. Licensing costs are higher for more complex chips. So that one extra CPU chip is likely to cost a lot more. 2. If it's Nvidia / Arm actually selling the CPU (and not just the ISA) you'd expect margins to be higher again.