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> Now you got a big problem, because neither Intel, AMD, or Nvidia are going to license their intellectual property I keep seeing this line and wonder - "did p
by xenocratus 6y ago
> Now you got a big problem, because neither Intel, AMD, or Nvidia are going to license their intellectual property
I keep seeing this line and wonder - "did people miss the news about Nvidia buying Arm?". Sure, there are still plenty of hurdles to pass until it's official, but take a look at the initial piece written by Nvidia about the acquisition:
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for-40-billion-creating-worlds-premier-computing-company-for-the-age-of-ai https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for...
Specifically this line:
> NVIDIA will continue Arm’s open-licensing model and customer neutrality and expand Arm’s IP licensing portfolio with NVIDIA technology
- knolan 6y agoWon’t be the first or the last acquisition to say everything will stay the same.
- gabereiser 6y ago> Won’t be the first or the last acquisition to say everything will stay the same. Then change it a year or so down the road, requiring you to have an account on some other non-related service in order for your hardware to work. /sarcasm
- kergonath 6y agoThey have to say that, though, don’t they? They need to convince a bunch of regulators that their purchase of ARM won’t cause too much damage. They couldn’t really say that they would be going to choke a whole industry by dropping the licensing model, even if it were the case.
- MBCook 6y agoThey may license the ARM technology, but will they license their own GPU technology? That’s what a Dell would need to make their own SOC.
- GregarianChild 6y agoAn interesting question here is: which of the big Arm customers are going to trust NVidia? As far as I understand, Arm's license requires licensees to give Arm detailed and advanced information about implementations (IIRC long before they are fabbed). This would give NVidia unprecedented insight into the competition's processors long before they hit the market. Will Samsung or Apple be happy about that? Will AMD be happy about that? Given the tension between the US and China, it's almost inconceivable that the Chinese Arm customers will be happy about this. China is the world's biggest processor market, with a government mandate to reduce dependency on foreign technology! Hello RISC-V!
- tambourine_man 6y agoI don’t know the legalese, but I'll bet you Apple won’t disclose future processors to Nvidea. They won’t disclose current ones. Maybe licensing the ISA, which is what Apple is doing, is while different deal.
- reader_mode 6y agoIt's also outright false - AMD licensed GPU tech to Samsung for the next generation Exynos, built custom SoC for clients in console. I don't know if AMD could license x86 cores since I don't know what their deal is on x86 IP with Intel.
- mbreese 6y agoAnd as you allude to -- AMD wouldn't exist without a license to the x86 ISA from Intel anyway. So all of the major CPU/GPU vendors have some kind of IP licensing in place. The question is now with Apple as a player, how will this shake up the rest of the chip industry. Will we see more cross-licensing or will existing players retreat and hold their IP closer?
- temac 6y agoPlus, in some cases it is perfectly fine to integrate technology by soldering a discrete package on a PCB. It is not superior to a SoC in all cases, but neither is the inverse true. In that sense Intel, AMD, or Nvidia are absolutely conveying their intellectual property to end user products through OEMs.