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ARM can't flourish under Nvidia, which customer would prefer to buy IP from a potential competitor rather than from a neutral provider. The ecosystem business

ARM can't flourish under Nvidia, which customer would prefer to buy IP from a potential competitor rather than from a neutral provider. The ecosystem business model that defines Arm simply doesn't have any space for them being perceived as biased this way or that way.

tw04 5y ago
>ARM can't flourish under Nvidia, which vendor would prefer to buy IP from direct competitor rather than from a neutral provider. I would imagine plenty. Take a look at the list of vendors that sell Nvidia GPUs despite the fact that Nvidia sells directly into the market. >The ecosystem business model that defines Arm simply doesn't have any space for them being perceived as biased this way or that way. I don't know, Intel's recent announcement that they're going to start licensing their IP directly contradicts that. I don't think Intel would waste what will likely be a fairly large amount of money spinning up a new business unit without first doing some market research and ensuring there's demand for it.
- smachiz 5y ago
  When you're thirsty, you buy from the person selling water. I don't think you'll find a lot of love lost between the OXMs and nvidia. I'm sure they would love more competitors in the space. We have people licensing Arm and building interesting CPUs (Ampere). I'm not sure that the NVIDIA acquisition would be good for the market or for Arm.
  - tw04 5y ago
    You haven't explained why Intel is entering the licensing business. If vendors have no desire to get their licensing from a company that competes in the space, there should be no demand for licensing from Intel, all of those OXMs should be going to ARM.
    - smachiz 5y ago
      You haven't demonstrated that anyone /is/ entering into contracts with Intel. Intel has done lots of things that it turns out people didn't want to do (with them).
      - tw04 5y ago
        They absolutely have people signing up, none of it has been publicly announced (that I've seen) but we already know they were doing custom designs for Facebook/Amazon/MS so they would be logical first-takers.
        Judgmentality 5y ago
        > They absolutely have people signing up, none of it has been publicly announced I can't tell if you're saying you have insider information or you're just assuming they're getting customers with no evidence.
        smachiz 5y ago
        None of those are OXMs and are the end customer. That is totally different than what your original assertion was.
        tw04 5y ago
        So tell me what an OXM is? Because Amazon sells outpost, an appliance, to end users. And Annapurna (owned by Amazon) sells CPUs to all sorts of vendors, including Ubiquiti and Synology.
    - robert_foss 5y ago
      Nor have we seen any serious uptake of Intels licensing business. It's a paper launch. Adding to that Intel didn't exactly pick this model as their first choice. The combination of a wafer production shortage and Intels CPUs underperforming is what drove Intel to this. It is neither Intels or most feasible clients first choice.
    - 5y ago
  - volta83 5y ago
    > We have people licensing Arm and building interesting CPUs (Ampere). > I'm not sure that the NVIDIA acquisition would be good for the market or for Arm. NVIDIA works with Ampere and just started shipping server nodes with Ampere CPUs. If that was bad for Ampere, they would not be working with NVIDIA on this. Not that you are right/wrong (I don't know), but Ampere appears to be an example that shows the opposite of what you are trying to claim.
Vvector 5y ago
The companies that directly compete with Nvidia (AMD & Intel) are not ARM customers. ARM's biggest customers are mobile phones, which could benefit from an Nvidia GPU
- jorvi 5y ago
  Considering how well Apple's M1 is performing, I suspect within 10 years the majority of new desktops and laptops sold will be ARM-based, with both Intel and AMD having to either adapt or languish.
  - karteum 5y ago
    Difficult to forecast within 10 years... maybe you are right, maybe it could be Alibaba/Allwinner/Rockchip with RISC-V designs ! :D
  - hellotomyrars 5y ago
    I think this is accurate if we see a substantial uptake of cloud/remote services for what are currently the most common high demand compute consumer devices (Game consoles + PC). ARM is already proving to be a winner in the datacenter as it becomes available so it seems all but inevitable. I think the overall trend is still accurate and in either case ARM + Nvidia is (or would be) a compelling provider of hardware but the segment of the market that needs/relies on X86 architecture does seem to be shrinking.
- adrian_b 5y ago
  Qualcomm is a direct competitor of NVIDIA (e.g. for automotive and robotics) and an important ARM customer. Until now the competing products of NVIDIA and Qualcomm differed in NVIDIA having worse CPUs and better GPUs and Qualcomm having better (ARM-designed) CPUs and worse GPUs. I do not find it believable that in the future NVIDIA would ever provide Qualcomm with better CPUs than those of NVIDIA products. Given NVIDIA's desire of dominating the datacenters, it is also hard to believe that they will give to all other companies who will attempt to design server CPUs new ARM cores at the same time when they will be available for the internal NVIDIA design teams.
tokyojoe 5y ago
Power consumption is a key application requirement for mobile. I don’t know that GPU’s are designed to run on the smell of an oil rag which the ARM processor cores do.
- plekter 5y ago
  Mobile GPUs (Imagination PowerVR, Qualcomm Adreno, Arm Mali, Apple's GPU) are exactly that.
- volta83 5y ago
  Doesn't NVIDIA ship the CPU for the Nintendo Switch? Not as low power as mobile phones, but not completely far away either.
volta83 5y ago
> ARM can't flourish under Nvidia, Why? > which customer would prefer to buy IP from a potential competitor rather than from a neutral provider. The same customers that buy NVIDIA GPUs, NVIDIA interconnects, support NVIDIA's software, etc. You seem to be suggesting that this "somehow" matters, but are not explaining "why" do you think this matters. AFAICT if AMD wants to ship a data-center node, it needs Mellanox interconnect, and has to buy that from NVIDIA, pretty much in the same way that NVIDIA ships AMD CPUs with their DGX boxes. There are dozens of thousands of pattents that all these companies need to buy from each other on a regular basis to function. I don't see how this particular change makes the status quo worse.

tw04 5y ago

>ARM can't flourish under Nvidia, which vendor would prefer to buy IP from direct competitor rather than from a neutral provider. I would imagine plenty. Take a look at the list of vendors that sell Nvidia GPUs despite the fact that Nvidia sells directly into the market. >The ecosystem business model that defines Arm simply doesn't have any space for them being perceived as biased this way or that way. I don't know, Intel's recent announcement that they're going to start licensing their IP directly contradicts that. I don't think Intel would waste what will likely be a fairly large amount of money spinning up a new business unit without first doing some market research and ensuring there's demand for it.

smachiz 5y ago
When you're thirsty, you buy from the person selling water. I don't think you'll find a lot of love lost between the OXMs and nvidia. I'm sure they would love more competitors in the space. We have people licensing Arm and building interesting CPUs (Ampere). I'm not sure that the NVIDIA acquisition would be good for the market or for Arm.
- tw04 5y ago
  You haven't explained why Intel is entering the licensing business. If vendors have no desire to get their licensing from a company that competes in the space, there should be no demand for licensing from Intel, all of those OXMs should be going to ARM.
  - smachiz 5y ago
    You haven't demonstrated that anyone /is/ entering into contracts with Intel. Intel has done lots of things that it turns out people didn't want to do (with them).
    - tw04 5y ago
      They absolutely have people signing up, none of it has been publicly announced (that I've seen) but we already know they were doing custom designs for Facebook/Amazon/MS so they would be logical first-takers.
      - Judgmentality 5y ago
        > They absolutely have people signing up, none of it has been publicly announced I can't tell if you're saying you have insider information or you're just assuming they're getting customers with no evidence.
      - smachiz 5y ago
        None of those are OXMs and are the end customer. That is totally different than what your original assertion was.
        tw04 5y ago
        So tell me what an OXM is? Because Amazon sells outpost, an appliance, to end users. And Annapurna (owned by Amazon) sells CPUs to all sorts of vendors, including Ubiquiti and Synology.
  - robert_foss 5y ago
    Nor have we seen any serious uptake of Intels licensing business. It's a paper launch. Adding to that Intel didn't exactly pick this model as their first choice. The combination of a wafer production shortage and Intels CPUs underperforming is what drove Intel to this. It is neither Intels or most feasible clients first choice.
  - 5y ago
- volta83 5y ago
  > We have people licensing Arm and building interesting CPUs (Ampere). > I'm not sure that the NVIDIA acquisition would be good for the market or for Arm. NVIDIA works with Ampere and just started shipping server nodes with Ampere CPUs. If that was bad for Ampere, they would not be working with NVIDIA on this. Not that you are right/wrong (I don't know), but Ampere appears to be an example that shows the opposite of what you are trying to claim.

Vvector 5y ago

The companies that directly compete with Nvidia (AMD & Intel) are not ARM customers. ARM's biggest customers are mobile phones, which could benefit from an Nvidia GPU

jorvi 5y ago
Considering how well Apple's M1 is performing, I suspect within 10 years the majority of new desktops and laptops sold will be ARM-based, with both Intel and AMD having to either adapt or languish.
- karteum 5y ago
  Difficult to forecast within 10 years... maybe you are right, maybe it could be Alibaba/Allwinner/Rockchip with RISC-V designs ! :D
- hellotomyrars 5y ago
  I think this is accurate if we see a substantial uptake of cloud/remote services for what are currently the most common high demand compute consumer devices (Game consoles + PC). ARM is already proving to be a winner in the datacenter as it becomes available so it seems all but inevitable. I think the overall trend is still accurate and in either case ARM + Nvidia is (or would be) a compelling provider of hardware but the segment of the market that needs/relies on X86 architecture does seem to be shrinking.
adrian_b 5y ago
Qualcomm is a direct competitor of NVIDIA (e.g. for automotive and robotics) and an important ARM customer. Until now the competing products of NVIDIA and Qualcomm differed in NVIDIA having worse CPUs and better GPUs and Qualcomm having better (ARM-designed) CPUs and worse GPUs. I do not find it believable that in the future NVIDIA would ever provide Qualcomm with better CPUs than those of NVIDIA products. Given NVIDIA's desire of dominating the datacenters, it is also hard to believe that they will give to all other companies who will attempt to design server CPUs new ARM cores at the same time when they will be available for the internal NVIDIA design teams.

tokyojoe 5y ago

Power consumption is a key application requirement for mobile. I don’t know that GPU’s are designed to run on the smell of an oil rag which the ARM processor cores do.

plekter 5y ago
Mobile GPUs (Imagination PowerVR, Qualcomm Adreno, Arm Mali, Apple's GPU) are exactly that.
volta83 5y ago
Doesn't NVIDIA ship the CPU for the Nintendo Switch? Not as low power as mobile phones, but not completely far away either.

volta83 5y ago

> ARM can't flourish under Nvidia, Why? > which customer would prefer to buy IP from a potential competitor rather than from a neutral provider. The same customers that buy NVIDIA GPUs, NVIDIA interconnects, support NVIDIA's software, etc. You seem to be suggesting that this "somehow" matters, but are not explaining "why" do you think this matters. AFAICT if AMD wants to ship a data-center node, it needs Mellanox interconnect, and has to buy that from NVIDIA, pretty much in the same way that NVIDIA ships AMD CPUs with their DGX boxes. There are dozens of thousands of pattents that all these companies need to buy from each other on a regular basis to function. I don't see how this particular change makes the status quo worse.