6 ms·
The reason to block the merger is pretty straightforward: 1) Nvidia designs expensive chips and sells them by the millions. [1] 2) ARM designs cheap chips and
by NortySpock 5y ago
The reason to block the merger is pretty straightforward:
1) Nvidia designs expensive chips and sells them by the millions. [1]
2) ARM designs cheap chips and sells them by the billions. [2]
3) Nvidia's "normal" product departments are incentivized to prevent ARM from competing with Nvidia's expensive chips, in various ways. This would hinder ARM's innovation and growth opportunities vs being independent.
I am glad to see this motion to block the merger, for the sake of a competitive market for CPUs, GPUs, etc.
[1] https://www.techradar.com/news/nvidia-hits-new-highs-in-gpu-sales-as-ampere-dominates-amd-big-navi https://www.techradar.com/news/nvidia-hits-new-highs-in-gpu-...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/arm-6-7-billion-chips-per-quarter https://www.tomshardware.com/news/arm-6-7-billion-chips-per-...
- dcow 5y agoARM doesn't sell chips. They license the instruction set. Ask Apple or Qualcomm if the final ARM SOCs they build and sell are cheap...
- kadoban 5y agoI don't see that that really changes anything here.
- dcow 5y agoWell the argument is that ARM is cheap and good for consumers because it's cheap. I wanted to make it clear that you can't go to ARM and buy <cheap arm chip>. You have to go to Qualcomm or Apple or Broadcom and buy <not quite so cheap arm chip>. So that kinda impacts the argument. Whatever Nvidia wants to do with licensing they have to combat market forces already in play. There's a market for somewhat less expensive arm chips, for one, so they'd lose that revenue. Two, if they want to royally fuck arm shops and become the only ARM vendor, well, good luck... you just killed the ISA you bought for 40 billion...
- throwaway2048 5y ago40 billion isn't much to sabotage the vast majority of your competitors
- scotty79 5y agoThey are responsible through licensing for huge number of cheap chips on the market. It really doesn't matter they don't sell it themselves. If they stop licensing it would have the same effect as if they werse selling them directly and they stopped selling.
- irrational 5y agoWouldn’t the effect be Apple and others creating a new (and hopefully better) replacement for ARM?
- ivirshup 5y ago"just create a new instruction set"? It's taken the better part of a decade for workable alternatives to CUDA to emerge.
- irrational 5y agoBy that logic there will never again be another workable alternative. Why not start now rather than wait a few decades?
- InvertedRhodium 5y agoThere's nothing that prevents you from doing that as it stands.
- nerdponx 5y agoInnovation is not an on-off switch. Market forces create an incentive to attempt to innovate, but they don't magically make innovation happen.
- vxNsr 5y agoIt's likely that there are many new designs being spun up everyday by various people, but that doesn't mean that we want to remove competition from the market.
- 5y ago
- chaboud 5y agoARM also licenses CPUs, GPUs, and just about everything that one would need to build an SoC. And those elements are used to enable the manufacture and sale of cheap chips. Semantics aside, ARM is the critical player in several market segments.
- fulafel 5y agoIt's not correct to say they just license the insn set. They license ready to use cpu and gpu core designs (like the Cortex family in most Android phones).
- yosefk 5y agoIt depends on the customer. Apple and Nvidia indeed license just the ISA and build their own CPU implementation from scratch. At the other extreme, you can make a complete chip just from ARM IP - they have way more than CPU and GPU IP, they can sell you pretty much everything else, too. At the middle are chip makers taking eg ARM CPU IP but no other ARM IP and making other IP themselves or licensing from other vendors.
- StreamBright 5y agoDepends. Apple does not sell chips. Apple sells a vertically integrated platform that has many components from cloud services to physical devices. The price of one component in the physical device is not that important.
- ngcc_hk 5y agoBut we have pi and many others. If all these are slowly killed may be they moved to more expensive chips. The business model does not fit.
- Damogran6 5y agoLooking at GPU cost and availability, I agree with you.
- DeathArrow 5y agoMany companies licensed ARM ISA. If Nvidia wants to hinder competition by only licensing them low performance cores, isn't it still possible for them to design their own cores?
- masklinn 5y ago> isn't it still possible for them to design their own cores? Most companies license the cores, so they can build ARM-designed cores and integrate those into an SoC. In order to design your own core, you need to license the ISA itself, and that’s a wholly different kettle of fishes: there are only about a dozen architectural licensees, and not all of them license both 32 and 64b ISAs.
- max_ 5y agoWhy don't we have newer chip companies? If barrier of entry is the issue isn't that what people should be striving for?
- Apofis 5y agoArm is British, the FTC and Nvidia are American. Can someone that's not a technocrat explain to me the problem here?
- brodock 5y agoIf ARM wants to do business in the US, they also need an entity there.