ARM up for sale again?

Seems Nvidia is interested now to buy, see here

It would be cool for two reasons:

1/ Nvidia is not a big ARM player (Xenix?), and so Nvidia will not take all the market for him.

2/ The boss of Nvidia (I know him enough, since he – Jen-Hsun Huang – saved my camera :) ) is really a good guy.

And, yes, it’s also important.

Nota: Nvidia is also not stupid. The chips for automotive market are an important opportunity (more money than application processors and same volume). The problem is that Nvidia do not have billions.

Takeovers are fueled by debt, all nVidia needs to do is borrow billions.

Their strength is GPUs which for automotive and data centre means AI acceleration. The still need a CPU to control it, which is why they are interested in ARM. An architectural licence gives them everything they need technically to achieve closer integration between the CPU and GPU (undocumented ofcourse), so the main business driver would to prevent a rival getting hold of it.

What that would mean for other licensees is anyone’s guess. How they would trade off favouring their own products verses continuing the fairly open licensing. Whether they would do a Qualcomm when it comes to cross licencing and patents.

The only thing for certain is licencing costs will increase to pay back the debt on the deal, which help increase the popularity of RISC-V.

Seems the NVidia rumour is gaining ground fast as they appear to be in advance discussions now.

@ Doug Webb

Seems the NVidia rumour is gaining ground fast as they appear to be in advance discussions now.

Very much possible and also likely to happen yes, SoftBank needs money quickly AFAIK. Not a big fan of ARM under NVidia, but oh well…

Time for another bounty.

Hummm… sounds like bigger problems may have just started to happen for the future buyer:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/arms-fired-china-jv-head-refuses-to-leave-company-reps-banned-from-company-premises/

nVidia goes pretty well with ARM. Nintendo Switch, anyone?

e: I should point out that the core of the Switch is essentially the same as the nVidia Jetson Nano. In recent times the two low power CPUs on the Nano which were speculated to exist have appeared.

@ Tristan

nVidia goes pretty well with ARM. Nintendo Switch, anyone?

Oh yes the Switch is awesome, I love it :)

e: I should point out that the core of the Switch is essentially the same as the nVidia Jetson Nano. In recent times the two low power CPUs on the Nano which were speculated to exist have appeared.

Yes the core of the switch is similar to the Jetson Nano, 4 Cortex A57 core and 4 Cortex A53 (basically more similar to an nVidia Tegra X1 tbh).

ROOL DDE supports basic C compilation for both and then neon and FP instructions via ObjAsm, but the GPU is a different beast (GM20B with 256 cuda cores) and nVidia is famous for not releasing sources in “open source” format :)

ROOL DDE supports basic C compilation for both and then neon and FP instructions via ObjAsm, but the GPU is a different beast (GM20B with 256 cuda cores) and nVidia is famous for not releasing sources in “open source” format :)

That’s what blobs are for. I just want to point out that the RPi is way weirder than anything nVidia can throw at us.

Yes. I can say that tegra drivers are in play fo Jetson Nano. I use it as my “PC”. Only reason I stoke the coal on my ageing PC is for Fusion 360. Warning. On Linux at least it has a HUGE memory overhead. RPI4 comes in with very little memory overhead. Nano comes in with over 1GB. I got the RPi4 (8GB) because of the memory issues with the Jetson Nano. While I’m aware I’m as popular as cancer with the powers that be, I do have a good collection of new ARM hardware. And my old beeb if anyone knows how to save it. I miss it.

>40 billion is the bet now from Nvidia :-) Link

It’s official, Nvidia has purchased Arm. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for-40-billion-creating-worlds-premier-computing-company-for-the-age-of-ai

Pending – I assume – regulatory approval

It will be subject to regulatory approval I believe in both the UK and USA

https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/14/nvida_arm_acquisition/

Could take 18 months to progress the takeover apparently and ARM will still be UK based just owned by Nvidea

Hermann Hauser is less than impressed about the prospect of Nvidia owning Arm and has written an open letter to the UK Prime Minister. He is asking for those who feel passionately about the sale of Arm to Nvidia to co-sign said letter.

https://savearm.co.uk

An interesting development, potentially in reaction to being bought by nVidia, according to some of the discussion in the comments.

https://www.osnews.com/story/132359/arm-is-now-backing-panfrost-gallium3d-as-open-source-mali-graphics-driver/

An interesting development, potentially in reaction to being bought by nVidia, according to some of the discussion in the comments.

It would be an amusing consequence of those events if ARMs traditionally sceptical view of supporting Open Source drivers suddenly gets changed by the prospect of being bought by NVidia (or is it nVidia or is it NVIDIA).

https://savearm.co.uk/

Why now? ARM is no longer a UK owned company and a controlling stake by HMG doesn’t make any sense – and is possibly illegal under current law due to ARM’s monopoly in numerous sectors.

As far as I can tell nVidia made an intent to purchase ARM, unless I missed it I don’t think a contract has been signed and may not be for some time whilst they do due diligence, regulatory approval etc.

nVidia being a licensee is a problem though, that must surely raise some questions. ARM not being a UK owned company, there’s not a lot UK regulators or HMG could do even if they did have objections, which is unlikely considering there were no objections to its sale previously.

which is unlikely considering there were no objections to its sale previously.

Yeah, instead of “oh **** we’ve just tanked the economy” they spun it as “Britain is open for business!”.
It’s too late now. The damage has been done.

nVidia being a licensee is a problem though

Yes and no.

Essentially there were two choices:

• It would be bought by some venture capitalist outfit looking to asset strip for whatever profit they could.

Or:

• It would be bought by a licensee who has some sort of investment in the technology.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/22/uk_government_arm_nvidia_unite/

Now, will the government intervene and f it up ¹ or are they too scared of upsetting America ² to want to get involved?

¹ They will f it up, it’s the only thing the pathetic muppets in charge are qualified to do.

² Having completely failed to realise that the minor issue of a border in Ireland is actually a pretty big deal over there, not least because of the large number of people with Irish ancestry. I suppose Ireland and America even have a shared history…in independence from the British!

This acquisition is hummmm….

On the AI side it’s very exciting, no doubts. But on the Licensing and General Purpose nature of ARM chips hummm we’ll see.

The GPU side may be the first to get changes…

I agree that ARM should be on its own (especially now). It really sounds like they went back to when ARM was Acorn and everyone had a problem with that because a competitor owned ARM, BUT maybe NVidia just bought ARM to finally deliver the Phoebe??? :D

From a news article we have the comment:

Intel’s upcoming Movidius platform, Keem Bay, which reportedly offers much higher efficiencies than competing parts from Nvidia, allegedly integrates a Cortex-A53 CPU rather than an Intel x86 part.

This is Intel, noted as competing with NVidia and possibly end up paying licence fees to NVidia?

As I said before, simliar to Qualcomm with their chips and patent licencing; either you buy their chips and pay the licence fee, or buy someone elses chips and pay the licence fee, either way you pay the licence fee and they get to decide how much.