What if instead of buying ARM, they put $40 billion into developing RISC V?
$40 billion is a huge amount of money. They could find the world's top ten chip designers and offer them $1 billion each in cash to come up with a new superior CPU design, and still have $30 billion left over to pay their minions.
Well, on that note, why not just buy the same kind of licenses Apple has bought to the ARM IP? It's not as if Nvidia lacks expertise, which, together with the IP, is the only other thing Nvidia needs from ARM to build CPUs.
I don't think this has anything to do with nVidia making CPUs. And that makes the whole thing a bit of a puzzle because the only reason ARM has been successful as a CPU architecture has been that its been controlled by a neutral company as a semi-open standard. It offers almost nothing (certainly not $40B worth of anything) if it ceases to be a neutral maintainer of the system. This is like Oracle somehow buying up all the copyrights to the Linux kernel (an impractical analogy, but suppose they did, tracking down every single contributor to Linux and buying the rights, would you not suspect Oracle had a purpose beyond wanting to improve Oracle Linux?)
I would expect a fair amount of interest in RISC-V in the coming months from Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc. Though... Google seems interested in capability based addressing, something uncommon in CPUs since the 1990s. So we may even see an entirely new architecture in time.
You're right.. spending this much money doesn't seem like it's for the technology. They are likely doing it to stifle the competition and get ahead that way. Makes me wonder if they're unable to advance GPU architecture anymore beyond die shrink performance improvements.
To get back the $40 billion is going to take a while unless they dramatically increase prices. ARM makes only about $400 million in revenue per quarter (not including expenses, so profit is less). How are they going to get back the $40 bill
They are likely doing it to stifle the competition and get ahead that way.
Why would they do that, from a business perspective? It's not like Nvidia doesn't care for dollars. Trying to out-compete the competition is at best a risk-full strategy. Much safer and future-proof approach is to just let the royalties roll in.
They might have the notion that they could directly get the sales of the ARM licensees. Such that if Xiaomi wants to make the next Redmi Note, instead of buying an ARM CPU from Mediatek, they would buy it direct from nVidia instead. nVidia can price the CPU high. If Xiaomi still wants to get it from Mediatek it would cost them a lot more becaue nVidia would ask for a high licensing price. Xiaomi won't have much of a choice but to pay unless they want to be stuck on an older CPU design. I do see the side of
Why not $40 billion into RISC V ? (Score:5, Interesting)
What if instead of buying ARM, they put $40 billion into developing RISC V?
$40 billion is a huge amount of money. They could find the world's top ten chip designers and offer them $1 billion each in cash to come up with a new superior CPU design, and still have $30 billion left over to pay their minions.
Re:Why not $40 billion into RISC V ? (Score:2)
Well, on that note, why not just buy the same kind of licenses Apple has bought to the ARM IP? It's not as if Nvidia lacks expertise, which, together with the IP, is the only other thing Nvidia needs from ARM to build CPUs.
I don't think this has anything to do with nVidia making CPUs. And that makes the whole thing a bit of a puzzle because the only reason ARM has been successful as a CPU architecture has been that its been controlled by a neutral company as a semi-open standard. It offers almost nothing (certainly not $40B worth of anything) if it ceases to be a neutral maintainer of the system. This is like Oracle somehow buying up all the copyrights to the Linux kernel (an impractical analogy, but suppose they did, tracking down every single contributor to Linux and buying the rights, would you not suspect Oracle had a purpose beyond wanting to improve Oracle Linux?)
I would expect a fair amount of interest in RISC-V in the coming months from Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc. Though... Google seems interested in capability based addressing, something uncommon in CPUs since the 1990s. So we may even see an entirely new architecture in time.
Re: (Score:2)
You're right .. spending this much money doesn't seem like it's for the technology. They are likely doing it to stifle the competition and get ahead that way. Makes me wonder if they're unable to advance GPU architecture anymore beyond die shrink performance improvements.
To get back the $40 billion is going to take a while unless they dramatically increase prices. ARM makes only about $400 million in revenue per quarter (not including expenses, so profit is less). How are they going to get back the $40 bill
Re: (Score:2)
They are likely doing it to stifle the competition and get ahead that way.
Why would they do that, from a business perspective? It's not like Nvidia doesn't care for dollars. Trying to out-compete the competition is at best a risk-full strategy. Much safer and future-proof approach is to just let the royalties roll in.
Re: (Score:2)
They might have the notion that they could directly get the sales of the ARM licensees. Such that if Xiaomi wants to make the next Redmi Note, instead of buying an ARM CPU from Mediatek, they would buy it direct from nVidia instead. nVidia can price the CPU high. If Xiaomi still wants to get it from Mediatek it would cost them a lot more becaue nVidia would ask for a high licensing price. Xiaomi won't have much of a choice but to pay unless they want to be stuck on an older CPU design. I do see the side of
Re: (Score:2)