Nvidia Reportedly Acquiring ARM For $40 Billion (arstechnica.com) 138
"SoftBank is set to sell the U.K.'s Arm Holdings to U.S. chip company Nvidia for more than $40 billion," writes Ars Technica, adding that the deal's imminent announcement was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal. The move comes just four years after Softbank bought ARM, promising it would become their company's linchpin:
Multiple people with direct knowledge of the matter said a cash-and-stock takeover of Arm by Nvidia may be announced as soon as Monday, and that SoftBank will become the largest shareholder in the U.S. chip company.
The announcement of the deal hinged on SoftBank ending a messy dispute between Arm and the head of its China joint venture, Allen Wu, who earlier rebuffed an attempt to remove him and claimed legal control of the unit. Several people close to SoftBank said the matter was now "resolved," though one person close to Mr Wu said he "remains the chairman of Arm China." A spokesperson for Mr Wu declined to comment.
The takeover values Arm above the $32 billion price that SoftBank paid for the business in 2016, a deal that was struck weeks after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union and prompted critics including Arm's founder to accuse the country of selling off the crown jewel of its tech sector. While Nvidia is paying more for the asset than SoftBank did, the price also reflects the scale of Arm's underperformance under the Japanese group's ownership. Nvidia had a market valuation of roughly similar to that of Arm's at the time of the 2016 deal, but now trades with a market value of $300 billion, or roughly 10 times the amount SoftBank paid in cash for Arm. By paying for a large portion of the deals with its own shares, it is also passing part of the risk of the transaction to SoftBank. For Nvidia, which recently overtook Intel to become the world's most valuable chipmaker, the deal will further consolidate the US company's position at the centre of the semiconductor industry...
One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make commitments to the UK government over Arm's future in Britain, where opposition politicians have recently insisted that any potential deal must safeguard British jobs.
The announcement of the deal hinged on SoftBank ending a messy dispute between Arm and the head of its China joint venture, Allen Wu, who earlier rebuffed an attempt to remove him and claimed legal control of the unit. Several people close to SoftBank said the matter was now "resolved," though one person close to Mr Wu said he "remains the chairman of Arm China." A spokesperson for Mr Wu declined to comment.
The takeover values Arm above the $32 billion price that SoftBank paid for the business in 2016, a deal that was struck weeks after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union and prompted critics including Arm's founder to accuse the country of selling off the crown jewel of its tech sector. While Nvidia is paying more for the asset than SoftBank did, the price also reflects the scale of Arm's underperformance under the Japanese group's ownership. Nvidia had a market valuation of roughly similar to that of Arm's at the time of the 2016 deal, but now trades with a market value of $300 billion, or roughly 10 times the amount SoftBank paid in cash for Arm. By paying for a large portion of the deals with its own shares, it is also passing part of the risk of the transaction to SoftBank. For Nvidia, which recently overtook Intel to become the world's most valuable chipmaker, the deal will further consolidate the US company's position at the centre of the semiconductor industry...
One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make commitments to the UK government over Arm's future in Britain, where opposition politicians have recently insisted that any potential deal must safeguard British jobs.
bad news to start the week (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:bad news to start the week (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. Big upheaval. Apple just made a huge bet on ARM. 90% of the world's smartphones use ARM.
The best outcome would be a shift to an open-hardware architecture that no one owns. RISC-V is one possibility, but it is based on MIPS and has architectural limitations. A new clean design by an independent foundation would be best.
We live in interesting times.
Re:bad news to start the week (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no.
ARM is a licensing company, and the P/E ratio here is insanely stupid for the price that Softbank paid, let alone what NVIDIA might pay. The ROI for NVIDIA is largely a steady stream of tiny dribbles.
What NVIDIA gets is brutal IP, the kind of IP to drool over. But that's really expensive drool. There is no fab, just being able to sit at the top of technology as you license the core of the most popular CPU family on the planet, and that includes Intel/AMD.
Start modifying ARM to use NVIDIA tech and all of the broad peripheral chipset families, and now you're starting to talk real potential revenue, but that's POTENTIAL revenue years down the road, after you bled yourself to pay the staggering $40,000,000,000 price tag for your drool.
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Re:bad news to start the week (Score:4, Insightful)
Intel and AMD are trying to deplatform nVidia. This acquisition is one based on survival.
Re: bad news to start the week (Score:2)
Interesting choice of words, I had just read the Wikipedia article on deplatforming literally right before coming to this page.
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Intel and AMD are trying to deplatform nVidia.
That sounds scary, expand on it. Do you have evidence? Do you even have a conspiracy theory of how it will happen based on current or even future trends in either company? Right now deplatform is just a word posted on the internet and while competition is increasing the only company to make any moves to deplatform NVIDIA has been Apple.
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Intel, ARM, and Apple are all in the GPU design business and directly compete with Nvidia.
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So "no" is the answer? Being a competitor doesn't mean you're in the process of deplatforming someone. Intel or AMD attempting to deplatform NVIDIA would be royally fucking stupid and would decimate their market share in any industry which cares about GPU graphics at the same time opening them to huge anti-trust suits.
This conspiracy is so stupid to not even be worthy of the name.
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NV is very much "wedged into" the compute space. Right now, their accelerators are the cream of the crop when it comes to ML training. They're top-notch when it comes to FP32 and FP64 HPC number crunching. CUDA is the best programming interface available for any compute card out there - even easier to use than coding for Phi, I'm told (and Phi is just a bunch of x86 CPUs running part of the AVX512 standard). If you can stomach their prices and the lock-in, CUDA on an NVLink-capable system is a compellin
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NVIDIA could combine ARM with their own GPU technology. That could potentially give them a foot in a big new market.
That's a possible good outcome. NVIDIA owning ARM and Softbank being the biggest shareholder in NVIDIA doesn't suggest many others.
Re:bad news to start the week (Score:4, Informative)
I worry that an overly-leveraged NVIDIA could topple over.
Softbank was foiled when trying to make it a highly-producing asset. NVIDIA will have just as much trouble, and will have to carry-the-note for trying. That stretches NVIDIA pretty thin. Although they've made lots of revenue in a number of diverse areas, ARM doesn't have wide-open fat revenue streams in the offing. It's not a cash cow. NVIDIA would be stretched pretty thin, given the $40B price, IMHO.
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Four times their annual revenue? Yeah, pretty thin. Except it sounds like they mostly traded for it with their inflated stock, so there's that.
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NVIDIA could combine ARM with their own GPU technology. That could potentially give them a foot in a big new market.
That's a possible good outcome. NVIDIA owning ARM and Softbank being the biggest shareholder in NVIDIA doesn't suggest many others.
Good outcome for who? certainly not for all the the current licensee's that don't want to be forced to deal with NVidia, especially their competitors.
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Apple made a bet on its internally-developed A-series processors, not ARM. Apple has been smoking the other ARM-base chip developers for more than 5 years now.
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Under what terms could Apple's ARM license be revoked?
Re:bad news to start the week (Score:5, Insightful)
It can't. Apple also doesn't share software with anyone else on their platform, so they can stay on ARMv8 in perpetuity, even if the rest of the world moves to ARMv9.
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It's not just the ISA that Apple licences though, they also licence the whole system architecture. For example they licenced big.LITTLE for their multi-core CPUs. Their implementation of it was about a year behind the curve too, probably because they only release new chips once a year with their new iDevices.
big.LITTLE is being replaced with DynamIQ now and that sort of thing will keep happening. Either Apple has to develop their own competing technology and graft it on to ARMv8 or hope that Nvidia is happy
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Apple is now one of the foremost CPU designers and sellers in the world. One of their big advantages is that they design what they need, rather than design what they hope the market might need. Developing their own technology is sort of what they are good at now - Apple is no longer just a hardware assembler like a typical PC or smartphone manufacturer.
Re:bad news to start the week (Score:4, Informative)
Here is a comparison for you.
https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/n... [tomsguide.com]
Note that the iPhone actually beats the S20 while having a third of the RAM (for example), does it with 6 cores (S20 Snapdragon 865 has 8 cores).
So one couldn't say Apple is "way behind" Snapdragon - they are actually ahead - significantly so - having released their processor earlier.
Essentially, Apple is doing more with less, which is pretty impressive. The bottom line is that mobile phones are constrained, and Apple is able to optimise way better than QC because they only have one customer.
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Essentially, Apple is doing more with less, which is pretty impressive. The bottom line is that mobile phones are constrained, and Apple is able to optimise way better than QC because they only have one customer.
Yes, this is a key point to Apple's advantage. Said a different way, Qualcomm would have to design multiple processors to optimize for the high end as well as middle and low ends. Apple only designs for the high end. If Qualcomm were to do the same, they would lose a lot of their revenue from the low/middle end.
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> ARM
> They sell to APPL.
I guess softbank is targeting all the amateur investors who dream of this connection. APPL strong armed ARM (heh) into a lifetime fixed license fee.
If tomorrow the entire world buy apple phone, laptop, refrigerator and cars, ARM will not see a single penny more.
Re: bad news to start the week (Score:4, Funny)
Apple's stock symbol is AAPL (two A's). But yeah, they totally should have changed their symbol to just APP years ago.
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I guess softbank is targeting all the amateur investors who dream of this connection. APPL strong armed ARM (heh) into a lifetime fixed license fee.
APPL doesn't have anything to do with ARM. APPL was a tiny oil company, now completely gone I believe. APPL is however the reason why Apple's sticker symbol is AAPL.
Re:bad news to start the week (Score:4, Insightful)
The best outcome would be a shift to an open-hardware architecture that no one owns.
I agree! And the good news is that it's already here -- it's called RISC-V.
RISC-V is one possibility, but it is based on MIPS and has architectural limitations.
To some extent, all RISC processors are "based on MIPS." So what?
Can you describe the specific "architectural limitations" in RISC-V that you are concerned about?
A new clean design by an independent foundation would be best.
Because designs produced by committee have such a great track record. :-(
instruction set designed by committee (Score:2)
A new clean design by an independent foundation would be best.
Because designs produced by committee have such a great track record. :-(
The VAX instruction set was designed by a committee, and it had a pretty good track record. The IBM System/360 instruction set was probably designed by a committee, and it also did pretty well.
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The VAX instruction set was designed by a committee, and it had a pretty good track record.
I enjoyed working on various vaxen, but I wouldn't use VAX as an example of success. It had a brief moment in the sun, but then it died. Completely died. If the VAX architecture is discussed today, it's usually as an example of what not to do.
The IBM System/360 instruction set was probably designed by a committee, and it also did pretty well.
I agree that (1) S/360 was a hugely successful and influential architecture, and (2) it was probably designed by a team rather than a single architect. But a "team" isn't the same as a "committee". Even assuming good faith by all participants -- which a questionable
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The VAX instruction set was designed by a committee, and it had a pretty good track record.
I enjoyed working on various vaxen, but I wouldn't use VAX as an example of success. It had a brief moment in the sun, but then it died. Completely died. If the VAX architecture is discussed today, it's usually as an example of what not to do.
The IBM System/360 instruction set was probably designed by a committee, and it also did pretty well.
I agree that (1) S/360 was a hugely successful and influential architecture, and (2) it was probably designed by a team rather than a single architect. But a "team" isn't the same as a "committee". Even assuming good faith by all participants -- which a questionable assumption -- industry standards committees are orders of magnitude slower than internal company teams. For every success, they produce are at least two camels ("A camel is a horse designed by committee").
Almost all computer instruction sets eventually die, and I have not seen the VAX instruction set discussed as an example of what not to do. As far as I know, it is still considered a good example of a Complex instruction set.
I don't know what the difference is between a "team" and a "committee". The people who designed DDCMP, an ancestor of Ethernet, called themselves a "committee", even though we all worked for DEC. Ethernet itself was mostly designed by people from Xerox, Intel and DEC, then turned ove
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There are so many ways this could go wrong. If Trump gets back in it could destroy ARM by limiting exports to China, and there would be a mass exodus away from the platform. It could also screw ARM if Nvidia doesn't keep playing nice with licencees.
From the UK's perspective the guarantee to keep ARM here only lasts until September next year, i.e. they are waiting to see how bad brexit is before making a decision. Have no doubt they will asset strip and move out if it suits them.
An open platform is a nice id
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Apple just made a huge bet on ARM.
No. Apple made a huge bet on an Apple-developed chipset that is compatible with ARM. They have a perpetual license that allows them to create their own hardware. Whatever Nvidia does doesn't affect Apple. I think it wouldn't affect Qualcomm and Samsung either.
If Nvidia comes up with instruction set enhancements that these guys don't have a license for, they can either ignore these enhancements, or they can make their own. If they are clever than they'll agree. But for Apple alone for example, they can ea
Re: bad news to start the week (Score:2)
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This matter was discussed to death the last time nVidia's acquisition of ARM was mentioned here on Slashdot.
nVidia is protecting their existing business by securing a platform for it (Neoverse, in particular, and all the interconnect technology that comes with it). They want a vertically-integrated platform for their compute accelerators, and they want to implant as many of the standards from that platform into other ARM server tech as best they can. The phone market doesn't matter to them so much.
Re: bad news to start the week (Score:2)
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Since /. ate my previous post, here's what is actually happening: Softbank is buying nvidia.
For Softbank to buy/take-over Nvidia they would have to have over 50% of the shares. Nvidia has a market values of $300 billion. They are paying $40 billion for ARM. That's 37.5% of Nvidia for an all stock sale. The article also mentioned cash, so we don't know just how much stock is involved. But we do know that it's under 50%
So, while the article does say that Softbank would be the largest shareholder if the sale goes through, they will have a lot less than 50% of the shares. That isn't to say that
They could destroy things, or they could be smart (Score:2)
> Either Nvidia is setting itself up to dominate its competitors or it is setting up ARM to have a vastly reduced market space.
They could do that. They could also do what most people who own a company do - try to *increase* the market for ARM, sell more ARM to more companies. Then ARM makes more money for Nvidia.
They could even use ARM's business model with some existing Nvidia IP - licensing Nvidia stuff with ARM stuff or like they license ARM stuff.
Of course I don't know which way they'll go. Who kno
Re: bad news to start the week (Score:2)
Why would they pay such a large amount of money to buy ARM, and then try to reduce market penetration? It's not Oracle we are talking about. Nvidia might actually be interested in growing the business instead of flushing money down the shitter...
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Also it's the last big British tech company and one of our few remaining assets being stripped. The transition to bargain basement, low wage client services economy is nearly complete. Come January the remaining protections will be stripped away.
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This is gonna be great. We're going to have new laptops (Chrombooks?) that are ARM based with real graphics based off of SBC's coming from NVIDIA.
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Of course it is the UK Holdings and this could be more about how they see the UK performing in the future. A US company gets more leverage over a desperate UK government, whose economy is imploding with no signs of recovery and from the Japanese perspective the UK is yesterdays economic news and not worth bothering with all that much, they will probably focus on investment more in their hemisphere. What little is left of the UK economy is likely to get, well, raped by US crony capitalism.
The game is afoot (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone pointed out on Ars, ARM's potential profits don't support such a high purchase price. This implies that Nvidia plans shenanigans, perhaps some sort of market domination strategy.
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perhaps some sort of market domination strategy.
Indeed. Nvidia and AMD are direct competitors. They both want to be the next Intel.
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Could they support the Jetson boards any worse? Those things are trash and so are the majority of the carrier boards.
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ARM has a wickedly huge patent portfolio. Their profits don't command their high price because ARM doesn't produce anything, they merely license. Having the entire patent pool and licenses in the hands of a company that actually makes products is very different.
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Maybe they want to get into the mobile space. There is a reason nobody makes phones with Nvidia SoCs or GPUs.
If this means that I can get nvidia video as HDL.. (Score:5, Insightful)
...then so be it.
Mali is subpar in comparison. So, if ARM licenses can now get Nvidia GPU video blocks for their designs instead of Mali, then is a net win for a lot of ARM licenses....
On the other hand, Nvidia will have to be careful on how they handle ARM, since they compete with many of the Licenses. If they handle it badly, many a license may go to MIPS or RISC V.
Only time will tell.
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I doubt you'll get everything, but I'd expect to see some improvements over Mali. It would be embarrassing for Nvidia not to make it better. And it would be anti-competitive for Nvidia to discontinue Mali. They could sell it to Ceva or something if they weren't going to improve it.
Also I'd expect to see Tegra improve.
One recent interesting development was Nvidia and Micron using PAM4 for communication between RTX 3090 and GDDR6X. I wonder if we'll start seeing lots more PAM4 for high speed inter-chip co
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Good news: For an additional fee, they will make a more 'nVidia' GPU for your ARM project
Bad news: The low cost option is now removed
Now THIS is news for nerds. (Score:2)
Booooooooo. (Score:2)
And may I add: Hisssssssssssssssssss
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And may I add: Hisssssssssssssssssss
But will the FTC feel the same way?
For what purpose? (Score:2)
Acquiring the base ARM development/licensing team gains nVidia... exactly what? Apple can replace their desktop/laptop CPU with an A-series chip because they control their own econsystem. Does nVidia think it is going to somehow knock AMD out of the x86 business with an ARM chip?
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Yeah, this sucks. If it takes, say, 100 people to make a widget, and the widget stands on its own as a product, then there's no benefit to the world to have that 100 person company bought by a behemoth. Except the behemoth can claim they are "diversified". Screw that.
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CPUs are used for a lot of things besides phones, laptops, desktops and servers.
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A $40 billion purchase is going to require $400 billion in sales to pay back. With Intel's dominance broken where is nVidia going to get those sales in a commodity market?
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Did SoftBank get $310 Billion in sales?
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As far as anyone knows, not even close.
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Softbank is not an example of successful investment.
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Softbank is not an example of successful investment.
It increased from $31 Billion to $40 Billion since 2016. Maybe they were hoping for better, but it beats Softbank's WeWork investment.
The point was, maybe there's more to it than some simplistic numbers. ARM has lots of parts. Maybe Nvidia sells off some. Maybe they have a plan to be a leader in data center CPUs 7 years from now. Or they need ARM to fill gaps in their planned autonomous car offerings. Or they want to be a leader in phone GPU technology. Or all of these plus some others.
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That's the OP's point: NVIDIA seems to have overpaid for ARM if they plan to continue business as usual. In order to justify the price, they will have some other plan.
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It gets them control of Neoverse.
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They don't have any competitors that use ARM except maybe for tiny microcontrollers that can be replaced with other IP.
Their competitors produce GPUs/compute accelerators. Their competitors also control the x86 platforms where GPUs/compute accelerators can be deployed.
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Where are AMD and Intel increasingly utilizing ARM? AMD uses it for Trustzone - for now.
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But they don't need to since their license can't be revoked.
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NVidea wants to be bought by Apple
You scare me
With Nvidia being unwilling to provide open... (Score:2)
.. source drivers, and the penchant for 'put backdoors and surveillance in everything' this doesn't bode well for the future of open computing.
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nVidia is perfectly willing to provide open source drivers. For example Tegra support [phoronix.com]. They cannot legally provide drivers for their GeForce line, presumably because of licensing deals made with Microsoft to get first citizen status when it came to D3D, and to get their GPU into the original Xbox (NV2A.) But they do own Tegra outright.
ARM acquisition about survival (Score:5, Insightful)
nVidia makes most of their money selling computer accelerators and/or dGPUs. They don't have a serious competitor in the phone market, and it's roundly-suspected that NV makes very little off the Switch, since Nintendo is using an old-and-probably-discounted version of Tegra (TX1). Automotive makes them a little money, but not that much, and they're slowly losing ground there.
The problem nVidia has today is that they're reliant on proprietary technology without complete leverage to force people to use it. nVidia could have opened up CUDA and NVLink for integration into open compute/interconnect standards like CCIX, CXL, and OpenCAPI. Instead, you pay NV a licensing fee to utilize NVLink on your platform, you lock yourself into CUDA which means your codebase will not work on AMD or (future) Intel compute accelerators by default, and you can only use compute accelerators sourced from nVidia. Logically, Intel and AMD don't like that, so they're constantly trying to find ways to marginalize nVidia and keep them off x86 server/HPC hardware.
If nVidia has their own platform - let's say, Neoverse - that can compete with x86 in the server realm, they can fully integrate CUDA + NVLink + Mellanox Infiniband (okay, Mellanox doesn't have complete control over Infiniband but still) into Neoverse. Anyone hoping to license future versions of Neoverse will probably get the entire nVidia product stack. NV doesn't care if you customize your own ARM cores or what have you. They want you locked in to their CUDA/NVLink world. Forever.
Without a platform, nVidia may die out. There's already been fighting between NV and Intel over whether future nVidia dGPUs would work in PCIe slots (I think the current agreement forces Intel to allow NV's cards to work on anything up to PCIe 4.x, which is a bit odd since PCIe is supposed to be an open standard). NV is being pushed out of automotive slowly, their console footprint is small, and AMD + Intel are still pushing to replace nVidia with their Radeon and Xe products (Xe may fail, but this would mark Intel's second attempt to fight nVidia + CUDA, the first being XeonPhi).
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A fair point. Kinda makes you wonder why they bought out Mellanox at all, but . . . oh well.
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nVidia has been devilishly difficult to deal with in the past. They may well raise hell in the phone market, or they may not. But if they don't lay down $40 billion now, there may be no nVidia in the future. So we will see. I do think we'll see NV GPU IP in future ARM reference builds, with all the unpleasant side-effects that you might expect (Panfrost may be in big trouble).
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 $40B into RISC V ? (Score:2)
Re:Why not $40 billion into RISC V ? (Score:4, Interesting)
What if instead of buying ARM, they put $40 billion into developing RISC V?
Actually, NVidia is already using internally developed RISC-V cores in their GPU's. These cores aren't exposed to the outside world, but they're integral to the internal functioning of the GPU. People from NVidia have publicly presented this work at RISC-V events over the last few years. Here's a recent example: https://youtu.be/7Lx3692cbAg [youtu.be].
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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
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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.
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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
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Intel is the interesting part (Score:2)
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Well, that's market cap. It's not real money. Intel's revenue is 72 billion versus NVIDIA's 12 billion.
NVIDIA has a very high market valuation, pumped up by cryptocurrency and then AI. So it would be better to say that the market thinks NVIDIA is going to be bigger than Intel in the future.
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AMD bought ATI. They are a CPU company that bought a GPU company.
nVidia bought ARM. They are a GPU company that bought a CPU company.
Intel... have Intel HD graphics...
Unless they progress very quickly, or buy up something else (PowerVR?), then they're going to get left behind.
Between them AMD and nVidia could make discrete graphics cards obsolete and own the market, if they integrate them into their chips. Then Intel would be the only one left with no path to decent graphics.
It's gonna hurt Intel, that's
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Tiger Lake / XE's "major leap forward" is, from everything I can find, about equivalent to an entry-level mobile graphics card from nVidia.
And that's based on review of an unreleased chip.
Also, nothing compared to a similar Ryzen.
Intel are not going to be able to catch that up in the next few years. Their stuff just isn't on the radar for anyone playing games or doing 3D or GPU or compute.
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Ice Lake and Tiger Lake are integrated graphics. They are major steps forward for Intel in that context, with Tiger Lake bringing them to approximate parity with AMD's integrated graphics in Ryzen. Integrated graphics are always going to be limited; they have a power budget of perhaps 20-30W (less on mobile; that's just the power budget for graphics, not for the entire CPU), are constrained to about a quarter of a CPU die, and are limited to the slower memory used with CPUs (no GDDR6X here). Important produ
decline of mega companies (Score:2)
The really interesting part of that blurb is about Intel. Already surpassed by Nvidia and they're about to get left behind even further. I never would have expected that. Although I guess I should have. Every mega-top-of-the-world company eventually goes the way of IBM, Bell and GE.
And Boeing.
Finally starting to make sense. (Score:2)
So when they say something costs's an arm and a leg, we now know that they mean $40 billion for the arm, but how much is the leg worth?
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SOLD (Score:5, Informative)
Deals done. ARM has a new owner. ARM: UK-based chip designer sold to Nvidia [bbc.co.uk]
China (Score:2)
Cheaper than the train (Score:2)
The UK is currently splashing £45Bn on a trainline from London to Birmingham. I think $40Bn for ARM would be a better deal.
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That trainline has been in progress for 11 years, and it's predicted to take another 13 years.
I damn well hope it won't take 24 years to do anything with ARM.
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Exactly. Buy it and it's done. The trainline will probably never be finished and it won't meet the requirements anyway by then.
AMD x86 SoC? (Score:2)
For nVidia to panic-buy ARM they must know something.
Maybe AMD has an x86 SoC in the wings with mobile Vega that smokes the competition without sacrificing power budget.
They've been making huge gains across the line with tight chip design so it may be possible. Android is basically ready to run on x86
Re: (Score:2)
Android runs fine on x86 but much of the software that uses the NDK will require more than a quick recompile to work there when it's been targeting ARM. Some of that software is already built for x86, some of it isn't.
UK/British jobs (Score:2)
Yeah, sure, NVidia's going to "safeguard" them.
Until there's a downturn, or a recession, and they close the British plants, and move the work to where they can pay crap wages.
The joy of end-stage capitalism.