SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Nvidia is reportedly in 'advanced talks' to buy ARM for more than $32 billion
SoftBank has been rumored to be exploring a sale of ARM — the British chip designer that powers nearly every major mobile processor from companies like Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, and Huawei — and now, it might have found a buyer. Nvidia is reportedly in "advanced talks" to buy ARM in a deal worth over $32 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Nvidia is said to be the only company that's involved in concrete discussions with SoftBank for the purchase at this time, and a deal could arrive "in the next few weeks," although nothing is finalized yet. If the deal does go through, it would be one of the largest deals ever in the computer chip business and would likely draw intense regulatory scrutiny.
Previously:
(2020-07-12) Apple Has Built its Own Mac Graphics Processors
(2020-07-11) Nvidia's Market Cap Rises Above Intel's
(2020-06-11) ARM Faces a Boardroom Revolt as it Seeks to Remove the CEO of Its Chinese Joint Venture
(2019-10-29) Fed Up Of Playing Whac-A-Mole With Network Of Softbank-Owned Patent Holders, Intel Goes To Court
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FunkyLich on Sunday August 02 2020, @12:36PM (17 children)
Why would ARM want to be bought by Nvidia? Don't the people of ARM enjoy receiving profits from what appears to be the most widespread CPU architecture in the World?
Shit like this seems to be the reason why technological advance is happening always slower and slower. Maybe there really is nothing much left to discover or invent. So what we see is just A selling to B selling to C selling to D selling to E... And soon the cost of patent/copyright/licenses add layer after layer on top of each other and we, the buyers, feed the endless chain of parasitic buyers and sellers there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @12:45PM (11 children)
Step 3: "Profit!"
(Score: 1) by petecox on Sunday August 02 2020, @12:52PM (8 children)
The offer is said to be roughly for what it was sold for 4 years ago.
So the current owners wouldn't even be achieving much of that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 02 2020, @02:13PM (7 children)
Softbank may be cutting their losses with ARM, having been unable to derive competitive ROI from investing the $32B in more pedestrian offerings - like an index fund.
NVIDIA, on the other hand, could bundle ARM cores with their GPUs much the same way that Xilinx has bundled ARM cores in their FPGAs. I can imagine NVIDIA spinning up some very popular niche products coupling a decently capable ARM executive processor with a large bank of GPU processors - possibly in small / low power form factors for edge/mobile applications.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday August 02 2020, @02:21PM (3 children)
Nvidia doesn't need to acquire ARM to do that. They can even create their own custom ARM cores, as they and others have done.
Influencing the future direction of ARM while collecting the revenue may prove useful to them. I'm not sure. We'll see a lot more analysis if the deal happens.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 02 2020, @02:52PM (2 children)
Of course not, they could license like Xilinx does... but... control brings benefits, one of them being unlimited negotiating power. Owning a company doesn't change physics, but it is transformative to finance and licensing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @03:30PM (1 child)
That's right. Many years ago we wanted to add a small amount of logic to the ARM design to help us meet requirements for certain market segments. ARM said sure you can do that but you'll need a different sort of license that will cost you 10x more money.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday August 02 2020, @03:38PM
Arm reveals new licensing strategy as RISC-V makes waves [soylentnews.org]
Arm Eases Upfront Licensing Fees to Head Off RISC-V [electronicdesign.com]
Arm Responds to RISC-V, and More [eetimes.com]
Why ARM opened up its instruction set and what it means for IoT [staceyoniot.com]
RISC-V is providing a credible threat to ARM that will keep them from price gouging as much.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday August 02 2020, @02:33PM
I wonder why SoftBank isn’t dumping WeWork or Uber first. Maybe no buyers...
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday August 02 2020, @10:32PM (1 child)
Softbank have no real clue what they're doing.
They have wheelbarrows full of Saudi cash, and they throw it at whatever company they see profiled in the business magazines. They got lucky once because Alibaba turned out to be profitable, but they've burned billions on Uber, and Wework and nonsense like that.
Based on the reports lately that Softbank are "demanding" Arm increase the cost of licenses it looks like they didn't even know what they had bought until they had bought it.
This is all good, because that Saudi oil money will make its way into the pockets of people who will do useful things with it, like buy lunch.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 03 2020, @12:42AM
So, like the Saudi prince that bought AOL... shortly after they bought ARM, I bought a few shares in them, then Trump farted or something that was taken as favorable to SoftBank so they jumped like 15% in a day, I suppose I should have just sold right then.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 02 2020, @12:54PM (1 child)
Step 3 is "???"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by jman on Wednesday August 05 2020, @11:35AM
PROFIT!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @12:54PM
ARM doesn't have a say. NVidia buy a market, sidestep AMD/Intel GPU integration and get to replace ARM Mali with their IP.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday August 02 2020, @12:54PM (1 child)
SoftBank owns ARM. They were splashing around tens/hundreds of $billions on big acquisitions in recent years but got hit hard by COVID. Now they plan to sell off some of those assets.
Coronavirus Has ‘Warren Buffett Of Japan’ On The Ropes As SoftBank Takes Dive [forbes.com]
SoftBank announces $41 billion asset sale to face coronavirus rout—and silence critics [fortune.com]
Flying unicorns could save SoftBank from the 'Valley of Coronavirus,' according to the quirky slides from its earnings call — take a look [businessinsider.com]
How coronavirus blew a hole in Masayoshi Son’s 300-year start-up vision [telegraph.co.uk]
I'm not sure what effect Nvidia buying ARM would have. At one point I thought it would be cool if they included a small ARM processor in every large GPU, making the reverse version of an APU.
Nvidia Embraces Arm, Declares Intent to Accelerate All CPU Architectures [hpcwire.com]
Nikkei says that SoftBank will still have a stake in ARM [nikkei.com]:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @07:04PM
"I'm not sure what effect Nvidia buying ARM would have."
it would make Arm more disgusting, of course. Arm is already a PITA, closed bunch of shit, and the disgusting scum at Nvidia would make it much worse.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Sunday August 02 2020, @01:03PM
Why wouldn't Softbank [wikipedia.org] want to sell ARM for more than $32B [wikipedia.org]?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday August 02 2020, @02:40PM
Because general computing ISA IPs post RISC-V holds little to no long term market value if not controlled of western owners targeting the legacy US public sector. And, nVidia is looking to transition out of gaming where AMD is encroaching and their IPs are drying into HPC where it's not about scale of production so much as scale of politics. That is, they're trying to avoid ending up like MIPS.
compiling...