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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: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday August 02 2020, @02:12PM (7 children)
It's nothing personnel. These companies will usually work with each other if they feel like it. At least for a while:
Intel Kaby Lake G reportedly loses AMD driver support all of a sudden [notebookcheck.net]
Here's PCIe 4.0 Actually Working on Intel Rocket Lake-S Platform [tomshardware.com]
Lack of PCIe 4.0 isn't the end of the world (see budget AMD motherboards). I was under the impression Intel would try to jump to PCIe 5.0 at the same time as DDR5, maybe next year, but their plans could be in flux.
Zen 3 and Big Navi will be a big test for AMD. It seems like they can pull solidly ahead of Intel with Zen 3. Big Navi should compete well with Nvidia's Ampere, but they might not be able to match the performance of RTX 3090 / 3080 Ti. They could be cancelling a top card [coreteks.tech] that would have that level of performance (~50% faster than RTX 2080 Ti). Since most people don't buy $1,000 GPUs, it's not a big deal, but beating Nvidia's top card could drive up AMD's sales downrange (a "mindshare"/marketing victory).
Most gamers are on x86, and XSX/PS5 are on x86. Although most games are GPU-bound and ARM is poised to make gains in several segments (Apple is contributing), x86 is going to stick around for at least another decade. Linux support, or more accurately WINE support, is becoming more common. Valve/Steam has been a big help. [google.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @05:21PM (3 children)
thx for info and links.
now this is just "feeling" from filtering stuff i read on the internet. it is not digested properly.
so i am keeping a eye out for i/o mostly.
for intel, i feel they never much cared about "expansion cards". for them a intel chip is all a consumer needs.
no audio, no gpu, no network (unless provided by intel chipset itself), heck they even had a go at "rambus", trying to intel-ify the ram.
so i am not betting on intel "to open the city gates" to intel-city so the surrounding pesants can bring in and take out goods at a rapid "unchecked" or "coherrent" rate.
sure thing, everything INSIDE intel city is in phase-locked step-lock and moving at a most brisk pace ... but anything not inside intel city will be ... well ... hampered or looked down upon.
so here i am coughing up my "filtered residue" and i feel tho pcie is getting mighty fast it is still hampered by a device encoding to pcie and another decoding from.
so if you have a truck load of one time data, that works but if you try to stream stuff back and forth, i think so either side on the link doesn't have to wait (waste cycles!) but can sync up, kindda like without having to en- and decode then pcie is looking yealously at how things sync up in intel city.
and this, probably is where amd could "abuse" the fact that they have TWO cities, the gpu and cpu and they could invent a protocol over or thru pcie that is NOT pcie but since they control both cities would work coherently over physical-electrical pcie ...
so, if the device needs coherence and is NOT inside intel city you can bet it will be a second class citizen ...
so that's all i found in the filter bag :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @05:35PM (1 child)
btw by "coherent" i mean like 50Hz are coherent in the grid. absent and ac-2-dc-2-ac converters the grid is rising and falling in lock step across the grid. so 50 Hz peak in rome/italy is at the exact same time as in berlin or paris .. lol.
you could (be warned, continue reading might give you a headache) imagine a virtual plane denoting the current instantenous voltage on the grid slamming down and rising up, cutting thru the whole eurpean continent AT THE SAME TIME... 50 times per second O_o"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday August 03 2020, @12:54AM
Actually keeping tight timing synchronization is much easier in a processor complex where delay variations are held to reasonably tight tolerances compared to the power grid which contains many more interfaces, sources, and especially loads that can vary widely in the course of 24 hours.
Also, wave propagation speeds are much slower through the power network compared to free space.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday August 03 2020, @02:56AM
Intel's networking/Ethernet chipsets are found in many AMD and ARM devices.
Intel will return to discrete GPUs, starting with HPC, and later consumers.
Infinity Fabric [wikichip.org] and Infinity Architecture [anandtech.com]?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by petecox on Monday August 03 2020, @12:50AM (2 children)
I'm going to go out on a limb and put 2 and 2 to get 5. Nevertheless...
Nvidia buys ARM => ARM and Denver teams optimise the next Tegra chip for x86 emulation (VLIW codemorphing) => NvidiARM powered Xbox. And as a sidenote, Nvidia releases a Windows on ARM macmini competitor.
(disclaimer: IANAGamer) But do check out the Windows 10 on RPi youtube videos, emulating x86 games at low framerates without proper driver support from Broadcom or MS or Rpi.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday August 03 2020, @02:26AM (1 child)
Good thinking. AMD's console wins could be attributed to having a strong presence in both CPUs and GPUs (and APUs, which the XSX/PS5 basically use: giant x86 APUs/SoCs). Nvidia did get the Nintendo Switch, but it's not the same. However, AMD is likely to underbid compared to Nvidia, so I would expect them to hang around for another console generation. Assuming there even is another proper console generation from Xbox/PlayStation.
I would instead check out the YouTube channel PI LABS [youtube.com] which is lately using box86 + WINE on Twister OS [raspbian-x.com] on Raspberry Pi 4B. They have rejected the idea of Windows on ARM (WoA) gaming in this text community post [youtube.com]. Make sure to check out the "Community" tab for your favorite YouTube channels.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by petecox on Monday August 03 2020, @03:11AM
I do agree with the sentiment that Windows on Pi is only a proof of concept without official support.
However, Gary Explains [youtube.com] has a point that no one is going to spend a grand or more on a S Pro X just to test their software on an ARM box. RPi 4 would make sense as an official target if Microsoft had a change of heart.