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...
(Score: 1) by petecox on Sunday August 02 2020, @12:49PM
nvidia owning ARM's mobile GPU makes no business sense.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Sunday August 02 2020, @12:57PM (2 children)
The Monopolies and Mergers commission is about as much use as a pile of over-ripe cabbage.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @03:36PM
>> about as much use as a pile of over-ripe cabbage.
A simile lost on most Koreans.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday August 02 2020, @10:12PM
A pile of over ripe cabbage may at least promote growth as dung. I doubt that the cartel watchdogs have that much positive impact on anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @01:34PM (5 children)
The Tegra 2 had some promise but it was quickly outclassed. I think what nVidia is seeing here is an opportunity to break into phones and whatever other integrated devices come next. AMD pretty much has the market cornered for high end GPUs in consoles today, but the Switch uses an nVidia ARM SoC. On phones where the CPU is more important than the GPU, nVidia hasn't really done anything.
Controlling ARM gives nVidia a fresh start on the next generation of phone CPUs, might help nVidia become the supplier for Apple when their GPU project inevitably fails, and maybe even gives them a chance to compete with AMD for the Playstation 6 a decade from now.
Softbank, of course, just wants the yuan. I'm happy to see ARM back under the control of a genuine 100% Western company.
Although I'm an AMD partisan in the desktop GPU wars, this deal is good for the industry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @01:37PM (2 children)
Oops.
I thought Softbank was Chinese, not Japanese. So, uh, scratch that bit about bringing them back under control of a Western company. Nothing wrong with Japan.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @03:42PM (1 child)
Aren't Russians the bad guys this week? Yeah, pretty sure it's them or maybe some Middle Eastern desert country. The US is just itching for a war. Is there an election or something happening over there?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @04:41PM
Go home Putler, you are drunk of win on the dictatorship vote. It's been a month, so time to sober up.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 02 2020, @01:40PM
Samsung has partnered with AMD to put AMD RDNA graphics on future Exynos smartphone SoCs.
Samsung and AMD Partner up for Mobile GPUs [soylentnews.org]
AMD GPU for 2021 Samsung flagships impresses in first leak [sammobile.com]
Samsung Exynos 1000 with AMD Radeon GPU rumored to feature only in the Galaxy S21 Ultra, Exynos brand change being contemplated too [notebookcheck.net]
If they end up using RDNA2 or later, maybe Samsung smartphones will end up with real-time raytracing support.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by petecox on Sunday August 02 2020, @06:31PM
Nvidia lost momentum on phones due to a lack of an integrated 4G modem. And when it was clear the Android tablet market was going nowhere, they focused on niches such as cars and their line of Shield devices.
So I can't see Tegra returning to phones unless they partner with, say, MediaTek on 5G where the latter currently integrates PowerVR and Mali GPUs. But such partnerships don't require buying ARM.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @01:56PM (8 children)
no love between apple and nvidia ...
intel is stalling, for example getting to pcie ver.3.
AMD has cake (cpu) and can eat it too (gpu).
the fuel that drives semi-conductor is, duh, money. this way maybe nvidia is still "dependent" on main stream cpu maker intel to innovate the cpu side of things but at least they (intel) cannot dictate the cash-flow of nvidia (let amd run ahead with a fast bus) and if they (intel) "sleep on the wrong (read: unfriendly) side of the bed too much" nvidia could still ditch intel for cpu?
as is obvious from modern games, most are GPU bound not CPU bound?
what is "dodgy" (like always) is the "free spirit with no allegance but profit" m$ ... since, same like games are GPU bound, most are also m$ bound.
unfortunately 32 belleons IS alot of monies ... so chances that m$ and/or intel will turn down the thumb screws on nvidia after acquisition are rather realistic, so nvidia def. needs to capitalize rather quickly on the ARM acquisition (since 32 belleons are "missing" from the coffers) with something people can buy?
(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.
(Score: 1) by jman on Monday August 03 2020, @06:05PM
I wonder if that means I'd eventually, finally, get Titan XP drivers that worked on anything > OSX 10.13.6? ;)
Oh, sure, I would. And by that time, it'll be OSX 12 and will run on my thumb. Not thumb drive. Thumb. You'll just have to stare *really* hard to make out what's on the screen.
(Customer: "My screen is all blue!" Tech Support: "Stop painting your nails.")