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Nvidia to buy Arm Holdings From SoftBank for $40 Billion
Nvidia to buy Arm Holdings from SoftBank for $40 billion
Chipmaker Nvidia has agreed to buy Arm Holdings, a designer of chips for mobile phones, from SoftBank in a deal worth $40 billion, the companies announced Sunday. The deal will include $21.5 billion in Nvidia stock and $12 billion in cash, including $2 billion payable at signing.
Softbank acquired Arm in 2016 for $31.4 billion in 2016 in one of its largest acquisitions ever. Arm is best known as the designer of an architecture used in chips in most mobile phones, including the Qualcomm chips used in most Android phones, as well as Apple's iPhone. Apple is also planning to shift its Mac computers from Intel chips to an Arm-based design.
Nvidia, whose chips are widely used to support graphics and artificial intelligence applications, including for self-driving vehicles, pledged that it would "continue Arm's open-licensing model and customer neutrality."
Interest in RISC-V set to skyrocket again.
Also at Bloomberg, The Verge, Tom's Hardware, and Wccftech.
Previously: Nvidia's Market Cap Rises Above Intel's
Nvidia Considering Acquisition of ARM for Over $32 Billion
Nvidia Buys ARM Holdings From SoftBank for $40 Billion
Nvidia buys ARM Holdings from SoftBank for $40 billion:
SoftBank has agreed to sell Arm Holdings to US chip company Nvidia for $40bn, ending four years of ownership as the Japanese technology group shifts towards becoming a global investment and asset management powerhouse.
The UK chip designer is the latest large asset disposal orchestrated by SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son as his newly built war chest opens up options for the group including an expansion of trading into publicly listed technology stocks and a potential delisting of its own shares.
Under the deal, SoftBank will become the largest shareholder in Nvidia, which will pay the Japanese group $21.5bn in common stock and $12bn in cash. "We look forward to supporting the continued success of the combined business," Mr Son said in a joint statement late on Sunday.
[...] 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. The British chip designer's technology is starting to find broader applications beyond mobile devices, in data centres and personal computers including Apple's Macs.
Arm would transform Nvidia's product line-up, which until now has largely focused on the high end of the chips market. Its powerful graphics processors—which are designed to handle focused, data-intensive tasks—are typically sold to PC gamers, scientific researchers and developers of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, as well as cryptocurrency miners.
Official announcement at Nvidia.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Monday September 14 2020, @06:11AM (11 children)
That should read:
ARM isn't the competition, ARM is the environment. I have about twenty ARM-powered devices in my house right now. If I want more, I can buy them in any form, any capability, at any price, from any vendor. If I'm really in a hurry the nearest place that'll sell me assorted ARM-based development boards is five minutes' drive away.
For RISC-V, I can try and mail order a few underpowered Arduino-level toy systems from obscure vendors or pay a stupid amount of money for a bare-bones board capable of running Linux. That's it.
I'd really like to do more with RISC-V, but you've got to be realistic about it, if after ten years of effort you need to search just to find a toy device using one, it's not going to take the world by storm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14 2020, @10:45AM
ARM is cheap and competitive now. Whether it will be in ~5 years depends on how NVidia handles the acquisition and future licencingw deals. If they start making life difficult for those who want to licence an ARM core and use it with a non-NVidia GPU things will change quite rapidly.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14 2020, @11:40AM (4 children)
Best outcome of this if it would force AMD to make a move to buy SiFive and get RISC-V moving faster. All it takes is to mass-produce a CPU and sell it as a single chip. All these integrated boards serve no one. What we need to move forward is to be able to buy a single RISC-V processor (bulk is fine too).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14 2020, @11:49AM (1 child)
That depends entirely on the target market. If your customers are building embedded systems or looking for microcontrollers then good integration is a major selling point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14 2020, @05:56PM
My observation is that the food chain is diverse. Generally most efficient with a symbiosis of chip manufacturers and end-user board manufacturers. I could be wrong, but the existing eco-system is based on that setup.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday September 14 2020, @01:53PM (1 child)
AMD had plans to create K12 ARM chips [wikipedia.org], mostly for servers, but they sidelined it in favor of going full speed ahead on x86 Zen and Epyc. That's a move that has proven to be hugely successful.
Nvidia in Advanced Talks to Buy ARM, Upend Silicon Industry [extremetech.com]
AMD has to be more careful (than say, Intel) about the products it launches. Unless RISC-V starts to eat into ARM in the server/HPC segment to a dramatic extent, I think it's more likely that AMD will revive K12. And if you could buy a motherboard and K12 ARM CPU, that might be desirable (but probably expensive, like building an Epyc-based PC).
Those integrated boards serve plenty of people. But they don't address the need for high core counts and clock speeds. Given that Apple is going to start putting out 12+ core ARM CPUs (advancing from the typical 2+6, 4+4 seen in mobile or SBCs), and ARM has announced its power-hungry Cortex-X1 [wikipedia.org] design, the pieces may be in place. Some company should make an 8x Cortex-X1, 8x Cortex-A78, 16x Cortex-A55 for desktops.
Rumor | Roadmap enlists AMD processor codenames expected till 2022; No hint of AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs indicated for 2021, but will ARM K12 be revived? [notebookcheck.net]
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14 2020, @05:54PM
What I mean is, people are currently desoldering the CPU from SiFive boards to create new boards, if that was not neccesary I'd image we'd be moving a lot further a lot faster, yet everyone seems to be focused on making their own integrated solution. I think ARM has been served great by off the shelf components, I wish we had that with RISC-V.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Monday September 14 2020, @01:09PM
Currently, yes. I like ARM as well. I'm working on several ARM based devices now. As long as Nvidia allows ARM to be ARM, that will likely remain true. If, OTOH, Nvidia tries to use tying and bundling or decides to cut open the goose that lays the golden eggs, ARM will stagnate and spawn a bunch of proprietary not-quite-ARM "enhancements".
A lot of the benefit of ARM (and part of why it is inexpensive) is that I can use the same tool chain and libraries on products from multiple competing vendors' ARM products. If that stops being true, RISC-V starts looking more attractive.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday September 14 2020, @01:30PM
Companies that are in AI, GPUs, datacenter and automobile ASIC can't work with an nVidia-owned ARM. Even at the basic level of ordering SoCs and asking questions about the docs will reveal too much about their up and coming designs and products.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday September 15 2020, @05:21PM (2 children)
On the following day: https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/09/15/sifive-to-debut-risc-v-pc-for-developers-based-on-freedom-u740-next-gen-soc/ [cnx-software.com]
compiling...
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday September 16 2020, @09:32AM (1 child)
The HiFive Unleashed a bare-bones board with the slightly older U540, costs a thousand dollars a pop for something that as an ARM device would cost around one tenth of that. Can you imagine what a full PC is going to cost?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 16 2020, @01:25PM
Who knows what they even mean by PC? All they need to provide is a standard motherboard with a soldered CPU. Let people find their own case, PSU, DRAM, etc.
If it really is the equivalent of a quad-core Cortex-A55, it would need almost no power. It could just be put in an SFF case. Larger and technically not an SBC since it would have 2-4 DIMMs.
Set your expectations very low, but keep an eye on CNX in October.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by linkdude64 on Monday September 14 2020, @07:41AM (5 children)
I don't like consolidation like this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14 2020, @11:51AM
I don't either. It is never in the interests of the customer in the long term because the suppliers invariably start tying products.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday September 14 2020, @01:20PM (3 children)
Hey, that's un-/ill-regulated capitalism for you. If you don't want the genie, don't rub the lamp.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14 2020, @03:08PM
What has capitalism ever done for us?
Cue Monty Python.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 14 2020, @04:21PM (1 child)
We don't have capitalism any more.
We have capitalism run amok.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14 2020, @06:11PM
no, this is idiocy running amok.
"you" take an idea that was cited by a malfunctioning political movement, and decry it just because it was cited by a malfunctioning political movement.
at the same time, "you" have the work of millions of artists and engineers and plain workers, and let that be owned by a few...
thus, companies own "us" and the environment, and "we" cant touch ideas that were used by some, who failed for whatever reason...
. . .
now u ask
"so what do you suggest?"
-zug (also known as Vlad)
and before i can utter a word, u say:
and by the way, i dont take suggestions by trolls, foreigners, nazis, communists, or just people i dont like.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday September 14 2020, @06:29PM (1 child)
Yes, RISC-V seems to be there now, but there seem to be roadblocks to developing a innovative libre/free RISC-V chip lurking in their nondisclosure requirements.
Which is why the Libre-SoC [libre-soc.org] project switched to the OpenPower architecture. Their interim hardware design is scheduled for its first tape-out sometime in October.
No, not available now, as ARM is, but likely to be popular with those wanting to be in control of their hardware.
And you can already look at their source code.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14 2020, @07:31PM
great news. i resisted buying any arm devices b/c it was not open, etc until recently. I regret it. They are a PITA. looking forward to Power for everything possible. Sick and tired of insecure, hostile and poorly supported hardware I wouldn't buy anything owned by Nvidia if i can help it. Haven't in years. Don't plan to start now.