Jon Masters Leaving NUVIA, Returning To Red Hat

[PerformanceExpert]

Unless ARM-NVIDIA starts outcompeting them (and it's unlikely, given how ARM designs have always sucked for high performance applications), they will have nothing to fear in case of such an acquisition.

That isn't true - Graviton 2, Cortex-A77, A78 and X1 have shown huge performance gains in recent years. Cortex-X1 has similar single-threaded performance as A13 according to AnandTech. And performance is also close to the 4.7GHz 3950X.

[starshipeleven]

.. how beautiful these old days were, when you could experiment in your garage and have the possibility of becoming a great corporation thanks to the prestige of your wits ..

Yeah, 1800's were sure great like that

[Jumbotron]

Jon probably realized that Apple's A14 SoC that's coming out in October for the iPhone and iPad and the higher performance version of the A14 for the first ARM powered Macbook would already be 90% of the performance delta of Nuvia's chip at a fraction of the cost.

Plus the future is ARM on Mac and Windows. Jon probably wants to continue helping Red Hat/IBM make ARM the future of Linux which will have a bigger impact that a Silicon Valley "Unicorn" like Nuvia. I wish Nuvia well. The more ARM and its ISA is pushed and refined the better at breaking the ever more stale and rickety x86 hegemony so we can FINALLY get A.I. driven Silicon in our hardware that's BOTH powerful AND power efficient. You're never getting both with x86. Never.

[nokipaike]

.. how beautiful these old days were, when you could experiment in your garage and have the possibility of becoming a great corporation thanks to the prestige of your wits ..

[starshipeleven]

what if Nvidia-ARM comes with a new instruction set (ARMv9 or ARMv10) and ends its licensing business alltogether with these to keep the architecture to themselves?

How can they keep the arch to themselves if they sold perpetual arch licenses already?
NUVIA, Amazon, Apple all have added their own new instructions to their ARM CPUs already, and others like Marvell and Qualcomm (and other 8 or so big companies involved in ARM) also have the perpetual arch license even if they are mostly just using licensed cores in their products.

If they go with a new NVIDIA-only instruction set, it's going to start an instruction set competition between a bunch of large companies and it would eventually end up with someone winning and becoming a standard (aka like AMD with 64bit instruction set back in the day), not necessarily NVIDIA since they would be new to the game, and ARM itself sucks at designing high performance CPU cores.

[milkylainen]

They have an architecture license, and the core design is their own. They are like Via and x86 processors. No matter how Intel would like to revoke the license for it (and also for AMD), they can't do that.

Unless ARM-NVIDIA starts outcompeting them (and it's unlikely, given how ARM designs have always sucked for high performance applications), they will have nothing to fear in case of such an acquisition.

Ah. Tnx for explaining. I guess you're right. But aren't a lot of them built from a base ARM design? A76 etc.
If they can't get a next gen base design, do they have the muscle to create a new one from scratch?

[ms178]

They have an architecture license, and the core design is their own. They are like Via and x86 processors. No matter how Intel would like to revoke the license for it (and also for AMD), they can't do that. Unless ARM-NVIDIA starts outcompeting them (and it's unlikely, given how ARM designs have always sucked for high performance applications), they will have nothing to fear in case of such an acquisition.

Intel invented Itanium to get rid of the licensees - it didn't work out as planned. But what if Nvidia-ARM comes with a new instruction set (ARMv9 or ARMv10) and ends its licensing business alltogether with these to keep the architecture to themselves?

[starshipeleven]

Red Hat = Stable Job Opportunities.

144Hz = constant shitposting

[starshipeleven]

I can't help to wonder what the future holds for ARM-vendors like NUVIA...
I mean, if Nvidia completes a "hostile" purchase, it could leave them in a pretty difficult spot.

They have an architecture license, and the core design is their own. They are like Via and x86 processors. No matter how Intel would like to revoke the license for it (and also for AMD), they can't do that.

Unless ARM-NVIDIA starts outcompeting them (and it's unlikely, given how ARM designs have always sucked for high performance applications), they will have nothing to fear in case of such an acquisition.

[milkylainen]

I can't help to wonder what the future holds for ARM-vendors like NUVIA...
I mean, if Nvidia completes a "hostile" purchase, it could leave them in a pretty difficult spot.