Broadcom Bids To Snatch Qualcomm For $103 Billion

[madscientist159]

NVIDIA is 100 times worse. There is no comparison.

One of. NVIDIA is one of the others, but as mentioned by another poster the damage NVIDIA can do is relatively limited -- I can go purchase a competitive AMD card if I don't want to sign up for the NVIDIA™ Linux™ Distribution™ with 5 Trillion EULAs™ and no source. What exactly is my alternative for ARM chips, SAS controllers, networking devices, etc?

[pal666]

Nothing good comes out of it for OSS.

qualcomm trojan horse will force broadcom to stop developing open gpu drivers?
i'd expect the opposite

[pal666]

I don't see a single driver with open firmware from Broadcom.

i don't see a singe opengl driver with open source(which is order of magnitude more important that firmware) from qualcomm. unlike broadcom

[pal666]

Broadcom? Ugh. That names evokes closed source to me.

because you live in imaginary world where the only open arm vendor gpu driver is not developed by broadcom

[pal666]

I always assumed Qualcomm was a much larger company than Broadcomm

broadcom was bought recently by avago, so current broadcom is not your old broadcom, but renamed avago

[pal666]

But at least Nvidia does not make many CPUs.

what amount of tegras will count as many?

[pal666]

I can go purchase a competitive AMD card if I don't want to sign up for the NVIDIA™ Linux™ Distribution™ with 5 Trillion EULAs™ and no source. What exactly is my alternative for ARM chips, SAS controllers, networking devices, etc?

there are certainly more arm vendors than x86 gpu vendors. and networking device vendors. have no idea about sas controllers, who needs them anyway

[OneBitUser]

there are certainly more arm vendors than x86 gpu vendors. and networking device vendors. have no idea about sas controllers, who needs them anywa

That's not that big of a deal... Intel's x86 GPU plans fell through almost 10 years ago.

Seriously though: you can hardly compare x86 and ARM on number of vendors/manufacturers... The former was Intel's own private architecture which AMD also manufactured originally*, while the latter is based on licensing the CPU and GPU specifications and designs created by ARM, and letting someone else manufacture or even modify them.
Compőaring x86 to IBM's POWER architecture would be a much fairer comparison.

*: plus you have VIA. Do not forget VIA!

[madscientist159]

OneBitUser what tends to happen in the ARM space is that sure, you can get lots of cheap, low power, IoT and phone style chips from the little manufacturers. Every time someone gets close to something that could be usable in e.g. a desktop or low end server application, the chip doesn't perform well and/or gets locked up somewhere. Developing high performance chips is very, very expensive, and so far only the relatively anti-FOSS companies have made any headway at all in that arena. This merger makes owner-controllable high-performance ARM even more unlikely in the near future.

[pal666]

Developing high performance chips is very, very expensive, and so far only the relatively anti-FOSS companies have made any headway at all in that arena.

so isn't it nice when most pro-foss arm vendor gets more money to design high performance chip?