NVIDIA Reportedly Near Deal To Buy Arm For $40+ Billion Dollars

[lox_]

It is sad news. The more a few hands have in is bad for the people. Can't they just collaborate ?

[curfew]

Then they turn consumer ARM into a closed-source design with encrypted firmware and zero open drivers.

There is no consumer ARM; ARM does not sell any chips. They make reference designs which are then adapted by actual chipmakers such as Samsung, Apple and Qualcomm. And by the way probably all chips are closed source at least partially (the modem, GPU, etc.)

[artivision]

I highly doubt it's anywhere close to Zen in real life workloads.

Even Apples design have more IPC than Ryzen, it just doesn't have the frequency but that is a lithography problem.

[timofonic]

Goodbye, ARM. After all, x86 will stay forever.

ARM isn't very OSS friendly, with these closed source drivers everywhere. It seems a perfect match for Nvidia, as they are closed source zealots.

I think Nvidia will obsessively try to control ARM platform as much as possible, as they are control freaks in a pathological way. They'll try to break the ARM perpetual license by using the best lawyers from hell and other obscure realms, then make anything to get more cash flow.

ARM fragmentation will become even worse, a lot worse.

Linaro is a bad joke, I agree too.

Good news for RISC-V and AMD

[DL9220]

Someone remembers 3dfx ? December 2000, they became NVidia, januari 2001 they cut supporting their Voodoo's and nVidia had all of sudden a 3D capable chip.. Before end of the year, nobody will know ARM anymore.

[numacross]

Someone remembers 3dfx ? December 2000, they became NVidia, januari 2001 they cut supporting their Voodoo's and nVidia had all of sudden a 3D capable chip..

3dfx was losing to NVidia in 3D for quite some time before their bankruptcy...
GeForce 256 launched in 1999, 2 in 2000 and 3 in 2001. I'd say that the FX series was the first that could've realistically used some 3dfx tech, and it wasn't very good.

[oleid]

As an owner/developer of a range of NVIDIA Jetson TX2 and Xavier devices I really don't see what all the angst is about.

NVIDIA already does an outstanding job with their Arm64 SOCs on those platforms incl fully open source board support packages based on Ubuntu.

For any serious engineers with skin in the game this is nothing but good news. I guess the script kiddies who have probably never touched an Arm compiler gotta hate.

We use(d) Tegra 2 SOCs at work. Upstream kernel support was entirely done by the community. Don't get me started about the graphics. In general, Nvidia is the worst SOC provider you can end up with.

If you want an arm SOC, it should be either really cheap so that community supports it OR you pay big bugs so that a company supports it really well and gets all the things mainline. And you want full mainline support since SOCs are used for a long time. I don't see where Nvidia fits in. Neither cheap, nor bringing things mainline.

Do they support CUDA with the free Tegra drivers?

[oleid]

It would seem AMD was wise not going ARM after all.

[tildearrow]

Even Apples design have more IPC than Ryzen,

Is this true or is it just because somebody compared Safari vs. Chrome (on two different devices) and they saw Safari running faster? (apples to oranges)

[numacross]

It would seem AMD was wise not going ARM after all.

Well... every Ryzen contains an ARM core (the PSP) and there's the short-lived ARM Opteron A1100. I'm pretty sure AMD has an ARM architectural license.