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

[ALRBP]

Anti-trust works so well these days. /s

Anti-trust laws are a joke. If there was any real and applied anti-trust legislation, Microsoft would not exist.

[timofonic]

Shutting down ARM licensing does not make much sense. ARM business model is a source of relatively big and stable income, and there is no reason why NVIDIA would want to kill that. NVIDIA refusing take the money - right... NVIDIA practically does not compete in ARM ecosystem anyway, that Tegra chip is super niche.

NVIDIA practically does not compete in ARM ecosystem...yet!

Why would they buy the entire ARM owners instead only using their licenses? Please don't be so naive and think about it.

Despite 3DFX existed in the early era of consumer 3D hardware, it had very interesting technology and were very OSS friendly in comparison with the rest of graphics hardware makers. ATI was still a separate company and not yet part of AMD, for example to youngsters about how graphics hardware companies was in the 90s.

NVIDIA is like a megalodon that started somewhat small but grew very fast by eating smaller ones, still eating like any other corporate entity. They always have an agenda and they hate everything that is out of their control, that's why they don't release proper FOSS drivers.

I think this is actually a good news for OSS community, because it has a potential to motivate industry to adopt/develop RISCV faster in a fear of NVIDIA.

It's good but bad too:
- Good: The greed of NVIDIA wil impulse others to react, including RISC-V. Maybe we'll see a different processor architecture ecosystem in the future.
- Bad: Software developers must react fast, a lot faster than now. Wine should evolve to become CPU independent. Hardware drivers must be a lot better and active faster to users Alternative platforms must be better supported everywhere as much as possible ags think ways to make it even better. FOSS must adapt faster and stop holy wars, standardize and make even more portable and optimized code. Software usability without removing features (I'm using Gnome again these days and getting disappointed again) must have more priority, everyone isn't a geek like me. And this is because NVIDIA could join forces with other or merge and create a monopoly bigger than old IBM.

Things are changing, get smarter and trust nobody

[OneTimeShot]

Cloudy days ahead for Open Source. Hope Google (or maybe we should start cheering for Huawei?) will begin supporting RISC-V for mainline Android...

[oleid]

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.

True. I was referring to ARM servers. It seemed, for some time, this was their future. But as you said, it was short lived.

[Papicha]

Hello, RISC-V

[Slartifartblast]

Unlike an investment bank, Nvidia has real skin in the game. Sounds like a good match, hope it works out for all customers.

Sadly I doubt for consumers or open-source advocates, we need RISC-V to become a major force.

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

if nvidia did buy it, will it fall under sanction ba for huawei too

Why? Softbank are a Japanese investment company, not Chinese. ARM are a British chip designer.
All the UK cares about is keeping ARM's HQ in the UK - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54122692

[tuke81]

ARM is huge ecosystem and is used every where. What ever plans Nvidia has for arm it will be just a fraction of whole ecosystem, mainly cars and maybe data centers. Doubt they will ever come back to phones or like consumer products by themselves. What I think what happens is, if they bought ARM they will make server/car/ML/AI division and keeping rest as is it to make stable stream of license fee income.

[blackshard]

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

Do you have any evidence to prove this statement?

it's not just a lithography process, because the running frequency of a processor is a complex matter of the internals: the number of stages of the pipelines, the amount of pipelines, the cache subsystems, in-order/out-of-order execution, etc... etc...

[PerformanceExpert]

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

When you already beat the fastest Ryzen on raw performance, why would increasing frequency be important?

Performance = IPC * frequency. So you can chase high frequencies like Intel/AMD/IBM, or you can go for high IPC. Since phones are now faster than the fastest desktops while using a fraction of the power, it's clear which is best.