NVIDIA Announces $40 Billion Deal To Acquire Arm

[ms178]

I like nothing about this merger. They don't acquire ARM per se, they give ARM owners NVIDIA's shares. The reason I don't like it is because I don't see how it may benefit NVIDIA aside from maybe creating a new platform akin to x86 to compete with the Intel/AMD x86 duopoly (Via is dead for all intents and purposes). ARM licensing profits are basically pennies and NVIDIA will never see a ROI on such a huge investment. At the same time nothing has precluded NVIDIA from building anything based on ARM - it's an open architecture. I just hope NVIDIA will survive this. I don't like the idea of the company drowning and leaving us with the only desktop GPU vendor.

Nvidia will pay $21.5 billion in stock and $12 billion in cash, including a $2 billion payment at signing. The stock part is cheap though as Nvidia's valuation right now is really high - they do profit from this here. But $ 12 billion in cash is not exactly exchange money.

And the benefit from this deal to Nvidia is not so much the operational business performance of ARM today, but the strategic positioning for the future. Nvidia is about to transition into a major new ecosystem player with tight integration of network, AI, GPU and CPU technologies [but what about memory? this piece is still missing] - so to speak it is the rise of a new Intel (without the fabs which at this point is more of a burden for Intel anyway). This is huge anyways! They now can offer you tightly integrated solutions and spread their IP to others in the ARM ecosystem benefiting from their sales, too. And I have read over the years that they have their own Linux distribution internally - which means that they can extract all of the performance features of their hardware. Maybe we normal consumers will see Nvidia's Clear Linux alternative one day, too.

It is a hard shift from the Nvidia we know today, but I see the chance for them to mature into a company which becomes a better team player as the responsibilities for such an ecosystem player are also somewhat higher (just see all the work Intel does on the Linux, library, compiler front etc. where large parts also benefit AMD and the x86 ecosystem as a whole).

[Spacefish]

Next 10 years will be interesting... I guess we will see a new architecture for things like network equipment (switches, mobile base stations and so on). Maybe RISC-V maybe a revival of MIPS (like china did with the Loongson CPU) or maybe even something completely new.

I believe that NVIDIA will raise license prices and will introduce new Instructions which they will cripple for consumer CPUs (like in notebooks) and will charge a large premium to enable them for server / datacenter applications.

Even things like memory bandwidth or max amount of supported memory could be such a artificial "cripple" to make consumer cores unusable in data center applications..

For uCs (which are used in automation tech and a lot of small electronics) i truly believe that RISC-V has a bright future! We are already seing the first steps of this.

High-Perf / Low-Latency: We will see.. RISC-V for some operations needs a lot more instructions to archive the same task than ARM / AMD64 does, this could limit throughput, as you need more memory BW and higher clocks to archive the same..

[schmidtbag]

I was initially very concerned about this, because Nvidia has the power to hoard ARM all to themselves or give themselves all of the nice benefits, while giving everyone else the scrappy leftovers. But based on what this article described, it seems like they're being pretty reasonable.

It's likely they're going to do some proprietary shenanigans, but, ARM has always had this problem. Unlike ARM's previous ownership, Nvidia does actually actively work with Linux, just not in a way that the Linux community finds desirable.

[ManganMan]

Next 10 years will be interesting... I guess we will see a new architecture for things like network equipment (switches, mobile base stations and so on). Maybe RISC-V maybe a revival of MIPS (like china did with the Loongson CPU) or maybe even something completely new.
(...)

I think that China will very seriously treat MIPS, if ARM wouldn't be an option anymore...

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/mips-lands-china-2020-08/

[birdie]

Nvidia will pay $21.5 billion in stock and $12 billion in cash, including a $2 billion payment at signing. The stock part is cheap though as Nvidia's valuation right now is really high - they do profit from this here. But $ 12 billion in cash is not exactly exchange money.

And the benefit from this deal to Nvidia is not so much the operational business performance of ARM today, but the strategic positioning for the future. Nvidia is about to transition into a major new ecosystem player with tight integration of network, AI, GPU and CPU technologies [but what about memory? this piece is still missing] - so to speak it is the rise of a new Intel (without the fabs which at this point is more of a burden for Intel anyway). This is huge anyways! They now can offer you tightly integrated solutions and spread their IP to others in the ARM ecosystem benefiting from their sales, too. And I have read over the years that they have their own Linux distribution internally - which means that they can extract all of the performance features of their hardware. Maybe we normal consumers will see Nvidia's Clear Linux alternative one day, too.

It is a hard shift from the Nvidia we know today, but I see the chance for them to mature into a company which becomes a better team player as the responsibilities for such an ecosystem player are also somewhat higher (just see all the work Intel does on the Linux, library, compiler front etc. where large parts also benefit AMD and the x86 ecosystem as a whole).

Thanks! The world of compute is just too huge for mere mortals to grasp. I'm here with my smartphone and x86 PC and of course all this cloud tech is really a vague thing for me.

[Jabberwocky]

It's funny how Apple refused to work with Nvidia based on past experiences. Nvidia found a way. 😂

I hope raspberry pi foundation had a solid contract with ARM. It would be sad to get locked down SoCs in future releases, well more locked down than it already is.

[Ardje]

So they bought cumulusnetworks, Mellanox and now ARM too... I see a dark future for open platforms.

[stikonas]

It's funny how Apple refused to work with Nvidia based on past experiences. Nvidia found a way. 😂

I hope raspberry pi foundation had a solid contract with ARM. It would be sad to get locked down SoCs in future releases, well more locked down than it already is.

It's not like raspberry pi is not locked down now. It is one of the most closed ARM platforms. You need huge binary blobs just to boot it. Compare it to e.g. rockchip's rk3399 which you can run completely blobless, from RAM initialization in the bootloader to 3D graphics.

[skeevy420]

Exactly how do you think Nvidia got the money for this acquisition? Before their Mellanox acquisition closed (which still hasn't come close to paying for itself), pretty much the only profit-making thing they sell is GPUs!

They walked away from it, years ago, when they discontinued their Tegra platform.

ARM is used in a lot more places besides mobile. Obviously cloud, but also consider that Nvidia makes ARM based SoCs for robotics and self-driving cars.

I meant the end-user market where GPUs don't seem to be as big of sellers on desktops as they used to be. Compared to even 5 years ago where one generation to the next brought major, significant gains, these days we can hold on to GPUs for longer because we're either on 720p to 2K and previous gens handle that in spades or we're part of the 1% of users gaming with something over 2K. Only that above 2K minority of users needs to upgrade every generation where the rest of us can hold back for a generation or three and still have quality up to 2K gaming (especially if we own a something-or-other-sync monitor). All the big GPU sales these days are for corporate use...AIs and whatnot.

To keep getting a steady stream of consumer, end-user money -- ARM. It's in cars, routers, phones, gaming devices, disposable electronics, tinkerer and hobbyist SBCs, and more. Damn-near a guarantee that every house in the world will upgrade or buy at least one ARM device per year.

increasechief This is also a reply to you as well....but RISC-V is a pipe dream in this context and I'd expect Apple to POWER it out if NVIDIA messes with ARM too much...and that's based on the assumption that Apple would pick an open architecture. That said, Apple does have the money to pay for the abilities to get RISC-V really ready which is why it gets brought up in these kinds of threads...cause most of us love when big money gets behind an open standard.

[numacross]

I hope raspberry pi foundation had a solid contract with ARM. It would be sad to get locked down SoCs in future releases, well more locked down than it already is.

Raspberry Pi is not using a custom ARM design, but re-using VideoCore processors from Broadcom.