[HN Gopher] Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
___________________________________________________________________
Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B
Author : czr
Score : 1711 points
Date : 2020-09-13 23:28 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nvidianews.nvidia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nvidianews.nvidia.com)
| ckastner wrote:
| Softbank paid $32B for ARM in 2016.
|
| A 25% gain over a horizon of four years is not bad for your
| average investment -- but this isn't an average investment.
|
| First, compared to the SP500, this underperforms over the same
| horizon (even compared to end of 2019 rather than the inflated
| prices right now).
|
| Second, ARM's sector (semiconductors) has performed far, far
| better in that time. The PHOX (Philadelphia Semiconductor Index)
| doubled in the same time period.
|
| And looking at AMD and NVIDIA, it feels as if ARM would have been
| in a position to benefit from the surrounding euphoria.
|
| On the other hand, unless I'm misremembering, ARM back then was
| already considered massively overvalued precisely because it was
| such a prime takeover target, so perhaps its the $32B that are
| throwing me off here.
| yreg wrote:
| It vastly overperforms the Softbank ventures we usually hear
| about (excluding BABA).
| smcl wrote:
| To be honest, cash deposited in a boring current account
| outperforms Softbank's Vision Fund
| lrem wrote:
| There's also a fundamental threat to ARM in the raise of
| RISC-V.
| janoc wrote:
| RISC-V is only a tiiny player in the low end embedded space
| (there are only a few parts actually available with that
| instruction set) and no competition at all at the high end.
|
| Maybe in a decade or so it may be more relevant but not
| today. Calling this a "fundamental threat" is a tad
| exaggerated.
| kabacha wrote:
| Where are people getting the "decade" number from? Looks
| demand for RISC-V just went up significantly and it's not
| like it's broken or not-existing, RISC-V "just worked" a
| year ago already:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19118642
| janoc wrote:
| The "decade" comes from the fact that there is currently
| no RISC-V silicon with performance anywhere near the
| current ARM Cortex A series.
|
| And a realistic estimate how long it will take to develop
| something that would be on par with today's Snapdragon,
| Exynos or Apple's chips is at least those 10 years. You
| need quite a bit more to have a high performance
| processor than just the instruction set.
|
| The "just worked" chips are microcontrollers, something
| you may want to put in your toaster or fridge but not a
| SoC at the level of e.g. Snapdragon 835 (which is an old
| design, at that).
|
| Also the Sipeed chips are mostly just unoptimized
| reference designs, they have a fairly poor performance.
|
| Most people who talk and hype RISC-V don't realize this.
| hajile wrote:
| A ground-up new architecture takes 4-5 years.
|
| Alibaba recently said their XT910 was slightly faster
| than the A73. Since the first actual A73 launched in Q4
| 2016, that would imply they are at most 4 years behind.
|
| SiFive's U8 design from last year claimed to have the
| same performance as A72 with 50% greater performance per
| watt and using half the die area. Consider how popular
| the Raspberry PI is with it's A72 cores. With those RISCV
| cores, they could drastically increase the cache size and
| even potentially add more PCIe lanes within the same die
| size and power limits.
|
| Finding out new things takes much more time than re-
| implementing what is known to already work. As with other
| things, the 80/20 rule applies. ARM has caught up a few
| orders of magnitude in the past decade. RISCV can easily
| do the same and give the lack of royalties. Meanwhile,
| the collaboration helps to share costs and discoveries
| which might mean progress will be even faster.
| andoriyu wrote:
| Hold on, the reason why RISV-V cores slower is that
| companies who make it doesn't have an existing backend or
| just got into CPU game.
|
| I'm not saying Apple can drop-in RISC-V front-end to
| their silicon and call it a day, but you get the idea.
|
| Sifive has a pretty decent chance at making performant
| chips within next few years.
| lrem wrote:
| But you don't buy a company for tens of billions ignoring
| anything that's not relevant today. You pay basing on what
| you predict the company will earn between today and
| liquidation. When Softbank originally bought ARM, no
| competition was on the radar. Now there is some. Hence,
| valuation drops.
| janoc wrote:
| Softbank bought ARM for $32 billion, sold for $40
| billion, plus they were collecting profits during all
| that time. Not quite sure how that meshes with "valuation
| drops" ...
|
| RISC-V in high performance computing is years out even if
| big players like Samsung or Qualcomm decided to switch
| today. New silicon takes time to develop.
|
| And Nvidia really couldn't care less about the $1-$10
| RISC-V microcontrollers that companies like SiPeed or
| Gigadevice are churning out today (and even there ARM
| micros are outselling these by several orders of
| magnitude).
| lrem wrote:
| Let me just quote what I originally responded to:
|
| > A 25% gain over a horizon of four years is not bad for
| your average investment -- but this isn't an average
| investment.
|
| > First, compared to the SP500, this underperforms over
| the same horizon (even compared to end of 2019 rather
| than the inflated prices right now).
|
| > Second, ARM's sector (semiconductors) has performed
| far, far better in that time. The PHOX (Philadelphia
| Semiconductor Index) doubled in the same time period.
|
| > And looking at AMD and NVIDIA, it feels as if ARM would
| have been in a position to benefit from the surrounding
| euphoria.
|
| That's the "valuation drops" - relatively to the market,
| ARM has significantly underperformed, despite the
| business being actually healthy and on the rise.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| No doubt because Softbank was facing investor pressure to make up
| for their losses.
| m00dy wrote:
| Can anyone point me who would be competing with Nvidia in AI
| Market ?
| joshvm wrote:
| There's low power inference from Intel (Movidius) and Google
| (Coral Edge TPU). Nvidia doesn't really have anything below the
| Jetson Nano. I think there are a smattering of other low power
| cores out there (also dedicated chips in phones). TPUs are used
| on the high performance end and there are also companies like
| Graphcore who do insane things in silicon. Also niche HPC
| products like Intel Knight's Landing (Xeon Phi) which is
| designed for heterogeneous compute.
|
| There isn't a huge amount of competition in the
| consumer/midrange sector. Nvidia has almost total market
| domination here. Really we just need a credible cross platform
| solution that could open up gpgpu on AMD. I'm surprised Apple
| isn't pushing this more, as they heavily use ML on-device and
| to actually train anything you need Nvidia hardware (eg try
| buying a Macbook for local deep learning training using only
| apple approved bits, it's hard!). Maybe they'll bring out their
| own training silicon at some point.
|
| Also you need to make a distinction between training and
| inference hardware. Nvidia absolutely dominate model training,
| but inference is comparably simpler to implement and there is
| more competition there - often you don't even need dedicated
| hardware beyond a cpu.
| option wrote:
| Google, Habana (Intel), AMD in a year or two, Amazon in few
| years
| weregiraffe wrote:
| Wow. It costs an arm.
| fizzled wrote:
| Wow, this is tectonic. I cannot wait to see how this redraws the
| competition map. There are dozens of major embedded semi vendors
| that license Arm IP. Nvidia could eradicate them trivially.
| maxioatic wrote:
| > Immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin and EPS
|
| Can someone explain this? (From the bullet points of the article)
|
| I looked up the definition of accretive: "characterized by
| gradual growth or increase."
|
| So it seems like they expect this to increase their margins. Does
| that mean ARM had better margins than NVIDIA?
|
| Edit: I don't know what non-GAAP and EPS stand for
| pokot0 wrote:
| GAAP is an accounting set of rules, EPS is Earning per Share.
| Basically means they think it will increase their gross margin
| and EPS but you can't sue them if it does not.
| ericmay wrote:
| EPS -> earnings per share
|
| Non-GAAP -> doesn't follow generaly accepted accounting
| practices. There are alternative accounting methods. GAAP is
| very US-centric (not good or bad, just stating a fact).
| salawat wrote:
| Though note the intent of GAAP is to cut down on "creative
| accounting" which can tend to mislead.
| tyingq wrote:
| I would guess they do have higher margins since they are mostly
| selling licenses and not actual hardware.
|
| This article is old, but suggests a 48% operating margin:
| https://asia.nikkei.com/NAR/Articles/ARM-posts-strong-profit...
| bluejay2 wrote:
| You are correct that it means they expect margins to increase.
| One possibility is that ARM has higher margins as you
| mentioned. Another is that they are making some assumptions
| about how much they can reduce certain expenses by, and once
| you factor in those savings, margins go up.
| hastradamus wrote:
| Why would Nvidia spend $40B to ruin Arm? I can't see them making
| a return on this investment. No one wants to work with Nvidia
| they are notoriously roothless. I'm sure everyone is making plans
| to move to something else ASAP. Maybe RISC-V
| yangcheng wrote:
| I am surprised that no one has mentioned China will very likely
| block this deal.
| incognition wrote:
| Are you thinking retribution for Huawei?
| ttflee wrote:
| China de-facto blocked Qualcomm-NXP merger during a trade
| talk by not providing a decision before the deadline to the
| deal.
| zaptrem wrote:
| On what grounds/with what authority?
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| Is it that hard to see that China might see this as an
| American company further monopolizing silicon tech,
| potentially cutting China off from Arm designs.
|
| But more to the point, this is also China. If you want to do
| business in China, you're going to do as they tell you, or
| you get the stick. And if you don't like it, what are you
| going to do?
| yangcheng wrote:
| is this a question or just sarcasm? The post said clearly
| "The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing
| conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals for
| the U.K., China, the European Union and the United States.
| Completion of the transaction is expected to take place in
| approximately 18 months."
| mnd999 wrote:
| I really hope so. The UK government should block it also, but I
| don't think they will.
| jl2718 wrote:
| This is all about NVLink in ARM.
| yissp wrote:
| I still think the real reason was just to spite Apple :)
| ericmay wrote:
| How does this spite Apple?
| RL_Quine wrote:
| The company who was part of the creation of ARM and has a
| perpetual license to its IP? Tell me how.
| hu3 wrote:
| Even perpetual license to future IP?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Why would Apple need future ARM IP? They have more than
| enough in house talent to take their license in any
| direction they wish.
| hu3 wrote:
| Such deal could certainly benefit both players. Hence my
| question.
| mlindner wrote:
| This is really bad news. I hope the deal somehow falls through.
| filereaper wrote:
| Excellent, can't wait for Jensen to pull out a Cortex A-78 TI
| from his oven next year. /s
| broknbottle wrote:
| hodl out for the Titan A-78 Super if you can, I hear it runs a
| bit faster
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| edge-AI!
|
| They're also building an ARM supercomputer at Cambridge, but
| server-ARM doesn't sound like a focus.
|
| I'm just hoping for some updated mobile Nvidia GPUs... and maybe
| the rumoured 4K Nintendo Switch.
|
| They _say_ they won 't muck it up, and it seems sensible to keep
| it profitable:
|
| > As part of NVIDIA, Arm will continue to operate its open-
| licensing model while maintaining the global customer neutrality
| that has been foundational to its success, with 180 billion chips
| shipped to-date by its licensees.
| fluffything wrote:
| > but server-ARM doesn't sound like a focus.
|
| ARM doesn't have good server CPU IP. Graviton, A64FX, etc.
| belong to other companies.
| Followerer wrote:
| Graviton is Neoverse, ARM's Neoverse.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Tangential, but when I hear about all these insane "start-up du
| jour" valuations, does anyone else feel like $40B isn't a lot of
| a hardware company sur as ARM?
| beervirus wrote:
| $40 billion is a real valuation though, as opposed to WeWork's.
| incognition wrote:
| Maybe referencing Nikola?
| broknbottle wrote:
| are you suggesting a bunch of office space leases that are
| fully stocked with beer is not worth $40 billion?
| fishermanbill wrote:
| When will Europe realise that there is no second place when it
| comes to a market - the larger player will always eventually end
| up owning everything.
|
| I can not put into words how furious I am at the UK's
| Conservative party for not protecting our last great tech
| company.
|
| Europe has been fooled into the USA's ultra free market system
| (which works brilliantly for the US but is terrible for everybody
| else). As such American tech companies have brought EVERYTHING
| and eventually moth balled them.
|
| Take Renderware it was the leading game engine of the PS2 era
| consoles, brought by EA and mothballed. Nokia is another great
| example brought by Microsoft and mothballed. Imagination
| Technologies was slightly different in that it wasn't bought but
| Apple essentially mothballed them. Now ARM will undoubtedly be
| the next via an intermediate buyout.
|
| You look across Europe and there is nothing. Deepmind could have
| been a great European tech company - it just needed the right
| investment.
| geon wrote:
| I don't really see your point. Even the examples you list are
| nonsensical.
|
| * We are no longer in the ps2 era. EA now uses Frostbite, which
| was developed by the Swedish studio Dice. It is alive and well,
| powering some 40-50 games.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frostbite_(game_engine)
|
| * Nokia was dead well before MS bought them.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| And you really think more protectionism will help?
|
| Maybe part of the problem is that due to so many regulations,
| there's not a healthy startup ecosystem and the compensation
| isn't remotely high enough to draw the best talent.
| mytherin wrote:
| Regulation has little to do with it. Most of the tech
| industry is inherently winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most
| because of how easy it is to scale up tech solutions. US
| companies get a huge head-start because of their large home
| market compared to the fragmented EU market, and can easily
| carry that advantage into also dominating the EU market.
|
| There is a reason Russia and China have strong tech companies
| and Europe doesn't. That reason isn't lack of money, lack of
| talent or regulations. The only way for Europe to get big
| tech companies is by removing or crippling big US companies
| so EU companies can actually compete. The US companies would
| be quickly replaced by EU alternatives and those would offer
| high compensation all the same.
|
| Whether or not that is worth it from the perspective of the
| EU is not so black and white - tech is obviously not
| everything - but the current situation where all EU data gets
| handed to the US government on a silver platter is also far
| from optimal from the perspective of the EU.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| > Maybe part of the problem is that due to so many
| regulations, there's not a healthy startup ecosystem
|
| Reaganomics talking point since the 80s, yet the U.S.
| constantly relaxes regulations, recently it released even
| more environmental ones and it looks in parts like Mars.
|
| But of course, cut regulations, cut corporate taxes, cut
| benefits, cut, cut, cut. There's never a failure model for
| such capitalism apparently. 2008 even was blamed on
| regulation, rather than lack of thereof.
|
| Am quite frankly done with this line of argument.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| tech is only 10% of the US economy, and European nations are
| much more reliant on free-trade. Germany in particular, whose
| exports constitute almost 47% of their GDP, globally only
| comparable to South Korea for a developed nation.
|
| I get that Hackernews is dominated by people working in
| software and software news, but as a part of the real economy
| (and not the stock market) it's actually not that large and
| Europe doesn't frame trade policy around it, for good reasons.
|
| The US also doesn't support free-trade for economic reasons,
| but for political and historical reasons, which is to maintain
| a rule based alliance across the globe, traditionally to fend
| off the Soviets. Because they aren't around any more, the US is
| starting to ditch it. The US has never economically benefited
| from free-trade, it's one of the most insular nations on the
| planet. EU-Asia trade with a volume of 1.5 trillion almost
| doubles EU-American trade, tendency increasing, and that's why
| Europe is free-trade dependent.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Only because of EU. Intra-EU trade is more comparable to
| trade between US states then true international trade.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| This is _awful_. Out of all the big tech companies, Nvidia is
| probably least friendly to open source and cross-platform
| comparability. It seems to me that their goal is to monopolize AI
| hardware over the next 20 years, the same way Intel effectively
| monopolized cloud hardware over the last 20. Expect to see less
| choice in the chip market and more and more propietary software
| frameworks like CUDA. A sad day for CS and for AI.
| tony wrote:
| Surprisingly - they have a working driver for FreeBSD. Never
| had an issue with it - and the performance is fantastic. As far
| back as early 2000's I remember installing proprietary nvidia
| drivers on Linux and playing UT2004.
|
| Maybe Nintendo/Sony uses Nvidia cards on their developer
| machines? I imagine FreeBSD drivers aren't simply altruism on
| their part.
|
| On the other hand, stagnation on other fronts:
|
| - Nouveau (tried recently) is basically unusable on Ubuntu. As
| in the mouse/keyboard locks every 6 seconds.
|
| - Proprietary drivers won't work with wayland
|
| And since their stuff isn't open, the community can't do much
| to push Nouveau forward.
| loeg wrote:
| The FreeBSD blob driver will drive a monitor, but it lacks a
| bunch of GPU hardware support the Linux one has: all of CUDA,
| NVENC/NVDEC, I2C DDC, and certainly more.
| non-entity wrote:
| I knew it was too good to be true.
| dheera wrote:
| The proprietary driver also doesn't support fractional
| scaling on 20.04 and I've been waiting ages for that.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Not just developer machines e.g. the Nintendo Switch uses an
| Nvidia Tegra X1 and run FreeBSD. Lots of game consoles do,
| you don't have to worry about the GPL.
| Shared404 wrote:
| I thought the switch ran a modified form of android, but
| just looked it up and found this on the Switch Wikipedia
| page:
|
| > Despite popular misconceptions to the contrary, Horizon
| [The switch software's codename] is not largely derived
| from FreeBSD code, nor from Android, although the software
| licence[7] and reverse engineering efforts[8][9] have
| revealed that Nintendo does use some code from both in some
| system services and drivers.
|
| That being said, at least one of the Playstation's runs a
| modified form of FreeBSD.
|
| Edit: add [The ... codename]
| zamadatix wrote:
| Very interesting, thanks!
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| Is the FreeBDD driver open source? Also, somehow I was under
| the impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver.
| Is that correct?
| magic_quotes wrote:
| > impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver.
|
| It's maintained while simultaneously not receiving any new
| features.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| Note this includes support for newer cards, so its only a
| matter of time before FreeBSD support is EOL'd
| magic_quotes wrote:
| New cards are fully supported. Why do you think they
| aren't?
| loeg wrote:
| https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/163239
| /en...
|
| The latest FreeBSD driver is 450.66, published 2020-8-18.
| Supports RTX 20xx, GTX 16xx, GTX 10xx, and older.
| Conan_Kudo wrote:
| They did. The proprietary NVIDIA driver is required on
| FreeBSD as well. The FreeBSD community just doesn't care
| about this.
| phire wrote:
| Nvidia's "Blob" approach does have an advantage when it comes
| to supporting random OSes.
|
| It's less of a driver and more of an operating system.
| Basically self-contained with all the support libraries it
| needs. Super easy to port to a new operating system and any
| driver improvement work on all OSes.
|
| But the approach also has many downsides. It's big. It
| ignores all the native stuff (like linux's GEM interface).
|
| It also has random issues with locking up the entire system.
| Like if you are debugging a process with the linux drivers, a
| breakpoint or a pause in the wrong place can deadlock the
| system.
| loeg wrote:
| You say that, but: Nvidia's "blob" driver doesn't have
| CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC, nor DDC I2C support on FreeBSD --
| despite all of this functionality being specific to
| Nvidia's own hardware, and the support being present in the
| Linux blob, which runs on a relatively similar platform.
|
| If the only differing bits were the portability framework,
| this would just be a matter of adding missing support. But
| it isn't -- the FreeBSD object file Nvidia publishes lacks
| the internal symbols used by the Linux driver.
| magic_quotes wrote:
| > If the only differing bits were the portability
| framework, this would just be a matter of adding missing
| support. But it isn't -- the FreeBSD object file Nvidia
| publishes lacks the internal symbols used by the Linux
| driver.
|
| In fact it is. For Linux and FreeBSD Nvidia distributes
| exactly the same blob for compilation into nvidia.ko; the
| blobs for nvidia-modeset.ko are slightly different.
| (Don't take my word for it, download both drivers and
| compare kernel/nvidia/nv-kernel.o_binary with
| src/nvidia/nv-kernel.o.) Nothing is locked in the closed
| source part.
| magic_quotes wrote:
| Native Linux stuff is not at all native for FreeBSD. If
| Nvidia suddenly decides to open their driver (to merge it
| into Linux), FreeBSD and Solaris support will be the first
| thing thrown out.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| AI training is moving away from CUDA and toward TPUs anyway.
| DGX clusters can't keep up.
| make3 wrote:
| this is just false
| ladberg wrote:
| And Nvidia's GPUs now include the same type of hardware that
| TPUs have, so there's no reason to believe that TPUs will win
| out over GPUs.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| The key difference between a TPU and a GPU is that a TPU
| has a CPU. It's an entire computer, not just a piece of
| hardware. Is nVidia moving in that direction?
| dikei wrote:
| In term of cutting edge tech, They have their own GPUs,
| CPUs from ARM, Networking from Mellanox, so I'd say
| they're pretty much set to build a kick ass TPU.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| A TPU is a chip you cannot program. It's purpose built
| and can't run the fraction of the type of workloads that
| a GPU can.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I don't know where all of this misinformation is coming
| from or why, but, as someone who has spent the last year
| programming TPUs to do all kinds of things that a GPU
| can't do, this isn't true.
|
| Are we going to simply say "Nu uh" at each other, or do
| you want to throw down some specific examples so I can
| show you how mistaken they are?
| shaklee3 wrote:
| Please show me the API where I can write a generic
| function on a TPU. I'm talking about writing something
| like a custom reduction or a peak search, not offloading
| a tensor flow model.
|
| I'll make it easier for you, directly from Google's
| website:
|
| TPUs Cloud TPUs are optimized for specific workloads. In
| some situations, you might want to use GPUs or CPUs on
| Compute Engine instances to run your machine learning
| workloads.
|
| Please tell me a workload a gpu can't do that a TPU can.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Sure, here you go:
| https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/raw_ops
|
| In my experience, well over 80% of these operations are
| implemented on TPU CPUs, and at least 60% are implemented
| on TPU cores.
|
| Again, if you give a specific example, I can simply write
| a program demonstrating that it works. What kind of
| custom reduction do you want? What's a peak search?
|
| As for workloads that GPUs can't do, we regularly train
| GANs at 500+ examples/sec across a total dataset size of
| >3M photos. Rather hard to do that with GPUs.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| Well, there you go. For one TensorFlow is not a generic
| framework like cuda is, so you lose a whole bunch of the
| configurability you have with cuda. So, for example, even
| though there is an FFT raw function, there doesn't appear
| to be a way to do more complicated FFTs, such as an
| overlap-save. This is trivial to do on a GPU, and is
| built into the library. The raw functions it provides is
| not direct access to the hardware and memory subsystem.
| It's a set of raw functions that is a small subset of the
| total problem space. And certainly if you are saying that
| running something on a TPU's CPU cores are in any way
| going to compete with a gpu, then I don't know what to
| tell you.
|
| You did not give an example of something GPUs can't do.
| all you said was that TPUs are faster for a specific
| function in your case.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| _For one TensorFlow is not a generic framework like cuda
| is, so you lose a whole bunch of the configurability you
| have with cuda_
|
| Why make generalizations like this? It's not true, and
| we've devolved back into the "nu uh" we originally
| started with.
|
| _This is trivial to do on a GPU, and is built into the
| library_
|
| Yes, I'm sure there are hardwired operations that are
| trivial to do on GPUs. That's not exactly a +1 in favor
| of generic programmability. There are also operations
| that are trivial to do on TPUs, such as CrossReplicaSum
| across a massive cluster of cores, or the various
| special-case Adam operations. This doesn't seem related
| to the claim that TPUs are less flexible.
|
| _The raw functions it provides is not direct access to
| the hardware and memory subsystem._
|
| Not true. https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/r
| aw_ops/Inplac...
|
| Jax is also going to be giving even lower-level access
| than TF, which may interest you.
|
| _You did not give an example of something GPUs can 't
| do. all you said was that TPUs are faster for a specific
| function in your case._
|
| Well yeah, I care about achieving goals in my specific
| case, as you do yours. And simply getting together a VM
| that can feed 500 examples/sec to a set of GPUs is a
| massive undertaking in and of itself. TPUs make it more
| or less "easy" in comparison. (I won't say effortless,
| since it does take some effort to get yourself into the
| TPU programming mindset.)
| shaklee3 wrote:
| I gave you an example of something you can't do, which is
| an overlap-save FFT, and you ignored that completely.
| Please implement it, or show me any example of someone
| implementing any custom FFT that's not a simple,
| standard, batched FFT. I'll take any example of
| implementing any type of signal processing pipeline on
| TPU, such as a 5G radio.
|
| Your last sentence is pretty funny: a GPU can't do
| certain workloads because one it _can_ do is too slow for
| you. Yet it remains a fact that TPU _cannot_ do certain
| workloads without offloading to the CPU (making it orders
| of magnitude slower), and that 's somehow okay? It seems
| where this discussion is going is you pointed to a
| TensorFlow library that may or may not offload to a TPU,
| and it probably doesn't. But even that library is
| incomplete to implement things like a 5G LDPC decoder.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Which part of this can't be done on TPUs? https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/Overlap%E2%80%93save_method#Ps... As far
| as I can tell, all of those operations can be done on
| TPUs. In fact, I linked to the operation list that shows
| they can be.
|
| You'll need to link me to some specific implementation
| that you want me to port over, not just namedrop some
| random algorithm. Got a link to a github?
|
| If your point is "There isn't a preexisting operation for
| overlap-save FFT" then... yes, sure, that's true. There's
| also not a preexisting operation for any of the hundreds
| of other algorithms that you'd like to do with signal
| processing. But they can all be implemented efficiently.
|
| _Yet it remains a fact that TPU cannot do certain
| workloads without offloading to the CPU (making it orders
| of magnitude slower), and that 's somehow okay?_
|
| I think this is the crux of the issue: you're saying X
| can't be done, I'm saying X can be done, so please link
| to a _specific code example_. Emphasis on "specific" and
| "code".
| shaklee3 wrote:
| Let's just leave this one alone then. I can't argue with
| someone who claims anything is possible, yet absolutely
| nobody seems to be doing what you're referring to (except
| you). A100 now tops all MLPerf benchmarks, and the
| unavailable TPUv4 may not even keep up.
|
| Trust me, I would love if TPUs could do what you're
| saying, but they simply can't. There's no direct DMA from
| the NIC to where I can do a streaming application at
| 40+Gbps to it. Even if TPU _could_ do all the things you
| claim, if it 's not as fast as the A100, what's the
| point? To go through undocumented pain to prove
| something?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| FWIW, you can stream at 10Gbps to TPUs. (I've done it.)
|
| 10Gbps isn't quite 40Gbps, but I think you can get there
| by streaming to a few different TPUs on different VPC
| networks. Or to the same TPU from different VMs,
| possibly.
|
| The point is that there's a realistic alternative to
| nVidia's monopoly.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| When I can run a TPU in my own data center, there is.
| Until then it precludes a lot of applications.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| You can run basically any C program on a CUDA core even
| those requiring malloc. It may not be efficient but you
| can do it. Google themselves call GPUs general purpose
| and TPUs domain specific.
| https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-
| learning/w...
| sorenbouma wrote:
| I'm a TPU user and I'd be interested to see a specific
| example of something that can be done on TPU but not GPU.
|
| Perhaps I'm just not experienced enough with the
| programming model, but I've found them to be strictly
| less flexible/more tricky than GPUs, especially for
| things like conditional execution, multiple graphs,
| variable size inputs and custom ops.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Sure! I'd love to chat TPUs. There's a #tpu discord
| channel on the MLPerf discord:
| https://github.com/shawwn/tpunicorn#ml-community
|
| The central reason that TPUs feel less flexible is
| Google's awful mistake in encouraging everyone to use
| TPUEstimator as the One True API For Doing TPU
| Programming. Getting off that API was the single biggest
| boost to my TPU skills.
|
| You can see an example of how to do that here:
| https://github.com/shawwn/ml-
| notes/blob/master/train_runner.... This is a repo that
| can train GPT-2 1.5B at 10 examples/sec on a TPUv3-8 (aka
| around 10k tokens/sec).
|
| Happy to answer any specific questions or peek at
| codebases you're hoping to run on TPUs.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| That doesn't answer the question of what a TPU can do
| that a GPU can't. I think the OP means impossible for the
| GPU, not just slower.
| [deleted]
| newsclues wrote:
| They just bought ARM for 40$billion. I think they want to
| integrate CPU,GPU and high speed networks
| lostmsu wrote:
| Where did you get this from? AFAIK GPT-3 (for example) was
| trained on a GPU cluster, not TPUs.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Experience, for one. TPUs are dominating MLPerf benchmarks.
| That kind of performance can't be dismissed so easily.
|
| GPT-2 was trained on TPUs. (There are explicit references
| to TPUs in the source code: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2
| /blob/0574c5708b094bfa0b0f6df...)
|
| GPT-3 was trained on a GPU cluster probably because of
| Microsoft's billion-dollar Azure cloud credit investment,
| not because it was the best choice.
| option wrote:
| no they are not. Go read recent MLPerf results more
| carefully and not Google's blogpost. NVIDIA won 8/8
| benchmarks for publicly available SW/HW combo. Also 8/8
| on per chip performance. Google did show better results
| with some "research" system which is not available to
| anyone other then them yet.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| This is a weirdly aggressive reply. I don't "read
| Google's blogpost," I use TPUs daily. As for MLPerf
| benchmarks, you can see for yourself here:
| https://mlperf.org/training-results-0-6 TPUs are far
| ahead of competitors. All of these training results are
| openly available, and you can run them yourself. (I did.)
|
| For MLPerf 0.7, it's true that Google's software isn't
| available to the public yet. That's because they're in
| the middle of transitioning to Jax (and by extension,
| Pytorch). Once that transition is complete, and available
| to the public, you'll probably be learning TPU
| programming one way or another, since there's no other
| practical way to e.g. train a GAN on millions of photos.
|
| You'd think people would be happy that there are
| realistic alternatives to nVidia's monopoly for AI
| training, rather than rushing to defend them...
| p1esk wrote:
| _transitioning to Jax (and by extension, Pytorch)_
|
| Wait, what? Why would transition to Jax imply transition
| to Pytorch?
| llukas wrote:
| You are basing your opinion on last year MLPerf and some
| stuff that may or may not be available in the future.
| MLPerf 0.7 "available" category has been ghosted by
| google.
|
| Pointing this out is not aggressive.
| lostmsu wrote:
| I checked MLPerf website, and it looks like A100 is
| outperforming TPUv3, and is also more capable (there does
| not seem to be a working implementation of RL for Go on
| TPU).
|
| To be fair, TPUv4 is not out yet, and it might catch up
| using the latest processes (7nm TSMC or 8nm Samsung).
|
| https://mlperf.org/training-results-0-7
| QuixoticQuibit wrote:
| NVIDIA's hardware works on x86, PowerPC, and ARM platforms.
|
| Many of their AI libraries/tools are in fact open source.
|
| They stand to be a force that could propel ARM's strength in
| data center and desktop computing. For some reason you're okay
| with the current x86 duopoly held by AMD and Intel, both who
| have their own destiny over CPUs and GPUs.
|
| The HN crowd is incredibly biased against certain companies.
| Why not look at some of the potential bright sides to this for
| a more nuanced and balanced opinion?
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| There are good points on both sides; as a Linux user, I feel
| the effects of their proprietary drivers and uncooperative
| approach, while I can also appreciate that they've managed to
| work with the Gnome and KDE project to have some support
| under Wayland, and the contributions they've made to the
| machine learning communities. Ad a whole, I do think that the
| former outweighs the latter, and loath the acquisition, but
| do think that the resources they're packing will bring ARM to
| new heights for the majority users.
| endgame wrote:
| https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
|
| You mean this Weyland "support"?
| CountSessine wrote:
| The funny thing about GBM vs EGLStreams, though, based on
| everything I've read online, is that there's broad
| agreement that EGLStreams is the technically superior
| approach - and that the reason it's been rejected by the
| Linux graphics devs is GBM, while inferior, has broad
| hardware vendor support. Apparently very few GPU vendors
| outside the big 3 had decent EGl implementations.
| ddevault wrote:
| That's not true. EGLStreams would be better suited to
| Nvidia's proprietary driver design, but it's technically
| inferior. This is the "broad agreement". No one but
| Nvidia wants EGLStreams, or we would have implemented it
| in other drivers.
| CountSessine wrote:
| You know I did a bit more reading about this, and it
| sounds like you're right. There's a great discussion
| about it here:
|
| https://mesa-dev.freedesktop.narkive.com/qq4iQ7RR/egl-
| stream...
| selectodude wrote:
| "October 26, 2017"
|
| I'm not coming out and saying it's gotten significantly
| better, but that is a three year old article and Nvidia-
| wayland does work on KDE and Gnome.
| [deleted]
| timidger wrote:
| That's because they implemented egl streams, nothing has
| changed majorly since then. There's been a lot of talk,
| but no action towards unification. The ball is entirely
| in Nvidia's court and they continue to work together on
| this.
| ianai wrote:
| Yes I wonder the same thing about the sentiment against
| nvidia. It's be helpful if there were some wiki about things
| they've killed or instances they've acted against foss
| systems.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Linus famously gave them the middle-finger.
| paulmd wrote:
| "linus went on a hyperbolic rant" isn't sufficient
| evidence for anything.
|
| linus is a hyperbolic jerk (as he admitted himself for a
| few months before resuming his hyperbolic ways) who is
| increasingly out of touch with anything outside the
| direct sphere of his projects. Like his misguided and
| completely unnecessary rants about ZFS or AVX.
|
| if there are technical merits to discuss you can post
| those instead of just appealing to linus' hyperbole.
|
| (I won't even say "appeal to authority" because that's
| not what you're appealing to. You're literally appealing
| to his middle finger.)
| arp242 wrote:
| He just responded to a complaint that nVidia hardware
| wasn't working with "nVidia is the worst company we've
| dealt with". I don't think that's "out of touch", it's
| pretty much the kind of stuff his job description
| entails. If you don't like his style, fair enough, but if
| the leader of a project says "company X is the worst
| company we deal with" then that doesn't inspire a whole
| lot of confidence.
| paulmd wrote:
| AFAIK the debate was mostly settled by NVIDIA submitting
| their own EGLStreams backend for Wayland (that promptly
| exposed a bunch of Wayland bugs). _So_ difficult to work
| with, that NVIDIA, asking to do something different and
| then submitting their own code to implement it!
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=EGLSt
| rea...
|
| AFAIK it also ended up being literally a couple thousand
| lines of code, not some massive endeavor, so the Wayland
| guys don't come off looking real great, looks like they
| have their own Not Invented Here syndrome and certainly a
| lot of generalized hostility towards NVIDIA. Like
| Torvalds, I'll be blunt, my experience is that a lot of
| people just _know_ NVIDIA is evil because of these dozens
| of little scandals they've drummed up, and they almost
| all fall apart when you look into them, but people just
| fall back on asserting that NVIDIA _must_ be up to
| something because of these 27 other things (that also
| fall apart when you poke them a bit). It is super trendy
| to hate on NVIDIA in the same way it's super trendy to
| hate on Apple or Intel.
|
| Example: everyone used to bitch and moan about G-Sync,
| the biggest innovation in gaming in 10 years. Oh, it's
| this _proprietary_ standard, it 's using a _proprietary_
| module, why are they doing this, why don 't they support
| the Adaptive Sync standard? Well, at the time they
| started doing it, Adaptive Sync was a draft standard for
| power-saving in laptops that had languished for years,
| there was no impetus to push the standard through, there
| were no monitors that supported it, and no real push to
| implement monitors either. Why take 10 years to get
| things through a standards group when you can just take a
| FPGA and do it yourself? And once you've done all that
| engineering work, are you going to give it away for free?
| Back in 2016 I outright said that sooner or later NVIDIA
| would have to support Adaptive Sync or else lose the home
| theater market/etc as consoles gained support. People
| told me I was loony, " _NVIDIA 'S just not that kind of
| company_", etc. Well, turns out they were that kind of
| company, weren't they? Turns out people were mostly mad
| that... NVIDIA didn't immediately give all their
| engineering work away for free.
|
| The GPP is the only thing I've seen that really stank and
| they backed off that when they saw the reaction. Other
| than that they are mostly guilty of... using a software
| license you don't like. It says a lot about the success
| of copyleft that anyone developing software with a
| proprietary license is automatically suspect.
|
| The truth is that NVIDIA, while proprietary, does a huge
| amount of really great engineering in novel areas that
| HNers would really applaud if it were any other company.
| Going and making your own monitor from scratch with a
| FPGA so you can implement a game-changing technology is
| exactly the kind of go-getter attitude that this site is
| supposed to embody.
|
| Variable refresh rate/GSync is a game changer. DLSS 2.0
| is a game changer. Raytracing is a game changer. And you
| have NVIDIA to thank for all of those, "proprietary" and
| all. They would not exist today without NVIDIA, AMD or
| Intel would not have independently pushed to develop
| those, even though they do have open-source drivers. What
| a conundrum.
| arp242 wrote:
| I'm not sure if Linus was talking about the Wayland stuff
| specifically; the answer was in response to a complaint
| that the nvidia/Intel graphics card switching didn't work
| on Linux.
|
| I haven't used nvidia products for about 10 years and I'
| m not really in to gaming or graphics, so I don't really
| have an opinion on them either way, either business or
| technical. I used their FreeBSD drivers back in the day
| and was pretty happy it allowed me to play Unreal
| Tournament on my FreeBSD machine :-)
|
| Linus is not always right, but a lot of what he says is
| often considerably more nuanced and balanced than his
| "worst-of" highlight reel suggests. There are plenty of
| examples of that in the presentation/Q&A he did from
| which this excerpt comes, for example (but of course,
| most people only see the "fuck you" part).
|
| So if Linus - the person responsible for writing
| operating systems with their hardware - says they're the
| "worst company we deal with" then this strikes me as a
| good reason to at least do your research if you plan to
| buy hardware from them, if you intend to use it with
| Linux anyway. I'll take your word for it that they're
| doing great stuff, but if it outright refuses to work on
| my Linux box then that's kinda useless to me.
|
| This was also 6 or 7 years ago I think, so perhaps things
| are better now too.
| 48bb-9a7e-dc4f2 wrote:
| "AFAIK". Your rant is wrong in so many levels it's not
| even funny.
|
| Nvidia earned that hostility. It's not even worth
| replying when you're giving a comment in such bad faith.
| There's a search function with many many threads that
| dealt with this subject before if anyone wants a less
| biased view of EGLStream and Wayland.
| [deleted]
| andrewprock wrote:
| The notion that the maintainer if Linux has a narrow
| focus role that isn't capable of advocating and serving
| the broader community is belied by the fact that Linux
| has grown from being a niche hobbyist platform to the de
| facto cloud standard OS.
| paulmd wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-
| zfs-s...
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-i-hope-
| intels-a...
|
| /shrug. The guy can't keep from popping off with
| obviously false statements about things he knows nothing
| about. What exactly do you want me to say? Yes, he's been
| a good manager for the linux kernel, but he is self-
| admittedly hyperbolic and statements like these show that
| he really doesn't have an issue running his mouth about
| things that he really doesn't understand.
|
| It is the old problem with software engineers: they think
| expertise in one field or one area makes them a certified
| supergenius with relevant input in completely unrelated
| areas. I can't count how many times I've seen someone on
| HN suggest One Weird Trick To Solve Hard Problems in
| [aerospace/materials sciences/etc]. Linus suffers from
| the same thing.
|
| His experiences with NVIDIA are probably relevant, and if
| so we can discuss that, but the fact that he gave someone
| the middle finger in a Q+A session is not. That's just
| Linus being an asshole.
|
| (and him being a long-term successful project manager
| doesn't make him not an asshole either. Jensen's an
| asshole and he's one of the most successful tech CEOs of
| all time. Linus doesn't mince words and we should do the
| same - he's an asshole on a professional level, the "I'm
| just being blunt!" schtick is just a nice dressing for
| what would in any other setting be described as a
| textbook toxic work environment, and his defenses are
| textbook "haha it's just locker room talk/we're all
| friends here" excuses that people causing toxic work
| environment are wont to make. He knows it, he said he'd
| tone it down, that lasted about a month and he's back to
| hyperbolic rants about things he doesn't really
| understand... like ZFS and AVX. But hey I guess they're
| not directed at people this time.)
|
| Again, if he's got relevant technical input we can
| discuss that but "linus gives the middle finger!!!!" is
| not the last word on the topic.
| andrewprock wrote:
| I don't take issue with the fact that Linus' behavior is
| problematic.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| A little defensive, no? I trust his judgement more than
| Mr. Random on the internets.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Nvidia does not publish drivers, only binary blobs.
|
| You generally have to wrap those and use them while not
| being foss-compatible.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| The OP said nothing about being ok with the x86 duopoly.
|
| Its possible to dislike two things at once, its also possible
| to be wary of new developments that give much more market
| power to a notoriously uncooperative and closed company.
| dheera wrote:
| > The HN crowd is incredibly biased against certain
| companies.
|
| No kidding, regarding the HN crowd. -- every time I post a
| comment criticizing Apple's monopoly and policies I get
| downvoted to oblivion, and I'd say that some of the things
| they do e.g. on the Apple store and proprietary
| hardware/software combinations are far more egregious than
| anything Nvidia has ever done. The HN algorithm basically
| encourages an echo chamber of people who gang up and
| downvote/flag others who don't agree with the gang opinion.
|
| (Psst ... If you see this comment disappear after a while,
| it's probably because the same Apple fanboys found this
| comment and decided to hammer it down again.)
| dang wrote:
| This is off topic and breaks the site guidelines. Would you
| please review them and stick to the rules?
|
| This sort of $BigCo metaflamewar in which each side accuses
| HN of being shills for the opposite side is incredibly
| repetitive and tedious. It's also a cognitive bias;
| everyone feels like the community (and the moderators for
| that matter) is biased against whatever view they favor.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&q
| u...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=notice%20dislike%20by:dang&da
| t...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| What's the point of pretending that people don't know you
| will get downvoted for holding an unpopular opinion? It's
| tautological.
| Shared404 wrote:
| Haven't looked at the rest of your posts, but if this gets
| flagged, it's probably from this:
|
| [Edit: I disagree with my past self of having put this
| comment here. This is something that if one feels that they
| notice, they should probably comment on. Leaving it here
| for clarity's sake]
|
| > The HN algorithm basically encourages an echo chamber of
| people who gang up and downvote/flag others who don't agree
| with the gang opinion.
|
| or this:
|
| > (Psst ... If you see this comment disappear after a
| while, it's probably because the same Apple fanboys found
| this comment and decided to hammer it down again.)
|
| than this:
|
| > criticizing Apple's monopoly and policies
|
| Source: Have criticized Apple without having been downvoted
| and flagged.
| [deleted]
| dheera wrote:
| I think it depends on how you criticize them. I've
| criticized:
|
| - The idea that we can trust Apple with privacy, when
| their OS isn't open source
|
| - The idea that the Apple Store is doing good things in
| the disguise of privacy when they actually play corporate
| favoritism and unfairly monopolize the app market
|
| - The idea that a PIN has enough entropy to be a good
| measure of security
|
| - Right to repair, soldered-to-motherboard SSDs
|
| - The environmental waste associated with the lack of
| upgradability
|
| - Price gouging on upgrades ($400 for +512GB, anyone?
| When I can get 4TB on Amazon for $500?) and lack of user
| upgradability
|
| I've been downvoted to hell for speaking the above. There
| are a bunch of brainwashed Apple worshippers lurking
| around here who don't accept any criticism of the holy.
|
| I totally welcome engaging in an intelligent discussion
| about any of the above, but downvotes and flagging (in
| most cases without any response) doesn't accomplish any
| of that, and serves just to amplify the fanboy echo
| chamber.
|
| Also, I don't think criticizing HN's algorithm or design
| should warrant being flagged or downvoted, either.
| Downvoting should be reserved for trolling, not
| intelligent protest. I'm also of the opinion that
| downvotes shouldn't be used for well-written
| disagreement, as that creates an echo chamber and
| suppresses non-majority opinions.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > I've been downvoted to hell for speaking the above.
|
| Fair enough. I don't think I've ever mentioned Apple by
| name, just participated in threads about them and
| commented on how I disagree about how they do some
| things.
|
| I also went and reread some of my comments, and realized
| I haven't criticized Apple as much here as I'd originally
| thought. Apparently I mostly stick to that in meatspace.
|
| > There are a bunch of brainwashed Apple worshippers
| lurking around here who don't accept any criticism of the
| holy.
|
| As there are everywhere unfortunately. I haven't run into
| many here personally, but have no difficulty believing
| they are here.
|
| > Also, I don't think criticizing HN's algorithm or
| design should warrant being flagged or downvoted, either.
| Downvoting should be reserved for trolling, not
| intelligent protest. I'm also of the opinion that
| downvotes shouldn't be used for well-written
| disagreement, as that creates an echo chamber and
| suppresses non-majority opinions.
|
| I agree here as well. I was more trying to point out the
| combative tone then the content of the text. There was
| also some content that could be interpreted as
| accusations of shilling, which is technically against the
| guidelines.
|
| To be clear -- I don't think your comment was accusing
| people of shilling, just that I can see how people could
| interpret it that way.
|
| Edit: The first quote I took from your comment really
| shouldn't have been there. Sorry about that. I still
| think if you get flagged it's because of the "(Psst..."
| part though. That one does come off as a bit aggressive.
| [deleted]
| dis-sys wrote:
| > Why not look at some of the potential bright sides to this
| for a more nuanced and balanced opinion?
|
| because as a NVIDIA user of the last 20 years, I never saw
| such bright side when it comes to open source.
| arp242 wrote:
| I don't really have an opinion on nVidia, as I haven't dealt
| with any of their products for over a decade; my own problem
| with this is somewhat more abstract: I'm not a big fan of
| this constant drive towards merging all these tech companies
| (or indeed, any company really). Perhaps there are some
| short-term advantages for the ARM platform, but on the long
| term it means a few small tech companies will have all the
| power, which doesn't strike me as a good thing.
| QuixoticQuibit wrote:
| I don't disagree with you, but I see it two ways:
|
| 1. The continued conglomeratization in the tech sector is a
| worrying trend as we see fewer and fewer small players.
|
| 2. Only a large-ish company could provide effective
| competition in the CPU/ISA/architecture space against the
| current x86 duopoly.
| arp242 wrote:
| I'm not so sure about that second point; I don't see why
| an independent ARM couldn't provide an effective
| competition? Server ARMs have been a thing for a while,
| and Apple has been working on ARM macbooks for a while. I
| believe the goal is even to completely displace Intel
| macBooks in favour of the ARM ones eventually.
|
| The big practical issue is probably software
| compatibility and the like, and it seems to me that the
| Apple/macOS adoption will do more for that than nVidia
| ownership.
| therealmarv wrote:
| The problem is more that AMD is sleeping in regard of GPU AI
| and good software interfaces.
| burnte wrote:
| Hardly sleeping, they have a fraction of the revenue and
| profit of NVidia and Intel. Revenue was half of Nvidia,
| profit was 5% of NVidia. Intel is even bigger. They only have
| so much in the way of R&D money.
| reader_mode wrote:
| Seeing their market performance I have no doubt they could
| get capital for R&D
| zrm wrote:
| Their market performance is a relatively recent
| development. R&D has a lead time.
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| ROCm is their product for compute and it still can't run on
| their latest NAVI cards which have been out for over a year
| while CUDA works on every nvidia card on day one.
| adventured wrote:
| > Revenue was half of Nvidia, profit was 5% of NVidia.
|
| For operating income it's 25%, for net income it's 18%; not
| 5%.
|
| Last four quarters operating income for AMD: $884 million
|
| Last four quarters operating income for Nvidia: $3.5
| billion
|
| This speaks to the dramatic improvement in AMD's operating
| condition over the last several years. For contrast, in
| fiscal 2016 AMD's operating income was negative $382
| million. Op income has increased by over 300% in just ~2
| 1/2 years. Increasingly AMD is no longer a profit
| lightweight.
| burnte wrote:
| I was using 2019 numbers rather than last 4 quarters. I
| also talked about revenue and profit, not operating
| anything.
|
| AMD 2019 Revenue: $6.73b [1] NVIDIA 2019 Revenue: $11.72b
| [2]
|
| Roughly half, as I said.
|
| AMD 2019 Profit (as earnings per share): $0.30 [1] NVIDIA
| 2019 Profit (as earnings per share): $6.63 [2]
|
| 4.52%, rounds to 5%, as I said.
|
| However, you still proved my point. Lightweight or not,
| they do not, and have not had the amount of money
| available compared to NVidia and Intel. It's growing,
| they'll be able to continue to invest, and they have an
| advantage in the CPU space that should last for another
| year or two, giving them a great influx of cash, and
| their focus on Zen 2 really paid off allowing them
| greater cash flow to focus on GPUs as well.
|
| [1] https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-
| releases/detail/930/amd... [2]
| https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-
| financia...
| nerderloo wrote:
| Earnings per share is only useful when you look at the
| stock price. Since number of outstanding shares are
| different between two companies, it's incorrect to
| measure company's profit based on EPS.
| adventured wrote:
| > AMD 2019 Profit (as earnings per share): $0.30 [1]
| NVIDIA 2019 Profit (as earnings per share): $6.63 [2]
|
| > 4.52%, rounds to 5%, as I said.
|
| You're misunderstanding how to properly compare
| profitability between two companies.
|
| If Company A has 1 billion shares outstanding and earns
| $0.10 per share, that's $100m in profit.
|
| If Company B has 10 billion shares outstanding and earns
| $0.05 per share, that's $500m in profit.
|
| Company A is not 100% larger on profit just because they
| earned more per share. It depends on how many shares you
| have outstanding, which is what you failed to account
| for.
|
| AMD's profit was not close to 5% of Nvidia's in 2019.
| That is what you directly claimed (as you're saying you
| went by the last full fiscal year).
|
| AMD had $341m in net income in their last full fiscal
| year. Nvidia had $2.8 billion in net income for their
| last full fiscal year. That's 12%, not 5%. And AMD's
| operating income was 22% of Nvidia for the last fiscal
| year.
|
| The trailing four quarters and operating income, is the
| superior way to judge the present condition of the two
| companies, rather than using the prior fiscal year.
| Especially given the rapid ongoing improvement in AMD's
| business. Regardless, even going by the last full fiscal
| year, your 5% figure is still wrong by a large amount.
|
| Operating income is a key measure of profitability and
| it's a far better manner of gauging business
| profitability than net income at this point. That's
| because the modern net income numbers are partially
| useless as they will include such things as asset
| gains/losses during the quarter. If you want to read up
| more on it, Warren Buffett has pointed out the absurdity
| of this approach on numerous occasions (if Berkshire's
| portfolio goes up a lot, they have to report that as net
| income, even though it wasn't a real profit generation
| event).
|
| I didn't say anything refuting your revenue figures,
| because I wasn't refuting them. I'm not sure why you
| mention that.
| slavik81 wrote:
| Aside from Navi support, which has already been mentioned,
| what would you like to see?
| Aeolun wrote:
| It is frankly amazing AMD can keep up at all.
| RantyDave wrote:
| They are doing something very right over there.
| twblalock wrote:
| On the other hand, if Nvidia wants ARM to succeed (and why else
| would they acquire it?), they can be a source of more
| competition in the CPU market.
|
| I don't really see how this deal makes the CPU market worse --
| wasn't the ARM market for mobile devices basically dominated by
| Qualcomm for years? Plus, the other existing ARM licensees
| don't seem to be impacted. On the other hand, I do see a lot of
| potential if Nvidia is serious about innovating in the CPU
| space.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Lol with the italics awful and your "seems to me" angle
| starpilot wrote:
| Hyperbole is how you get upvotes. No one really reacts to
| wishy-washy answers, it's the "OMG world is ending"
| provocative stuff that gets people engaged.
| mikorym wrote:
| Wow, didn't someone call this out recently on HN? I mean, someone
| mentioned that this was going to happen. (Or rather, feared that
| this was the direction things were going in.)
|
| On a different topic, how would this influence Raspberry Pis
| going forward?
| axaxs wrote:
| This seems fair, as long as it stays true(regarding open
| licensing and neutrality). I've mentioned before, I think this
| will ultimately be a good thing. NVidia has the gpu chops to
| really amp up the reference implementation, which is a good thing
| for competition in the mobile, settop, and perhaps even desktop
| space.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| No, what everyone thinks will happen is a pretend open ARM
| architecture and Nvidia CPUs dominating. Nvidia isn't going to
| license the best GPU features they start adding.
|
| It's an excellent deal for NVIDIA of course, I'm certain they
| intend to make the chips they produce much faster than the ones
| they license (if they even ever release another open design) to
| the point where buying CPUs from Nvidia might be they only game
| in town. We'll have to see but this is what I expect to happen.
| fluffything wrote:
| That's not what everyone thinks.
|
| NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own
| ARM CPUs with an unlimited ARM license.
|
| ARM doesn't give NVIDIA a world-class CPU team like apple's,
| amazon's or fujitsu. ARM own cores are "meh" at best. Buying
| such a team, would also have been much cheaper than 40b$.
|
| Mobile ARM chips are meh, but nvidia doesn't have GPUs for
| that segment, and their current architectures probably don't
| work well there. The only ARM chips that are ok-ish are
| embedded/IoT at < 1W power envelope. It would probably take
| nvidia 10 years to develop GPUs for that segment, the margins
| on that segment are razor thin (0.10$ is the cost of a full
| SoC on that segment), and it is unclear whether applications
| on that segment need GPUs (your toaster certainly does not).
|
| The UK appears to require huge R&D investments in ARM to
| allow the sale. And ARMs bottom line is 300million $/year in
| revenue, which is peanuts for nvidia.
|
| So if anything, ARM has a lot to win here with nvidia pumping
| in money like crazy to try to improve ARM's CPU offering. Yet
| this all seem super-risky because at the segments ARM is
| competing at, RISC-V competes as well, and without royalties.
| It is hard to compete against something that's free, even if
| it is slightly less good. And chances are that over the next
| 10 years RISC-V will have much better cores (NVIDIA
| themselves started replacing ARM cores with RISC-V cores in
| their GPUs years ago already...).
|
| Either way, the claim that it is obvious to everybody what
| the 3D-chess being played here is false. To me this looks
| like a bad buy for nvidia. They could have paid 1 billion for
| a world class CPU team and just continue to license ARM
| and/or switch to RISC-V chips. Instead they are spending 40
| billion in a company that makes 300 million a year, makes
| meh-cpus, is heavily regulated in the UK and the world, has
| problems with China due to being in the West, have to invest
| in the UK which is leaving the EU in a couple of weeks, etc.
| yvdriess wrote:
| > NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their
| own ARM CPUs with an unlimited ARM license.
|
| Famously, the Tegra SoCs, as used in the Nintendo Switch.
| Followerer wrote:
| No. Precisely the Tegra SoC within the Nintendo Switch
| (X1) uses ARM Cores. Specifically A57 and A53. NVIDIA's
| project to develop their own v8.2 ARM-based chip is
| called Denver.
| axaxs wrote:
| If you only look at today's numbers, it doesn't make a ton
| of sense. But looking at the market, the world is moving
| -more- towards ARM, not away. The last couple years have
| given us ARM in a gaming console, ARM in mainstream
| laptops, ARM in the datacenter. Especially as the world
| strives to go 'carbon neutral', ARM kills everything from
| Intel/AMD. So with that in mind, I don't think it's a bad
| buy, but time will tell.
|
| RISC-V and ARM can coexist, but RISC-V in the mainstream is
| a far away due to nothing more than momentum. People won't
| even touch Intel in a mobile device anymore, not just
| because of power usage, but software compatibility.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| It's a bad buy unless they plan to use this to leverage a
| better position. Your argument is that ARM is essentially
| worthless to NVIDIA or at least _extremely_ high $40bn bet.
| I guess only time will tell but I think NVIDIA intend to
| make their money back on this purchase and that won't be
| through the current licensing model (as your own figures
| show).
| rrss wrote:
| > ARM doesn't give NVIDIA a world-class CPU team like
| apple's, amazon's or fujitsu.
|
| Are you referring to the Graviton2 for Amazon? If so, you
| might be interested to learn that ARM designed the cores in
| that chip.
|
| > (NVIDIA themselves started replacing ARM cores with
| RISC-V cores in their GPUs years ago already...).
|
| The only info on this I'm aware of is https://riscv.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDI..., which says
| nvidia is replacing some internal proprietary RISC ISA with
| RISC-V, not replacing ARM with RISC-V.
| axaxs wrote:
| Perhaps not. I mean AMD and soon Intel basically compete with
| themselves by pushing advances in both discrete GPU and APU
| at the same time, one negating the need for the other.
|
| I'm not claiming I'm right and you're wrong, of course. I
| just think it's unfair to make negative assumptions at this
| point, so wanted to paint a possible good thing.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Agree, Nvidia's track record on opening things up is pretty
| bad. They are very good at business though!
| gumby wrote:
| Amidst all the hand-wringing: RISC-V is at least a decade away
| (at current pace + ARM's own example). But what if Google bought
| AMD and put TPUs on the die?
| askvictor wrote:
| Because so many of Google's acquisitions have ended up doing
| well...
| sib wrote:
| Android, YouTube, Google Maps, DoubleClick, Applied Semantics
| (became AdSense), DeepMind, Urchin, ITA Software, etc.
|
| I think Google has done ok.
| dbcooper wrote:
| Has it had any successes with hardware acquisitions?
| Zigurd wrote:
| Google has steadily gained smart home device market share
| vs a very good competitor and is now the dominant player.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| AMD's x86 licence isn't transferrable. To acquire them is to
| destroy their value.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| This sort of stuff really isn't going to produce long term
| benefits for humanity is it.
|
| Does anyone know if or how Apple will be affected by this? What
| are the licensing agreements on the ISA?
| gumby wrote:
| ARM and Apple go way back (Apple was one of the three original
| consortium members who founded ARM). I am sure they pay a flat
| fee and have freedom to do whatever they like (probably other
| than sub licensing).
|
| Owning ARM would make no sense for them as they would gain no
| IP but would have to deal with antitrust which would force them
| to continue licensing the ip to others, which is not a business
| they are in.
|
| If ARM vanished tomorrow I doubt it would affect apple's
| business at all.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| This has been out there in the news for well over a month, I
| guess I don't understand why Apple didn't try to make a bid for
| ARM? Or why Apple didn't try to set up some sort of independent
| holding company or consortium to buy ARM. They definitely have
| the money and clout to have done something like that.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I guess Apple have a perpetual ARM ISA license. They haven't
| used the CPU designs from ARM for many years.
| dharma1 wrote:
| I doubt Apple's arm license will be affected. But I think they
| will be getting tougher competition in the sense that Android
| phones will be getting a fair bit better now - most of them
| will be using super well integrated Nvidia GPU/ML chips in the
| future because of this deal.
|
| I think it will also bring Google and Nvidia closer together
| deafcalculus wrote:
| nVidia clearly wants to compete with Intel in data centers. But
| how does buying ARM help with that? They already have an
| architectural license.
|
| Right now, I can see nVidia replacing Mali smartphone GPUs in low
| to mid-end Exynos SoCs and the like. But it's not like nVidia to
| want to be in that low-margin area.
| fluffything wrote:
| > I can see nVidia replacing Mali smartphone GPUs in low to
| mid-end Exynos SoCs and the like.
|
| Replacing these with what? What nvidia gpus can operate at that
| power envelope ?
| deafcalculus wrote:
| Lower power versions of what they put in Tegra / Switch? Or
| perhaps they can whip up something in 1-2 years. I'd be
| astonished if nVidia doesn't take any interest in smartphone
| GPUs after this acquisition.
| fluffything wrote:
| A nintendo switch has ~2 hours of battery...
|
| There is a big difference between having interest in a
| market, and being able to compete in it. There are also
| many trade-offs.
|
| Nobody has designed yet a GPU architecture that works at
| all from 500W HPC clusters to sub 1W embedded/IoT systems,
| much less that works well to be a market leader in all
| segments. So AFAICT whether this is even possible is an
| open research problem. If this were possible, there would
| already be nvidia GPUs at least in some smartphones and IoT
| devices.
| m0zg wrote:
| On the one hand, this is bad news - I would prefer ARM to remain
| independent. But on the other, from a purely selfish standpoint,
| NVIDIA will likely lean on Apple pretty hard to get its GPUs into
| Apple devices again, which bodes well for GPGPU and deep learning
| applications.
|
| Apple is probably putting together a RISC-V hardware group as we
| speak. The Jobs ethos will not allow them to depend this heavily
| on somebody else for such a critical technology.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| A few weeks ago there were rumors that ARM was looking to be
| sold to Apple and Apple turned them down. If an NVIDIA
| acquisition is such a deal breaker for Apple, why wouldn't they
| have just acquired ARM to begin with?
| patfla wrote:
| How does this get past the FTC? Oh right, it's been a dead letter
| since the Reagan administration. Monopoly 'R Us.
|
| Never mind the FTC - the rest of the semiconductor industry has
| to be [very] strongly opposed.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| https://semiwiki.com/ip/287846-tears-in-the-rain-arm-and-chi...
|
| Does this mean Nvidia will have to deal with the hot mess at
| China ARM?
| justincormack wrote:
| Allegedly it has been sorted, before this deal was announced.
| No idea how.
| DCKing wrote:
| This is terrible. Not really just because of Nvidia - which has a
| lot of problems I've previously commented on the rumors of this
| [1] - but Nvidia's ownership completely changes ARM's incentives.
|
| ARM created a business model for itself where they had to act as
| a "BDFL" for the ARM architecture and IP. They made an
| architecture, CPU designs, and GPU designs for others. They had
| no stake in the chip making game, and they had others - Samsung,
| Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Huawei, Mediatek, Rockchip and loads of
| others make the chip. Their business model was to make the ARM
| ecosystem accessible for as many companies as possible, so they
| could sell as many licenses as possible. In that way, ARM's
| business model enabled a very diverse and thriving ARM market. I
| think this is the _sole_ reason we see ARM eating the chip world
| today.
|
| This business model would continue to work perfectly fine as a
| privately held company, or being owned by a faceless investor
| company that wants you to make as much money as possible. But
| it's not fine if you are owned by a company that wants to use you
| to control their own position in the chip market. There is no way
| Nvidia (any other chip company, but as laid out previously Nvidia
| might even be more concerning) will spend 40 billion on this
| without them deliberately or inadvertently destroying ARM's open
| CPU and GPU ecosystem. Will Nvidia allow selling ARM licenses to
| competitors of Nvidia's business? Will Nvidia reserve ARM's best
| IP as a selling point for its own chips? Will Nvidia allow Mali
| to continue existing? Any innovations ARM made previously it sold
| to anyone mostly indiscriminatorily (outside of legal
| restrictions), but now every time the question must be asked
| "does Nvidia have a better propietary purpose for this?". For any
| ARM chip maker the situation will be that Nvidia is both your
| ruthless competitor, but it also sells you the IP you need to
| build your chips.
|
| EDIT: ARM's interests up to last week were to create and empower
| as many competitors for Nvidia as possible. They were good at
| that and was the root of the success of the ARM ecosystem. That
| incentive is completely gone now.
|
| Unless Nvidia leaves ARM alone (and why would they spend $40B on
| that??), this has got to be the beginning of the end of ARM's
| golden age.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24010821
| klelatti wrote:
| Precisely, plus just consider the information that Nvidia will
| have on all its competitors who use Arm IP.
|
| - It will know of their product plans (as they will need to buy
| licenses for new products).
|
| - It will know their sales volumes by product (as they will
| need to pay fees for each Arm CPU sold).
|
| - If they need technical help from Arm in designing a new SoC
| then the details of that engagement will be available to
| Nvidia.
|
| How does this not give Nvidia an completely unfair advantage?
| DCKing wrote:
| I wouldn't use the term "unfair" here. There's also just
| three x86 licensees in the world and people don't usually
| consider that an affront. You buy, you control, that's how
| the world works.
|
| But I do think it's important that we recognize that we're
| going from a position of tremendous competitiveness to a much
| less competitive situation. And that will be a situation
| where ARM will be tightly controlled and much less inducive
| to the innovation we've seen in the last years.
| klelatti wrote:
| That's a good point. I guess it is "unfair" but that isn't
| necessarily an argument against it - as you say lots of
| things are unfair.
|
| But, given the high market share of Arm in several markets
| allowing one firm the ability to use that market share to
| gain competitive advantage in related markets seems to me
| to be deeply problematic.
| i386 wrote:
| > You buy, you control, that's how the world works.
|
| Only in countries with poor regulators like the states does
| it work like this.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > There's also just three x86 licensees in the world and
| people don't usually consider that an affront.
|
| Hi! Counterexample here.
| bigyikes wrote:
| Noob question: how does the x86 licensing work? Does Intel
| still own the rights? Why would they license to AMD? Why
| don't they license to others?
| VectorLock wrote:
| In simplest terms, the AMD & Intel perpetual license goes
| all the way back to the early 80s and Intel has tried to
| legally harangue their way out of it ever since, with
| limited success.
| klelatti wrote:
| Very briefly:
|
| - They don't license because they can make a lot more
| money manufacturing the chips themselves.
|
| - AMD also has the right to x86 because Intel originally
| allowed them to build x86 compatible chips (some
| customers insisted on a 'second source' for cpus) and
| following legal action and settlements between the two
| companies over the years there is now a comprehensive
| cross licensing agreement in place. [1]
|
| - Note that AMD actually designed the 64 bit version x86
| that is used in most laptops / desktops and servers these
| days.
|
| [1] https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-
| shilov/amd-clar...
| tboerstad wrote:
| The three licensees would be Intel, AMD and VIA
| dralley wrote:
| VIA doesn't have a license for the AMD64 instruction set,
| however. Intel and AMD did a cross-licensing deal so they
| have a co-equal position.
| StillBored wrote:
| Which hasn't kept them from building 64-bit cores with
| everything including AVX-512..
|
| https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3099/centaur-unveils-its-
| new-...
|
| IIRC you watch the "Rise of the Centaur" documentary they
| talk about the Intel lawsuit, and the corresponding
| counter suit that they won. Which makes the whole thing
| sound like MAD.
|
| More interesting there is
| https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/zhaoxin/kaixian
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Thankfully those patents are about to expire.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _There is no way Nvidia will spend 40 billion on this without
| them deliberately or inadvertently destroy ARM 's open CPU and
| GPU ecosystem_
|
| But why would a company spend that much money to buy a company
| and destroy it afterwards?
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| https://songma.github.io/files/cem_killeracquisitions.pdf
| batmansmk wrote:
| Oracle and Sun at $8B.
| bwanab wrote:
| It's not going to destroy the business it's going to destroy
| the current business model. The point is that the only way
| this deal can make sense for Nvidia, is to use ARM's IP as a
| competitive advantage over other competitors. Until now,
| ARM's value proposition has been IP neutrality for the
| various user companies.
| DCKing wrote:
| Nvidia will certainly try to get as much money out of ARM's
| R&D capabilities, existing IP, and future roadmap as they
| can. They will get their money's worth - at worst they will
| fail trying. In that sense, they won't destroy "ARM the
| company" or "ARM the IP". But Nvidia will have no interest in
| maintaining ARM's business model whereby ARM fosters a
| community of Nvidia competitors - they have an interest to
| the opposite. Therefore they very likely will destroy "ARM
| the ecosystem".
| melbourne_mat wrote:
| I think it's wonderful news that Arm is joining the ranks of
| giant American tech oligopolies. This is a win for freedom and
| increases prosperity for all.
|
| /s
| oldschoolrobot wrote:
| exactly
| edderly wrote:
| I agree with the general sentiment here, but ARM is not exactly
| Snow White. It's an open secret that ARM was (and still is)
| selling the CPU design at a discount if you integrated their
| Mali (GPU). This isn't relevant to Nvidia today, but it was
| when they were in the mobile GPU space. Also this caused
| obvious problems for IMGtec and other smaller GPU players like
| Vivante.
| klelatti wrote:
| Bundling is not necessarily problematic: it happens at your
| local supermarket all the time!
|
| What would be an issue would be if Arm used their market
| power in CPUs to try to control the GPU market - e.g. you
| can't have the latest CPU unless you buy a Mali GPU with it.
| hajile wrote:
| Bundling isn't necessarily anti-competitive provided ARM
| isn't taking a loss selling their chip. I'll admit that
| things aren't actually free-market here because copyright and
| patent monopolies apply.
|
| There are three possibilities here: ARM's design is
| approximately the same as the competitory, ARM's design is
| inferior to the competitor, and ARM's design is superior to
| the competitor.
|
| If faced with two equivalent products, staying with the same
| supplier for both is best (especially in this case where the
| IP isn't supply-limited). The discount means a reduction in
| costs to make the device. Instead of ARM making a larger
| profit, their customers keep more of their money. In turn,
| the super-competitive smartphone market means those savings
| will directly go to customers.
|
| In cases where ARM's design is superior, why would they
| bundle? If they did, getting a superior product at an even
| lower price once again just means less money going to the big
| corporation and more money that stays in the consumer's
| pocket.
|
| The final case is where ARM has an inferior design. I want to
| sell the most performance/features for the price so I can
| sell more phones. I have 2 choices: slight discount on the
| CPU but bundled with an inferior GPU or full price for the
| CPU and full price for a superior GPU. The first option
| lowers phone price. The second option offers better features
| and performance. For the high-end market, I'm definitely not
| going with the discount because peak performance reigns
| supreme. In the lesser markets, its a calculation of price
| for total performance and the risk that consumers might
| prefer an extra few FPS for the cost of another few dollars.
|
| Finally, there are a couple small players like Vivante or
| Imagination Technologies, but the remaining competitors in
| the space (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc) aren't
| going to be driven under by bundle deals, so bundling seems
| to be pretty much all upside for consumers who stand to save
| money as a result.
| Followerer wrote:
| " It's an open secret that ARM was (and still is) selling the
| CPU design at a discount if you integrated their Mali (GPU)."
|
| Why is that bad? Not only it's common business practice (the
| more you buy from us, the cheaper we sell), it also makes
| sense from the support perspective. Support the integration
| between their cores and a different GPU would be more work
| for them than integration of their cores with their own GPUs.
|
| That's why companies expand to adjacent markets: efficiency.
|
| A completely different thing would be to say: "if you want
| our latest AXX core, you _have_ to buy our latest Mali GPU ".
| That's bundling, and that's illegal.
| DCKing wrote:
| I'm sure that ARM is not a saint here in the sense that they
| would also have an incentive to milk their licensees as much
| as possible. Now they will keep having that incentive, but
| also the terrible incentive to actively outcompete their
| licensees which is much worse.
| 013a wrote:
| I tend to agree, but there may be another angle to this which
| could prove beneficial to consumers. Right now, the only ARM
| chips which are actually competitive with desktop chips are
| from Apple, and are obviously very proprietary. If this
| acquisition enables Nvidia to begin producing ARM chips at the
| same level as Apple (somehow, who's to say how, that's on them)
| then that would help disrupt the AMD/Intel duopoly on Windows.
| Its been a decade; Qualcomm has had the time to try and compete
| here, and has failed miserably.
|
| I doubt Nvidia would substantially disrupt or cancel licensing
| to the many third-rate chip designers you listed. But, if they
| can leverage this acquisition to build Windows/Linux CPUs that
| can actually compete with AMD and Intel, that would be a win
| for consumers. And Nvidia has shown interest in this in the
| past.
|
| Yes, its a massive disruption to the status quo. But it may be
| a good one for consumers.
| klelatti wrote:
| But Nvidia has an Arm architecture license already - the same
| as Apple - so can build Arm chips to whatever design it wants
| (and it does in Tegra).
|
| This is nothing to do with extending Nvidia's ability to use
| Arm IP in its own products.
| 013a wrote:
| Nvidia is a total powerhouse when it comes to chip design.
| Most people here are looking at this from the angle of "how
| does ARM benefit Nvidia", but I think its more valuable to
| consider "how does Nvidia benefit ARM". In 2020, given what
| we know about Ampere, I really don't think there's another
| company out there with better expertise in microprocessor
| design (but, to be fair, lets say top 3 next to Apple and
| AMD). Now, they have more of the stack in-house, which may
| help produce better chips.
|
| Yes, ARM mostly just does licensing, but it may turn out
| that this acquisition gives Nvidia positive influence over
| future ISA and fundamental design changes which emerge from
| their own experience building microprocessors.
|
| Maybe that just benefits Nvidia, or maybe all of their
| licenses; I don't know. But, I think the high price of this
| acquisition should signal that Nvidia wants ARM for more
| than just collecting royalties (or, jesus, the people here
| who think they're going to cancel the licenses or
| something, that's a wild prediction).
|
| The other important point is Mali, which has a very obvious
| and natural synergy with Nvidia's wheelhouse. Another
| example of Nvidia making ARM better; Nvidia is the leader
| in graphics, this is no argument, so their ability to
| positively influence Mali (whether by actually improving
| it, or replacing it with something GeForce) may be
| beneficial to the OEMs who use it.
| DCKing wrote:
| > Nvidia is a total powerhouse when it comes to chip
| design. Most people here are looking at this from the
| angle of "how does ARM benefit Nvidia", but I think its
| more valuable to consider "how does Nvidia benefit ARM".
| In 2020, given what we know about Ampere, I really don't
| think there's another company out there with better
| expertise in microprocessor design (but, to be fair, lets
| say top 3 next to Apple and AMD). Now, they have more of
| the stack in-house, which may help produce better chips.
|
| In my view you have this completely backwards. I think
| the opposite is true and that Nvidia is not a powerhouse
| CPU designer at all. They make extremely impressive GPUs
| certainly, but that does not automatically translate to
| great capabilities in CPUs. In terms of CPUs they have so
| far either used standard ARM designs and have attempted
| their own Project Denver custom architecture which are
| not bad but have not impressed CPU wise either. In this
| area Nvidia would _need_ ARM - primarily for themselves.
|
| > The other important point is Mali, which has a very
| obvious and natural synergy with Nvidia's wheelhouse.
| Another example of Nvidia making ARM better; Nvidia is
| the leader in graphics, this is no argument, so their
| ability to positively influence Mali (whether by actually
| improving it, or replacing it with something GeForce) may
| be beneficial to the OEMs who use it.
|
| I know you're only entertaining the thought, but the
| image of Nvidia shipping HDL designs of Geforce IP to
| Samsung or Mediatek in the short term future seems
| completely alien to me. Things would need to change
| drastically at Nvidia for them to ever do this.
|
| Certainly Nvidia has the capabilities to sell way better
| graphics to the ARM ecosystem, and very likely only one
| line of GPUs can survive, but it just seems _extremely_
| unlike Nvidia to ever license Geforce IP to their
| competitors.
| easde wrote:
| Nvidia actually did try to license out its GPU IP a few
| years back: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7083/nvidia-
| to-license-kepler...
|
| I don't believe they ever closed a deal, but clearly
| Nvidia had some interest in becoming an IP vendor.
| Perhaps the terms were too onerous or the price too high.
| smolder wrote:
| AMDs answer to Ampere won't be shabby based on info about
| next generation consoles. They're also widening the gap
| on CPUs with Zen to where ARM won't have an easy time
| making inroads on server/workstation.
|
| On the Intel side, the process obstacles have been
| tragic, but they have plenty of hot products and plenty
| of x86 market share to lose, or in other words, plenty of
| time to recover CPU performance dominance.
| 013a wrote:
| I hope so. And when AMD's graphics cards and Intel's
| processors become good again, they're welcome to reclaim
| a top spot. But, until then, they are woefully behind.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| perhaps they can be part of an 'early insider' program to
| get access to the next gen architecture improvements. and
| use that to steer towards integrating their own gpus for a
| premium instead of the dinky little Malis.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| To play devil's advocate a bit, are nVidia's incentives
| necessarily so different? Their goal will be to make as much
| money as possible, and it's clear that licensing has been a
| winning strategy for ARM.
|
| Samsung comes to mind as another company that makes their own
| TVs, phones, SSDs, ect., but is also perfectly happy to license
| the underlying screens and chips in those products to other
| companies. From my vantage point, the setup seems to be working
| well?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Screen manufacture is a highly competitive market. ARM
| licensing isn't.
| DCKing wrote:
| It could be Nvidia just wants ARM's profits and leave them
| alone, but I don't understand why Nvidia would spend 40
| billion dollars on that. They spend 40 billion on the control
| of a company, why would they do that if they just would leave
| them be? Surely they want to exercise that control in some
| way for their own goals. Especially a company like Nvidia
| which (in my linked comment) has a proven track record of not
| understanding how to collaborate with others.
|
| EDIT: Let's be clear that ARM's incentive last week was to
| create and empower as many competitors for Nvidia as
| possible. They were good at that and was the root of the
| success of the ARM ecosystem. That incentive is completely
| gone now.
|
| I'm guessing Samsung has a track record where I'd feel a
| little more confidence in the situation if they'd taken over
| ARM here, but in general ARM's sale to Softbank and thereby
| its exposure to lesser competitive interests has been
| terrible. They could have remained a private company.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > They spend 40 billion on the control of a company, why
| would they do that if they just would leave them be?
|
| Well, the optimistic reason would be talent-share. nVidia
| has a lot of chip designers, and ARM has a lot of chip
| designers, and having all of them under one organization
| where they can share discoveries, research and ideas could
| benefit all of nVidia's products.
| DCKing wrote:
| All I can say to that is that I don't share your
| optimism. Explaining this as an acquihire sounds nice,
| but that seems a thin explanation of this purchase given
| the key role ARM has for many of Nvidia's competitors and
| the ludicrous amount of money Nvidia put on the table
| here. We'll see what the future holds - I certainly hope
| the open ecosystem can survive.
| klelatti wrote:
| How do we know that Samsung hasn't stifled some potential
| competitors by refusing to sell them screens or by selling
| them an inferior product?
| baddox wrote:
| Samsung makes (excellent) screens for iPhones, which are
| huge competitors to Samsung's own flagship phones, but
| Samsung still seems happy to take the profits from the
| screen sales. If there are smaller potential competitors
| that Samsung won't work with it's most likely because the
| scale is too small to be in their economic interest, not
| because they're rejecting profits in order to stifle
| potential competitors.
| simias wrote:
| iPhones sell massively well though, to the point where it
| would be a big loss if Apple went to another company for
| their screens. You just can't screw with a company the
| size of Apple without consequences. It's not like they'd
| go "oh no, no more iPhone now I guess :'(" if Samsung
| decided not to sell them screens anymore.
|
| The problem is more with smaller companies that could be
| destroyed before they even get a chance to compete. Those
| can be bullied pretty easily by a company the size of
| Samsung.
| baddox wrote:
| I don't really see how it works both ways. It's hard to
| imagine a bigger scarier competitor to Samsung than the
| Apple iPhone, yet we agree Samsung is happy selling
| screens to Apple.
| bavell wrote:
| Because there are a lot more Androids and other devices
| that need screens. If they didn't make screens for Apple,
| a competitor would.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Apple is a much bigger company than Samsung, they can't
| realistically turn down a contract that big when LG is
| lying in wait to take all that money.
| sfifs wrote:
| Not really. Revenues and Profits of Samsung group and
| Apple are roughly comparable and in many ways Samsung's
| revenue streams are more diversified and sustainable..
| stock valuation notwithstanding.
| runeks wrote:
| > Samsung makes (excellent) screens for iPhones, which
| are huge competitors to Samsung's own flagship phones,
| but Samsung still seems happy to take the profits from
| the screen sales.
|
| What markup does Apple pay for Samsung OLED displays
| compared to Samsung's other OLED customers? I think this
| is highly relevant if you want to use it as an example.
| Because if the markup for Apple is 5x that of other
| buyers of Samsung OLED displays then you certainly can't
| say Samsung is "happy" to sell them to Apple.
|
| Same for nVidia-owned-ARM: if they're happy to sell ARM
| licenses at 5x the previous price, then that will surely
| increase sales for nVidia's own chips. I guess my overall
| point is: a sufficiently high asking price is equivalent
| to a refusal to sell.
| paulmd wrote:
| demanding information that you know nobody will be able
| to produce is an unethical debating tactic.
|
| obviously nobody but Samsung and their customers will
| know that information, and anyone who could reveal it is
| under NDA.
|
| Apparently the prices are good enough that Apple doesn't
| go elsewhere.
| hajile wrote:
| Resources are limited. If a Samsung phone and a Motorola
| phone need the same screen and there's not enough to go
| around, what happens?
|
| A bidding war of course.
|
| On the surface, it's capitalism at work. In reality,
| Samsung winds up in a no-lose situation. If Motorola wins,
| Samsung gets bigger margins due to the battle. If Samsung
| wins, they play "pass around the money" with their
| accountants, but their only actual costs are those of
| production.
|
| I'd note that chaebol wouldn't exist in a free market. They
| rely on corruption of the Korean government.
| runeks wrote:
| The root problem here is the concept of patents -- at least as
| far as I can see.
|
| If patents did not exist, and nVidia were to close down ARM and
| tell people " _no more ARM GPUs; only nVidia GPUs from now on_ ",
| then a competitor who offers ARM-compatible ISAs would quickly
| appear. But in the real world, nVidia just bought the monopoly
| rights to sue such a competitor out of existence.
|
| It's really no wonder nVidia did this given the profits they can
| extract from this monopoly (on the ARM ISA).
| sizzle wrote:
| Holy shit this is huge. Did anyone see this coming?!?
| jbotz wrote:
| There is now but one choice... RISC-V, full throttle.
| redwood wrote:
| The British should never have allowed foreign ownership of their
| core tech
| bencollier49 wrote:
| I'm so exercised about this that I'm setting up a think tank to
| actively discuss UK control of critical tech (and "golden
| geese" as per others in this thread). If you're in tech and
| have a problem with this, please drop me a line, I'm
| @bencollier on Twitter.
| hajile wrote:
| Britain and the US are politically, and economically entwined
| with each other. As a country, keeping core technology at home
| is tied to defense (don't buy your guns from your competitor).
| If they don't intend to go to war with the US, then there isn't
| any real defense loss (I'd also point out that making IP
| "blueprints" for a core is different from manufacturing the
| core itself). If Britain were to have a real issue, it would be
| the US locking down F35 jets they sell to their allies.
| ranbumo wrote:
| Yes. It'd have been reasonable to block sales to non eu parties
| for national security reasons.
|
| Now arm is yet another US company.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Isn't the UK leaving the EU?
| kzrdude wrote:
| That just means that their home/core market got smaller, so
| they should have protected ARM to stay inside EU the UK,
| then.
| mkl wrote:
| Yes, but the Brexit referendum was only 1 month before
| SoftBank acquired Arm Holdings. The deal was probably
| already in progress, and finalised before the UK had any
| real policies about Brexit, so EU requirements would have
| been reasonable if decided ahed of time. But the timing may
| also explain the lack of any national security focused
| requirement (general confusion).
| alphachloride wrote:
| I hope the stonks go up
| shmerl wrote:
| That's nasty Nvidia, very nasty. But on the other hand might be
| it will be a motivation for everyone to use ARM less.
|
| I quite expect AMD for example to drop ARM chips from their
| hardware. Others should also follow suit. Nvidia is an awful
| steward for ARM.
| bitxbit wrote:
| They need to block this deal. A real clean case.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Who needs to block it? And why is it a clean case?
| zeouter wrote:
| Eeek. My gut reaction to think is.. could we have less powerful
| conglomerates.. please?
| bleepblorp wrote:
| This isn't going to do good things for anyone who doesn't own a
| lot of Nvidia stock.
|
| This is going to do especially bad things for anyone who needs to
| buy a cell phone or the SoC that powers one. There's no real
| alternative to ARM-based phone SoCs. Given Nvidia's business
| practices, any manufacturer who doesn't already have a perpetual
| ARM license should expect to have to pay a lot more money into
| Jensen Huang's retirement fund going forward. These costs will be
| passed on to consumers and will also provide an avenue for
| perpetual license holders to raise their consumer prices to
| match.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| > _This isn 't going to do good things for anyone who doesn't
| own a lot of Nvidia stock._
|
| If it makes you feel any better, studies of acquisitions show
| that most of them are duds and destroy acquirer shareholder
| value.
| imtringued wrote:
| Well, the commenter is actively worried about Nvidia
| destroying shareholder value. If you destroy ARM in the
| process of acquiring it the combined company will be worth
| less in the long run. If the acquisition was actually
| motivated by synergy then Nvidia could have gotten away with
| a much cheaper license from ARM.
| bgorman wrote:
| Android worked on x86 and MIPS in the past, it could presumably
| be ported to work with RISC-V
| saagarjha wrote:
| It might pretty much work today, perhaps with a few config
| file changes.
| Zigurd wrote:
| MIPS support was removed from the Android NDK, though older
| versions of the NDK stand a good chance of working, still. So
| app developers with components needing the NDK support have a
| bit of work to remain compatible.
| bleepblorp wrote:
| Android still works on x86-64; indeed there are quite a few
| actively maintained x86-64 Android ports that are used, both
| on bare metal PCs and virtualized, for various purposes.
|
| The problem is that there are no x86 SoCs that are
| sufficiently power efficient to be battery-life competitive
| with ARM SoCs in phones.
| seizethegdgap wrote:
| Can confirm, just spun up Bliss OS on my Surface Book. Not
| at all the smoothest experience I've ever had using an
| Android tablet, but it's nice.
| janoc wrote:
| You would first need an actual working RISC-V silicon that it
| would be worth porting to. Not the essentially demo chips
| with poor performance that are around now.
|
| RISV-V is a lot of talk and hype but the actual silicon that
| you could buy and implement into a product is hard to come
| by. With the exception of a few small microcontroller efforts
| (GigaDevice, Sipeed).
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Many various reasons for this but one perspective I am curious
| about is how much this is actually a defensive move against
| Intel, because nVidia knows Intel is busy developing dedicated
| graphics via Xe, and if nVidia just allows that to continue they
| are going to find themselves simultaneously competing with and
| dependent on a vendor that owns the whole stack that their
| platform depends on. It is not a place I would want to be, even
| accounting for how incompetent Intel seems to have been for the
| last 10 years.
|
| Edit: yes I meant nVidia not AMD!
| fluffything wrote:
| Nvidia could have bought a world-class CPU architects team, and
| build their own ARM or RISC-V chips (NVIDIA has an infinite ARM
| license already).
| Tehdasi wrote:
| Intel has been promising high-end graphics for decades, and
| delivering low end integrated graphics as a feature for their
| CPUs. Which makes sense, the market for CPUs is worth more than
| the market for game oriented GPUs. The rise of GPUs used in AI
| might change this calculation, but I doubt it. I suspect that
| nVidia just would like to move into the CPU market.
| jml7c5 wrote:
| How does AMD enter into this? Did you mean Nvidia?
| zmmmmm wrote:
| ouch I wrote a whole comment and systematically replaced
| Nvidia with AMD ... kind of impressive.
|
| Thanks!
| yogrish wrote:
| SoftBank isa true banking company .. invested (Bought) in ARM and
| selling it now for meagre profit. A company that says it has 300
| year vision
| krick wrote:
| We've been repeating the word "bad" for the last couple of weeks
| here, but I don't really remember any insights on what can happen
| long term (and I'm asking, because I have absolutely no idea). I
| mean, let's suppose relationships with Qualcomm don't work out
| (which we all kind of suspect already). What's the alternative?
| Is it actually possible to create another competitive
| architecture at this point? Does it take 5, 10 years? Is there
| even a choice for some other (really big) company, that doesn't
| want to depend on NVIDIA?
| walterbell wrote:
| Talking points from the founders of Arm & Nvidia:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its-...
|
| _> Huang told me that first thing that the combined company will
| do is to, "bring NVIDIA technology through Arm's vast network."
| So I'd expect NVIDIA GPU and NPU IP to become available quickly
| to smartphone, tablet, TV and automobile SoC providers as quickly
| as possible._
|
| _> Arm CEO Simon Segars framed it well when he told me, "We 're
| moving into a world where software doesn't just run in one place.
| Your application today might run in the cloud, it might run on
| your phone, and there might be some embedded application running
| on a device, but I think increasingly and with the rollout of 5g
| and with some of the technologies that Jensen was just talking
| about this kind of application will become spread across all of
| those places. Delivering that and managing that there's a huge
| task to do."_
|
| _> Huang ... "We 're about to enter a phase, where we're going
| to create an internet that is thousands of times bigger than the
| internet that we enjoy today. A lot of people don't realize this.
| And so, so we would like to create a computing company for this
| age of AI."_
| mlindner wrote:
| Arm CEO really doesn't understand what's going on. There is no
| future where everything runs on the cloud. That simply cannot
| happen for legal reasons. Additionally the internet is getting
| more balkanized and that further is against the idea of the
| cloud. AI will not be running in the cloud, it will be running
| locally. Apple sees this but many others don't yet. You only
| run AI in the cloud if you want to monetize it with
| advertising.
| scalablenotions wrote:
| So all these AI SAAS companies are fake?
| topspin wrote:
| My instincts are telling me this is smoke and mirrors to
| rationalize a $40E9 deal. The only part of that that computes
| at all is the GPU integration, and that only works if NVIDIA
| doesn't terrorize Arm licencees. The rest is buzzwords.
| cnst wrote:
| There's a pretty big assumption that the deal even gets
| approved.
|
| Even if it does get approved, and even if NVIDIA decides to
| not screw up any of the licensees, the whole notion of NVIDIA
| being capable of doing so to any of their (NVIDIA's)
| competitors, will surely mean extra selling points for all of
| ARM competitors like MIPS, RISC-V etc.
| sharken wrote:
| Hopefully this deal will be stopped in it's tracks by
| regulators.
|
| If not then it's very likely that NVIDIA will do everything
| in it's power to increase prices for ARM designs.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Or Jensen believes that smart, convergent IoT is at a tipping
| point, and this is a bet on that.
|
| Not all fashionable words are devoid of meaning.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Makes sense. IoT was a buzzword in 2013. It is now a mature
| ecosystem and we've gotten a good taste and smell for it.
| Its on its way towards the plateau of productivity on the
| Gartner curve if I were to guess.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The sole meaning of the "Gartner Curve" is the amount of
| money available to be spent on hype, that Gartner can
| hope to get. It has the most tenuous imaginable
| relationship with the market for actual, you know,
| products.
| manigandham wrote:
| The Gartner Hype Cycle might be branded but the basic
| delta between overhyped technology vs actual production
| processes has been observed for a long time.
| Ecco wrote:
| Want to be nerdy and use powers-of-ten? Fine by me! But then
| please go all the way: $4E10!!!
| mikkelam wrote:
| That's normalized scientific notation, nothing wrong with
| 10E9. This is also allowed in several programming languages
| such as python.
| jabl wrote:
| Perhaps the parent prefers engineering notation, which uses
| exponents that are a multiple of three?
| topspin wrote:
| Got me.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Bye bye ARM Mali =(
| janoc wrote:
| Frankly, good riddance.
| paulmd wrote:
| This is NVIDIA's "xbox one/PS4" moment. AMD has deals with
| console manufacturers, their clients pay for a huge amount of
| R&D that gets ported back into AMD's desktop graphics
| architecture. Even if AMD doesn't make basically anything on
| the consoles themselves, it's a huge win for their R&D.
|
| Now, every reference-implementation ARM processor
| manufactured will fund GeForce desktop products,
| datacenter/enterprise, etc as well.
|
| NVIDIA definitely needs something like this in the face of
| the new Samsung deal, as well as AMD's pre-existing console
| deals.
| fluffything wrote:
| > Now, every reference-implementation ARM processor
| manufactured will fund GeForce desktop products,
| datacenter/enterprise, etc as well.
|
| That's like throwing pennies onto a pile of gold. NVIDIA
| makes billions of yearly revenue. ARM makes ~300 million.
| NVIDIA revenue is 60% of a GPU price. ARM margins in
| IoT/embedded/phone chips are thin-to-non-existent. If
| anything, NVIDIA will need to cut GPU spending to push ARM
| to the moon. And the announcement already suggest that this
| will happen.
| janoc wrote:
| ARM doesn't make any chips. They license IP (CPU cores
| and the MALI GPU) needed to build those chips to
| companies like Apple, Samsung, TI, ST Micro, Microchip,
| Qualcomm ...
|
| That margins on $1 microcontroller are "thin-to-non-
| existent" is thus completely irrelevant - those are
| margins of the silicon manufacturer, not ARM's.
| fluffything wrote:
| So what's the marging of ARM per chip bought? ARM's IP
| isn't free. It is created by engineers that cost money.
| Those chip sell for 0.10$, so ARM's margin's can't be
| more than 0.10$ per chip, otherwise seller would be
| operating at a loss.
| mr_toad wrote:
| If I was an nVidia shareholder I wouldn't want ARM profits
| to subsidise GPU development.
|
| GPU profits should be able to cover their own R&D,
| especially given the obscene prices on the high end cards.
| dannyw wrote:
| Why not? The winning strategy since the 2000s have been
| to reinvest all profits into growing the business; not
| trying to chase juicy margins.
| hajile wrote:
| It's also constraining.
|
| Console makers dictated that RDNA must use a forward-
| compatible version of the GCN ISA. While AMD might have
| wanted to make some changes of some ideas that turned out
| to be less-than-optimal, they cannot because they are
| stopped by the console makers paying the bills.
| joshvm wrote:
| Is the situation better with Mali? This seems something that
| might actually improve with Nvidia. I was under the
| impression that ARM GPUs are currently heavily locked down
| anyway (in terms of open source drivers). Nvidia would
| presumably still be locked down, but maybe we'd have more
| uniform cross platform interfaces like CUDA.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Tegra open source support is great and actually supported
| by NVIDIA. Probably the best ARM GPU option for open source
| drivers.
|
| Mali support is done by outside groups (not ARM). Midgard
| and Bifrost models are well supported (anything that starts
| with a T or G, respectively). Support for older models is a
| little worse, but better than some other GPUs.
|
| Adreno support is done by outside groups (not Qualcomm) and
| is lagging behind new GPUs that come out considerably.
|
| PowerVR GPUs (Imagination) have terrible open source
| support.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Tegra the chipset is supported by Nvidia, but even then
| they are not a paragon of cooperation with the Linux
| community. They have their own non-mainlined driver,
| while the mainlined one (tegra) is done by someone else.
|
| They did contribute somewhat to the "tegra" driver at
| least.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| What is Amazon's license for ARM like to make graviton
| processors?
| rvz wrote:
| What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a
| starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to
| wait for RISC-V to catch up.
|
| Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies
| the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has
| survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell
| themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa.
|
| In 2011, I thought that they would learn the lessons and warnings
| highlighted from Eric Schmidt about the UK creating long standing
| tech companies like FAANMG. [0] I had high hopes for them to
| learn from this, but after 2016 with Softbank and now this, it is
| just typical.
|
| ARM will certainly be more expensive after this and will
| certainly be even more closed-source, since their Mali GPUs
| drivers were already as closed as Nvidia's GPUs. This is a
| terrible outcome I have seen but from Nvidia's perspective, it
| makes sense. From a FOSS perspective, ARM is dead, long live
| RISC-V.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-
| schm...
| paulmd wrote:
| love the armchair CEO perspectives that NVIDIA spent $40b only
| to flush the whole ARM ecosystem right down the drain, that's
| definitely a rational thing to do, right?
|
| Jensen's not an idiot, how many OG 90s tech CEOs are still at
| the helm of the company they founded? Any severely negative
| moves towards their customers just drives them into RISC-V and
| they know that.
|
| Yes, ARM customers will be paying more for their ARM IP. No,
| NVIDIA is not going to burn ARM to the ground.
| throwaway5792 wrote:
| Once they were sold to SoftBank ARM had no more control over
| its destiny. You're saying that they're repeating the pattern,
| but they had no choice in this today. This was SoftBank's
| decision as the owner of ARM.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Softbank has some losses of it's own to make up, so that's
| not very surprising.
| broknbottle wrote:
| Losses? Masayoshi Son just made a cool 8 billion on this
| deal. Time to hit up the roulette table in Vegas to double
| that to 16 billion
| throwaway5792 wrote:
| Buying a stake in AAPL,FB, or any tech company would have
| netted higher returns for less effort than buying ARM. If
| anything, a 25% ROI in 4 years is quite poor.
| therealmarv wrote:
| Have you read the press release at all? It's too early to judge
| this now. ARM will stay in Cambridge and Nvidia wants to invest
| in this place.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| My experience of acquisitions is that sweet songs are sung to
| calm the horses. Then the next financial quarter comes around
| and the truck from the glue factory arrives.
|
| If you take at face value anything from a press release,
| earnings call or investor relations website, then I would
| like to take a moment to share with you the prospectus of
| Brooklyn Bridge LLC.
| dylan604 wrote:
| My money is currently tied up in ocean front property in
| Arizona.
| dylan604 wrote:
| And when Facebook bought Oculus, they said no FB login would
| be required to use Oculus. FoxConn was supposed to ramp up
| production in the US according to a press release. That was
| then, now time has passed. bigCorp hopes your short term
| memory forgets the woohooism from a foregone press release.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I'm reminded of this recent development:
|
| https://www.oculus.com/blog/a-single-way-to-log-into-
| oculus-...
|
| Discussed here on HN, with the top comment being a copy and
| paste of Palmer Lucky's acknowledgement that the early
| critics turned out to be correct:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24201306
|
| Different situation, different companies, but if you "follow
| the money" you'll never be too far wrong.
| klodolph wrote:
| It's not too early to judge, because this has been in the
| news for a while and people have had the time to do an
| analysis of what it means for Nvidia to buy ARM. The press
| release doesn't add much to that analysis. We've seen a _ton_
| of press releases go by for acquisitions and they 're always
| full of sunshine... at the moment, I'm thinking of Oracle's
| acquisition of Sun, but that's just one example. The typical
| pattern for acquisitions is that a tech company will acquire
| another tech company because they can _extract more value_
| from the acquired company 's IP compared to the value the
| acquired company would have by itself, and you can extract a
| lot of value from an IP while you slash development budgets.
| Not saying that's going to happen, but it's a common pattern
| in acquisitions.
|
| I think it's enough to know what Nvidia is, how they operate,
| and what their general strategies are.
|
| Not saying I agree with the analysis... but I am not that
| optimistic.
| boardwaalk wrote:
| Corporations say these types of things with every
| acquisition. It might be true initially and superficially,
| but that's all.
| sjg007 wrote:
| I doubt they will move all of the talent to the USA. I mean
| California is nice and all but I think a lot of Brits are
| happy to stay in Cambridge.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| Cambridge is one of the most beautiful cities on the
| planet.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Agree!
| paulmd wrote:
| One of the (many) synergies in this acquisition is that
| it's also an acqui-hire for CPU development talent.
| NVIDIA's efforts in that area have not gone very smoothly.
| They aren't going to fire all the engineers they just
| bought.
| wmf wrote:
| A bigger concern is that they would hoard future cores
| and not license them.
| RantyDave wrote:
| They might, just like Apple do. But then their forty
| billion dollar investment would stagnate and be eaten by
| riscv, which is probably what they are hoping to avoid.
| causality0 wrote:
| Why _would_ you read the press release at all? Do you expect
| a company to not do what 's in their own financial self-
| interest? Look, I love nVidia. I only buy nVidia GPUs and I
| adore their devices like the SHIELD TV, handheld, tablet,
| even the Tegra Note 7. Even I can see that they're not just
| buying ARM on a whim. They intend to make that money back.
| Them using ARM to make that money is good for absolutely
| _nobody_ except nVidia themselves.
| therealmarv wrote:
| Well it seems to be normal to judge without reading in 2020
| and customize your news yourself. Time will tell...
| causality0 wrote:
| I'll listen to what they're saying but I'm paying far
| more attention when I look at what they're doing. The
| only way buying ARM helps nVidia is by damaging their
| competitors, AKA almost everyone.
| CleanItUpJanny wrote:
| >long standing tech companies like FAANMG
|
| why are people going out of their ways to avoid the obvious and
| intuitive "FAGMAN" acronym?
| realbarack wrote:
| Because it has an offensive slur in it
| stupendousyappi wrote:
| People should be fighting to join their favorite Silicon
| Valley FANMAG. Some would prefer the Bill Gates FANMAG,
| others Jeff Bezos...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sounds more like a F-MANGA. Gates goes Super Saiyan while
| Bezos builds a mechwarrior army.
| gumby wrote:
| Because smoking is no longer acceptable
| swarnie_ wrote:
| Lost on the way to 4chan?
| lacker wrote:
| Netflix really doesn't belong in the same category as the
| others. It's big but not as big, and it isn't a sprawling
| conglomerate. Clearly "FAGMA" is the best acronym.
| staz wrote:
| GAFAM is often used in the french speaking world
| whereistimbo wrote:
| Or MAGA: Microsoft Apple Google (Alphabet) Amazon. $1
| trillion dollar club.
| broknbottle wrote:
| I think you meant the four comma club
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| On the bright side, this could end up being a big boost for
| RISC-V.
| m00dy wrote:
| and this would be killer for intel
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Maybe? But somehow I don't think they'll be able to
| capitalize on it because Intel.
| hajile wrote:
| Even if/when RISCV takes over, Intel and AMD will be in a
| unique position to offer "combination" chips with both x86
| and RISCV cores which could milk the richest enterprise and
| government markets for decades to come.
| kristianpaul wrote:
| Indeed, looking right now at https://rioslab.org/.
| miguelmota wrote:
| Would love to see RISC-V catch up and be more widely adopted.
| nickt wrote:
| Probably worth a second look at this RISC desktop thread
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19118642
| hn3333 wrote:
| Softbank buys low ($32B in 2016) and sells high ($40B in 2020).
| Nice trade!
| tuananh wrote:
| i thought that would be low in investment world.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| 4 years, 8 billions. 2 B / year. I don't think that's low.
| And during this time Arm was also filling its owner coffers.
| The only real question here is if they filled the coffers at
| a greater 2B/year or not. My guess is they didn't. Now
| SoftBank has a lot of cash to acquire more shining toys.
| tuananh wrote:
| i guess i watched too many tv shows where investors think
| anything below 50% ROI is low
| hajile wrote:
| 5% over inflation is average. US congress manages 25-30%,
| but that's on the back of insider trading (technically
| illegal thanks to a law signed by Obama, but also without
| much ability to actually investigate -- also law signed
| by Obama a few months later without fanfare).
| aneutron wrote:
| How does it fare, adjusting for inflation and other similar
| factors ?
| oldschoolrobot wrote:
| This is horrible for Arm
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Simple question, is this about ARM architecture and IP... or
| securing a worldwide competitive advantage in 5G?
| curiousmindz wrote:
| Why do you think Nvidia cares about Arm? Probably the "access"
| into a lot of industries?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| No to make a better ARM chip, with awesome graphics/AI, not
| licence the design and take all the mobile CPU profits for 5-10
| years?
| banjo_milkman wrote:
| I think this is driven by partly embedded applications and more
| directly by the datacenter.
|
| Nvidia already own the parallel compute/ML part of the
| datacenter and the Mellanox acquisition had brought the ability
| to compete in the networking part of the datacenter - but they
| were missing CPU IP, for tasks that aren't well matched to the
| GPU. This plugs that hole. They are in control of a complete
| data-center solution now.
| paulmd wrote:
| There's a huge number of synergies that this deal provides.
|
| (a) NVIDIA becomes a full-fledged full-stack house, they have
| both CPU and GPU now. They can now compete with AMD and Intel
| on equal terms. That has huge implications in the datacenter.
|
| (b) GeForce becomes the reference implementation of the GPU,
| ARM processors now directly fund NVIDIA's desktop/datacenter
| R&D in the same way consoles and Samsung SOCs fund Radeon's
| R&D. CUDA can be used anywhere on any platform easily.
|
| (c) Acqui-hire for CPU development talent. NVIDIA's efforts
| in this area have not been very good to date. Now they have
| an entire team that is experienced in developing ARM and can
| aim the direction of development where they want.
|
| Basically there's a reason that NVIDIA was willing to pay
| more than anyone else for this property. And (Softbank's) Son
| desperately needed a big financial win to show his investors
| that he's not a fucking idiot for paying $32b for ARM and to
| make up for his other recent losses.
| RantyDave wrote:
| Quite. Nvidia will be able to make a single chip CPU, GPU
| and Infiniband. Plus they'll score some people that know
| about cache coherency from Arm. We can see the future
| datacentre starting to form...
| jasoneckert wrote:
| Most tech acquisitions are fairly bland - they often maintain
| their separate ways for several years with a bit of integration.
| Others satisfy a political purpose or serve to stifle
| competition.
|
| However, given the momentum of Nvidia these past several years
| alongside the massive adoption and evolution of ARM, this is
| probably going to be the most interesting acquisition to watch
| over the next few years.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| LOL, Apple must be shitting bricks. Serves them right for going
| with ARM for their new Mac Books, the smarter move would have
| been to move to an AMD Ryzen APU, they also clearly should have
| gone with AMD Epyc for the new Mac Pro's.
| [deleted]
| geogra4 wrote:
| smic and Huawei better be prepared to have to dump arm asap
| bfrog wrote:
| So when does everyone switch to risc-v then
| sharken wrote:
| Related discussions:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24009177
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173539
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454958
| someperson wrote:
| and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467989
| poxwole wrote:
| It was good while it lasted. RIP ARM
| [deleted]
| hetspookjee wrote:
| I wonder what the this means for Apple and their move to ARM for
| their macbooks. End of 2019 Apple and NVIDIA broke up their
| cooperation on CUDA. Both these companies are very tight on their
| hardware. Apple must've known this was happening but I guess they
| weren't willing to pay more than 40B for this risky joint venture
| they're bound to go into.
|
| Anyone has a proper analysis on the ramifications of this
| acquisition for Apple's future in ARM?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Apple is an ARM founder. You can bet your boots they made sure
| they were safe through the history of ARM's existence and sale
| to Softbank in the first place. No one can cite the deep magic
| to them, they were there when it was written.
| ibains wrote:
| I love this, I was amongst early engineers on CUDA (compilers).
|
| NVIDIA was so well run, but boxed into a smaller graphics card
| market - ATI and it were forced into low margins since they were
| made replaceable by OpenGL and DirectX standards. For the
| standard fans - they resulted a wealth transfer from NVIDIA to
| Apple etc. and reduced capital available for R&D.
|
| NVIDIA was constantly attacked by a much bigger Intel (which
| changed interfaces to kill products and was made to pay by a
| court)
|
| Through innovation, developing new technologies (CUDA) they
| increased market cap, and have used that to buy Arm/Mellanox.
|
| I love the story of the underdog run by a founder, innovating
| it's way to getting into new markets against harsh competition.
| Win for capitalism!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| enragedcacti wrote:
| Nvidia might have been an underdog once, but they are now the
| world's largest chipmaker, even surpassing Intel.
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/312528-nvidia-overtake...
| mhh__ wrote:
| And Intel's revenue remains 700% larger than Nvidia's
| justicezyx wrote:
| The comment identified the positive side of the nvidia story.
| Note that nvidia had not had large acquisition for many years.
|
| This acquisition can be seen as a beacon of nvidia's past
| struggle against the market and the competitors.
|
| For whatever happened, nvidia innovated to their success, and
| had enabled possibly the biggest tech boom so far through deep
| learning. Might be one day everyone claimed nvidia to be the
| "most important company" on earth.
| llukas wrote:
| > The comment identified the positive side of the nvidia
| story. Note that nvidia had not had large acquisition for
| many years.
|
| Not correct Mellanox was bought for $7B.
| justicezyx wrote:
| Bad me... Poor memory!
| Lind5 wrote:
| Arm's primary base is in the IoT and the edge, and it has been
| very successful there. Its focus on low power allowed it to shut
| out Intel from the mobile phone market, and from there it has
| been gaining ground in a slew of vertical markets ranging from
| medical devices to Apple computers. But as more intelligence is
| added to the edge, the next big challenge is to be able to
| radically improve performance and further reduce power, and the
| only way to make that happen is to more tightly customize the
| algorithms to the hardware, and vice versa
| https://semiengineering.com/nvidia-to-buy-arm-for-40b/
| 01100011 wrote:
| Can we,for once, hear the opinions of people in the chip industry
| and not the same tired posts from software folks? NVIDIA Bad! Ok,
| we get it. Do you have anything more insightful than that?
|
| I'm starting to feel like social media based on upvotes is a
| utter waste of time. Echo chambers and groupthink. People
| commenting on things they barely know anything about and getting
| validation from others who don't know anything. I'd rather pay
| for insightful commentary and discussion. I feel like reddit
| going downhill has pushed a new group of users to HN and it's
| sending it down the tube. Maybe it's time for me to stop
| participating and get back to work.
| diydsp wrote:
| as an embedded dev, the last 2-4 years of STM (major ARM
| provider) have seen a large degree of integration of
| specialized hardware into 32-bit microcontrollers. e.g. radios,
| motor control, AI, 64-bit FPUs, graphics, low-power, etc.
|
| I expect more of the same. The only way it could go wrong is if
| they lose customer focus. Microcontrollers are a competitive,
| near-commodity market, so companies have to provide valuable
| features.
|
| I don't really know Nvidia well - I only buy their stock! - but
| they seem to be keeping their customers happy by paying
| attention to what they need. Perhaps their fabrication will be
| a boon to micros, as they're usually a few gens behind
| laptop/server processors.
| drivebycomment wrote:
| You're not wrong, but most of HN threads are like this. 80% of
| comments are low information, Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
| But among that, there are still some useful gems, so despite
| what you said, HN is still worth it. If you fold the first two
| top level comments, the rest have some useful , informed
| perspective.
|
| I don't see this as having that much of an impact on any short
| to medium term. ARM has too much intricate business
| dependencies and contracts nVidia can't just get out of.
|
| My speculation is that nVidia might be what it takes to push
| arm to overcome the final huddle into more general purpose and
| server cpu, and achieve that pipedream of a single binary/ISA
| running everywhere. Humanity would be better off if a single
| ISA does become truly universal. Whether business/technology
| politics will allow that to happen and whether nVidia has
| enough understanding and the shrewdness to pull that off is to
| be seen.
| dahart wrote:
| > Humanity would be better off of a single ISA does become
| truly universal.
|
| This is an interesting thought. I think I would agree with
| this in the CPU world of the last 20-30 years, but it makes
| me wonder a few things. Might a universal ISA eliminate major
| pieces of competitive advantage for chip makers, and/or stall
| innovation? It does feel like non-vector instructions are
| somewhat settled, but vector instructions haven't yet, and
| GPUs are changing rapidly (take NVIDIA's Tensor cores and ray
| tracing cores for example). With Moore's law coming to an
| end, a lot of people are talking about special purpose chips
| more and more, TPUs being a pretty obvious example, and as
| nice as it might be to settle on a universal ISA, it seems
| like we're all about to start seeing larger differences more
| frequently, no?
|
| > 80% of comments are low information, Dunning-Kruger effect
| in action.
|
| I really liked all of your comment except this. I have a
| specific but humble request aside from the negative
| commentary & assumption about behavior. Please consider
| erasing the term "Dunning-Kruger effect" from your mind. It
| is being used here incorrectly, and it is very widely
| misunderstood and abused. There is no such effect. The
| experiments in the paper do not show what was claimed, the
| paper absolutely does not support the popular notion that
| confidence is a sign of incompetence. (Please read the actual
| paper -- the experiments demonstrated a _positive
| correlation_ between confidence and competence!) There have
| been some very wonderful analyses of how wrong the Dunning-
| Kruger paper was, yet most people only seem to remember the
| (incorrect) summary that confidence is a sign of
| incompetence.
|
| https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-
| dunning-...
| drivebycomment wrote:
| > Might a universal ISA eliminate major pieces of
| competitive advantage for chip makers, and/or stall
| innovation?
|
| That's a good question. I didn't try to put all the
| necessary nuances in a single sentence, so you're right to
| question a lot of the unsaid assumptions. I don't know for
| sure at this point the innovation in ISA has run most of
| its course yet, but I do feel like we kind of have, given
| how relatively little difference it makes. I think a
| "truly" universal ISA, if it ever happens, would
| necessarily have to have a governance and evolution cycles,
| so that people will have to agree to the core part of the
| universal ISA, yet have a room and a way to let others
| experiment various extensions, including vector extensions
| for example, and have a process to reconcile and agree on
| the standard adoption. I don't know if that's actually
| possible - it might be very difficult or impossible for
| many different reasons. But if such can happen, that would
| be beneficial, as it would reduce certain amount of
| duplication, and unlock certain new possibilities.
|
| > Please consider erasing the term "Dunning-Kruger effect"
| from your mind. It is being used here incorrectly
|
| Duly noted.
| paxys wrote:
| You are just starting to feel that now?
| 01100011 wrote:
| I know, right? It's finally hitting me. I am realizing how
| much of an asshole I've become thanks to the validation of a
| handful of strangers on the internet. I have caught myself
| commenting on things I have only cursory knowledge of and
| being justified by the likes of strangers. I actually
| believed that the online communities I participated in
| actually represented the world at large.
|
| I'm not quite ready to end my participation in HN, but I'm
| close. I am looking back on the last 10 years of
| participation in forums like this and wondering what the hell
| good it did. I am also suddenly very worried for what sites
| like Reddit are doing to kids. That process of validation is
| going to produce some very anti-social, misguided adults.
|
| I would rather participate in an argument map style
| discussion, or, frankly, just read the thoughts of 'experts'.
| cycloptic wrote:
| It is best to limit your exposure to these type of sites.
| There was a post yesterday about Wikipedia being an
| addictive MMORPG. Well, so are Hacker news, twitter,
| reddit, and so on...
| saiojd wrote:
| Agreed, upvotes are a failed experiment, especially for
| comments.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Totally. I see a future where people will have edge over others
| when they pay for information than relying on free sources
| (except Wikipedia due to its scale, but still, Wikipedia is not
| a replacement for a proper academic textbook).
|
| FT provides insightful commentary from finance/business side of
| things and their subscription is expensive - rightfully so.
| choiway wrote:
| I'm confused. What is it that Nvidia can do by owning ARM that it
| can't do by just licensing the architecture? Can't they just
| license and build all the chips people think they'll build
| without buying the whole thing?
| ykl wrote:
| I wonder what this means for NVIDIA's recent RISC-V efforts [1].
| Apparently they've been aiming to ship (or already have been
| shipping?) RISC-V microcontrollers on their GPUs for some time .
|
| [1] https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-
| NVIDI...
| luxurycommunism wrote:
| Hopefully that means we will see some big leaps in performance.
| QuixoticQuibit wrote:
| HN being hyperbolic and anti-NVIDIA as usual. I think this is a
| great thing. Finally a competitor to the AMD-Intel x86 duopoly. I
| imagine the focus will first be on improving ARM's data center
| offerings but eventually I'm hoping to see consumer-facing parts
| available sometime as well.
| japgolly wrote:
| I think the biggest concern is NVIDIA's stance against OSS.
| QuixoticQuibit wrote:
| Look at their AI/CUDA documentation and associated githubs.
| Many of their tools and libraries are open source.
|
| Tell me, what other AI platform works with x86 and PowerPC
| and ARM? Currently NVIDIA's GPUs do.
| cycloptic wrote:
| It's good that they open sourced that stuff, but the main
| problem is that CUDA itself is closed source and vendor
| locked to nvidia's hardware.
| sreeramb93 wrote:
| I dont buy laptops with nvidia GPUs because of nightmares
| I had working with them in 2014-2015. Has the support
| improved?
| TomVDB wrote:
| It only makes sense to demand them to give this away for
| free if you consider them a hardware company and a
| hardware company only.
|
| Look at them as a solutions company and the first
| question to answer is: why is it fine for companies like
| Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe etc and any other software
| company to profit from closed software yet a company
| should be ostracized for it as soon as hardware becomes
| part of the deal?
|
| Nvidia invested 15 years in developing and promoting a
| vast set of GPU compute libraries and tools. AMD has only
| paid lip service and to this day treats it as an ugly
| stepchild, they don't even bother anymore to support
| consumer architectures. Nvidia is IMO totally justified
| to reap the rewards of what they've created.
| cycloptic wrote:
| Please don't misrepresent my statement, I haven't
| demanded they give anything away for free. If you're
| referring to the CUDA drivers, the binaries for those are
| already free with the hardware. And if AMD truly doesn't
| care about it then that's even more reason for them to
| open source it, because they can't really claim they're
| keeping it closed source to hamstring the competition
| anymore.
|
| wrt Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, and the others: I've been
| asking them to open source key products every chance I
| get. Just so you know where I'm coming from.
| nolaspring wrote:
| I spent most of this afternoon tying to get cuda in docker
| to work on my Mac for a machine learning use case. It
| doesn't. Because nvidia
| fomine3 wrote:
| Because Apple. NVidia was tried to support Macs but Apple
| stops support.
| diesal11 wrote:
| "Because NVIDIA" is blatantly false.
|
| CUDA support for docker containers is provided through
| the open source Nvidia-Docker project maintained by
| Nvidia[1]. If anything this is a great argument _for_
| NVIDIAs usage of open source.
|
| Searching that project's issues shows that Nvidia-Docker
| support on MacOS is blocked by the VM used by Docker for
| Mac(xhyve) not supporting PCI passthrough, which is
| required for any containers to use host GPU resources.[2]
|
| xhyve has an issue for PCI passthrough, updated a few
| months ago, which notes that the APIs provided by Apple
| through DriverKit are insufficient for this use case[3]
|
| So your comment should really say "Because Apple"
|
| [1] https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker
|
| [2] https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-
| docker/issues/101#issuecomm...
|
| [3] https://github.com/machyve/xhyve/issues/108#issuecomm
| ent-616...
| jefft255 wrote:
| << I spent most of the afternoon hacking away at some
| unsupported edge case on an unsupported platform which is
| inadequate for what I'm trying to do. It doesn't work,
| which is clearly nvidia's fault. >>
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Apple is why you can't use Nvidia hardware on a Mac, not
| Nvidia. Apple has exclusive control over the drivers.
| Nvidia can't release updates or fix things on Mac OS.
|
| I'm all for railing on the shitty things Nvidia does do,
| but no reason to add some made up ones onto the pile.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Sounds like everyone is rallying around RISC-V. What does this
| mean for MIPS?
|
| "ARM was probably what sank MIPS" - saagarjha
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24402107
| Zigurd wrote:
| Wave owns MIPS, about which I had no idea and googling that
| also returns that Wave went Chapter 11 this year.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Looking at the conversations almost 24 hours after posting the
| IP, licensing, ecosystem, political, and overall business aspects
| of this have been discussed to death. Oddly for Hacker News there
| has been little discussion of the potential technical aspects of
| this acquisition.
|
| Pure speculation (of course)...
|
| To me (from a tech standpoint) this acquisition centers around
| three things we already know about Nvidia:
|
| - Nvidia is pushing to own anything and everything GPGPU/TPU
| related, from cloud/datacenter to edge. Nvidia has been an ARM
| licensee for years with their Jetson line of hardware for edge
| GPGPU applications:
|
| https://developer.nvidia.com/buy-jetson
|
| Looking at the architecture of these devices (broadly speaking)
| Nvidia is combining an ARM CPU with their current gen GPU
| hardware (complete with Tensor Cores, etc). What's often left out
| of this mention is that they utilize a shared memory architecture
| where the ARM CPU and CUDA cores share memory. Not only does this
| cut down on hardware costs and power usage, it increases
| performance.
|
| - Nvidia has acquired Mellanox for high performance network I/O
| across various technologies (Ethernet and Infiniband). Nvidia is
| also actively working to be able to remove the host CPU from as
| many GPGPU tasks as possible (network I/O and data storage):
|
| https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect
|
| - Nvidia already has publicly available software in place to
| effectively make their CUDA compute available over the network
| using various APIs:
|
| https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server
|
| Going on just the name Triton is currently only available for
| inference but it provides the ability to not only directly serve
| GPGPU resources via network API at scale but ALSO accelerate
| various models with TensorRT optimization:
|
| https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/triton-inference-server...
|
| Given these points I think this is an obvious move for Nvidia.
| TDP and performance is increasingly important across all of their
| target markets. They already have something in place for edge
| inference tasks powered by ARM with Jetson but looking at ARM
| core CPU benchmarks it's sub-optimal. Why continue to pay ARM
| licensing fees when you can buy the company, collect licensing
| fees, get talent, and (presumably) drastically improve
| performance and TDP for your edge GPGPU hardware?
|
| In the cloud/datacenter, why continue to give up watts in terms
| of TDP and performance to sub-optimal Intel/AMP/x86_64 CPUs and
| their required baggage (motherboard bridges, buses, system RAM,
| etc) when all you really want to do is shuffle data between your
| GPUs, network, and storage as quickly and efficiently as
| possible?
|
| Of course many applications will still require a somewhat general
| purpose CPU for various tasks, customer code, etc. AWS already
| has their own optimized ARM cores in place. aarch64 is more and
| more becoming a first class citizen across the entire open source
| ecosystem.
|
| As platform and software as a service continues to eat the world
| cloud providers likely have already started migrating the
| underlying hardware powering these various services to ARM cores
| for improved performance and TDP (same product, more margin).
|
| Various ARM cores are already showing to be quite capable for
| most CPU tasks but given the other architectural components in
| place here even the lowliest of modern ARM cores is likely to be
| asleep most of the time for the applications Nvidia currently
| cares about. Giving up licensing, die space, power, tighter
| integration, etc to x86_64 just seems to be foolish at this
| point.
|
| Meanwhile (of course) if you still need x86_64 (or any other
| arch) for whatever reason you can hit a network API powered by
| hardware using Nvidia/Mellanox I/O, GPU, and ARM. Potentially
| (eventually) completely transparently using standard CUDA
| libraries and existing frameworks (see work like Apex):
|
| https://github.com/NVIDIA/apex
|
| I, for one, am excited to see what comes from this.
| vletal wrote:
| Nvidia being like "Apple did now want to use our tech? Let's just
| buy ARM!"
| naruvimama wrote:
| (Nvidia - ARM) - Nvidia >> 40 Bn
|
| Only about 50% is gaming and nascent divisions like data centres
| can get a big boost from the acquisition.
|
| We only connected Nvidia with GPUs, perhaps AI & ML. Now they are
| going to be a dominant player everywhere from consumer devices,
| IOT, cloud, HPC & Gaming.
|
| And since Nvidia does not FAB its own chips like intel, this
| transformation is going to be pretty quick.
|
| If only they go into public cloud business, we as costumers would
| have one other strong vendor to choose from.
| totorovirus wrote:
| nvidia is notorious for being not nice to oss developers as Linus
| Torvalds claims:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&ab_channel=Silic...
|
| I wonder how Linux would react to this news.
| tontonius wrote:
| You mean how GNU/Linux would react to it?
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| Don't exclude the alpine folks please
| [deleted]
| jpswade wrote:
| I feel like this is yet more terrible news for the UK.
| browserface wrote:
| Vertical integration. It's the end products, not the producers
| that matter.
|
| Or maybe, more accurately, the middle of the supply chain doesn't
| matter. The most value is at either end: raw materials and
| energy, and end products.
|
| Or so it seems :p ;) xx
| [deleted]
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Doesn't this need regulatory approval from the USA and Japan?
| (Not that the USA would look a gift horse in the mouth, of
| course.)
| sgift wrote:
| There is a note at the end of the article:
|
| "The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing
| conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals for
| the U.K., China, the European Union and the United States.
| Completion of the transaction is expected to take place in
| approximately 18 months."
|
| Hopefully, the EU does its job, laughs at this and tells Nvidia
| to either go home or forces them to FRAND licensing of ARM IP.
| kasabali wrote:
| > forces them to FRAND licensing of ARM IP
|
| FRAND licensing is worthless, if Qualcomm taught us anything.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I'm not convinced this is a death sentence for ARM. I doubt
| nVidia spent $40b on a company with the intention of killing it's
| golden goose business model. The contractual agreements might
| change, but ARM wasn't exactly giving their IP away for free
| before this move.
| Hypx wrote:
| You know how the tobacco companies work?
|
| From a purely capitalistic standpoint, it's fine to kill off
| some of your customer base if you make more money from the
| remainder. If it can work for tobacco, you believe that Nvidia
| is will to kill off some of its customers if they can get the
| remainder to pay more.
| scruffyherder wrote:
| Unless they are putting explosives in the chips the customers
| will be free to go elsewhere
| Hypx wrote:
| If their software is dependent on the ARM ISA then they
| can't.
| qubex wrote:
| _mumble mumble_ Turing complete _mumble mumble_
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It is less about them intentionally killing it and more about
| their culture and attitude killing it.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Does Nvidia have a habit of killing acquisitions? I'm only
| familiar with their graphics business, but as far as I can
| see the only culture going on there is excellence.
| p1necone wrote:
| NVIDIAs whole schtick is making a bunch of interesting
| software and arbitrarily locking it to their own hardware.
| Doesn't seem compatible with being the steward for what has
| up until now been a relatively open CPU architecture.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| arbitrarily? Nvidia invests a lot in software R&D, why
| should they just give it away to their competitor AMD who
| basically invest nothing in comparison?
| rocqua wrote:
| Arbitrary as in, without technical reasons.
|
| An open architecture, and business model based on
| partnership doesn't really synchronize with vendor
| locking your products for increased profits.
| ip26 wrote:
| At issue is the conflict between ARM's business model-
| which revolves around licensing designs to other companies-
| and Nvidia's reputation of not playing nicely with other
| companies.
| ATsch wrote:
| The concern is more that nvidias culture has historically
| been being overall hostile to parterships. Which works
| great for what Nvidia is doing right now, but is probably
| bad for a company that depends heavily on partnerships.
| paulpan wrote:
| My initial reaction is that this reminiscent of the AMD-ATI deal
| back in 2006. It almost killed both companies and comparatively,
| this deal size is much bigger ($40B vs. $6B) for both a more
| mature industry and companies involved.
|
| $40B is an obscene lot of money objectively and what's the
| endgame for Nvidia? If it's to "fuse" ARM's top CPU designs with
| their GPU prowess, then couldn't they invest the money to restart
| their own CPU designs (e.g. Carmel)? My inner pessimist, as with
| others here, is that Nvidia will somehow cripple the ARM
| ecosystem or prioritize their own needs over those of other
| customers'. Perhaps an appropriate analogy is Qualcomm's IP
| licensing shenanigans and how they've crippled the non-iOS
| smartphone industry.
|
| That said, there's also examples of companies making these
| purchases with minimal insidious behavior and co-existing with
| their would-be competitors: Microsoft's acquisition of Github,
| Google's Pixel smartphones, Sony's camera lenses business and
| even Samsung, which supposedly firewalls its components teams so
| the best tech is available to whoever wants (and is willing to
| pay for it).
|
| I suppose if this acquisition ends up going through (big if),
| then we'll see Nvidia's true intent in 3-5 years.
| gigatexal wrote:
| How large or little of boost does this give the likes of RISC-V?
| nl wrote:
| Just noting that Apple _doesn 't_ have a perpetual license, they
| have an architecture license[1], including for 64bit parts[2].
|
| This allows them to design their own cores using the Arm
| instruction set[3] and presumably includes perpetual IP licenses
| for Arm IP used while the license is in effect. New Arm IP
| doesn't seem to be included, since existing 32bit Arm licensees
| had to upgrade to a 64bit license[2].
|
| [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-
| part-1-h...
|
| [2]
| https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-...
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural...
| zdw wrote:
| I see this going a few ways for different players:
|
| The perpetual architecture license folks that make their own
| cores like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Fujitsu (I think they
| needed this for the A64FX, right?) will be fine, and may just
| fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or
| there. Apple especially will be fine as they can get code into
| LLVM for whatever "Apple Silicon" evolves into over time.
|
| The smaller vendors that license core designs (like the A5x and
| A7x series, etc.) like Allwinner, Rockchip, and Broadcom are
| probably in a worse state - nVidia could cut them off from any
| new designs. I'd be scrambling for an alternative if I were any
| of these companies.
|
| Long term, it really depends on how nVidia acts - they could
| release low end cores with no license fees to try to fend off
| RISC-V, but that hasn't been overly successful when tried earlier
| with the SPARC and Power architectures. Best case scenario, they
| keep all the perpetual architecture people happy and
| architecturally coherent, and release some interesting datacenter
| chips, leaving the low end (and low margin) to 3rd parties.
|
| Hopefully they'll also try to mend fences with the open source
| community, or at least avoid repeating past offenses.
| hastradamus wrote:
| Nvidia mend. Lol
| Followerer wrote:
| "and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few
| instructions here or there"
|
| No, they may not. People keep suggesting these kinds of things,
| but part of the license agreement is that you can't modify the
| ISA. Only ARM can do that.
| my123 wrote:
| That's untrue.
|
| (famously so, Intel used to ship arm chips with WMMX and
| Apple for example ships their CPU today with the AMX AI
| acceleration extension)
| rrss wrote:
| WMMX was exposed via the ARM coprocessor mechanism (so it
| was permitted by the architecture). The coprocessor stuff
| was removed in ARMv8.
| my123 wrote:
| Now custom instructions are directly on the regular
| instruction space...
|
| (+ there's the can of worms of target-specific MSRs being
| writable from user-space, Apple does this as part of APRR
| to flip the JIT region from RW- to R-X and vice-versa
| without going through a trip to the kernel. That also has
| the advantage that the state is modifiable per-thread)
| Followerer wrote:
| In ARMv8 you have a much cleaner mechanism through system
| registers(MSR/MRS).
| saagarjha wrote:
| Apple has been using system registers for years already.
| AMX is interesting because it's actual instruction
| encodings that are unused by the spec.
| Followerer wrote:
| That's like saying that my Intel CPU comes with an NVIDA
| Turing AI acceleration extension. The instructions the CPU
| can run on an Apple ARM-based CPU is all ARM ISA. That's in
| the license arrangement, if you fail to pass ARM's
| compliance tests (which include not adding your own
| instructions, or modifying the ones included) you can't use
| ARM's license.
|
| Please, stop spreading nonsense. All of this is public
| knowledge.
| my123 wrote:
| No. I reverse-engineered it and AMX on the Apple A13 is
| an instruction set extension running on the main CPU
| core.
|
| The Neural Engine is a completely separate hardware
| block, and you have good reasons to have such an
| extension available on the CPU directly, to reduce
| latency for short-running tasks.
| rrss wrote:
| Are the AMX instructions available in EL0?
|
| Is it possible AMX is implemented with the
| implementation-defined system registers and aliases of
| SYS/SYSL in the encoding space reserved for
| implementation-defined system instructions? Do you have
| the encodings for the AMX instructions?
| my123 wrote:
| AMX instructions are available in EL0 yes, and are used
| by CoreML and Accelerate.framework.
|
| A sample instruction: 20 12 20 00... which doesn't in any
| stretch parse as a valid arm64 instruction in the Arm
| specification.
|
| Edit: Some other AMX combinations off-hand:
|
| 00 10 20 00
|
| 21 12 20 00
|
| 20 12 20 00
|
| 40 10 20 00
| rrss wrote:
| very interesting, thanks!
| Followerer wrote:
| The AMX is an accelerator block... If you concluded
| otherwise, your reverse-engineering skills are not
| great...
|
| Let me repeat this: part of the ARM architectural license
| says that you can't modify the ISA. You have to implement
| a whole subset (the manual says what's mandatory and
| what's optional), and _only_ that. This is, as I 've been
| saying, _public_ _knowledge_. This is how it works. And
| there are very good reasons for this, like avoiding
| fragmentation and losing control of their own ISA.
|
| And once again, stop spreading misinformation.
| my123 wrote:
| Hello,
|
| Specifically about the Apple case,
|
| After your tone, not certainly obligated to answer but
| will write one quickly...
|
| Apple A13 adds AMX, a set of (mostly) AI acceleration
| instructions that are also useful for matrix math in
| general. The AMX configuration happens at the level of
| the AMX_CONFIG_EL1/EL12/EL2/EL21 registers, with
| AMX_STATE_T_EL1 and AMX_CONTEXT_EL1 being also present.
|
| The list of instructions is at
| https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/xZmmVF7tS8/ (didn't bother
| to document it publicly at least at this point).
|
| Hopefully that clears things up a bit,
|
| And please don't ever do this again, thank you. (this
| also doesn't comply with the guidelines)
|
| -- a member of the checkra1n team
| btian wrote:
| Can you provide a link to the "public knowledge" for
| those who don't know?
| eklavya wrote:
| You may be correct, but do you really have to be so
| attacking?
| kortex wrote:
| Well, regardless of whether this amendment is kosher or not,
| AMX definitely exists. Perhaps the $2T tech behemoth was able
| to work out a sweetheart deal with the $40B semiconductor
| company.
|
| > There's been a lot of confusion as to what this means, as
| until now it hadn't been widely known that Arm architecture
| licensees were allowed to extend their ISA with custom
| instructions. We weren't able to get any confirmation from
| either Apple or Arm on the matter, but one thing that is
| clear is that Apple isn't publicly exposing these new
| instructions to developers, and they're not included in
| Apple's public compilers. We do know, however, that Apple
| internally does have compilers available for it, and
| libraries such as the Acclerate.framework seem to be able to
| take advantage of AMX. [0]
|
| my123's instruction names leads to a very shallow rabbit hole
| on google, which turns up a similar list [1]
|
| Agreed upon: ['amxclr', 'amxextrx', 'amxextry', 'amxfma16',
| 'amxfma32', 'amxfma64', 'amxfms16', 'amxfms32', 'amxfms64',
| 'amxgenlut', 'amxldx', 'amxldy', 'amxldz', 'amxldzi',
| 'amxmac16', 'amxmatfp', 'amxmatint', 'amxset', 'amxstx',
| 'amxsty', 'amxstz', 'amxstzi', 'amxvecfp', 'amxvecint']
|
| my123 also has ['amxextrh', 'amxextrv'].
|
| [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-
| iphone-11-pro....
|
| [1] https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=187087&curp
| ost...
| mxcrossb wrote:
| It seems to me that if Apple felt that Nvidia would limit them,
| they could have outbid them for ARM! So I think you are
| correct.
| millstone wrote:
| I think Apple is not committed to ARM at all. Bitcode,
| Rosetta 2, "Apple Silicon" - it all suggests they want to
| keep ISA flexibility.
| emn13 wrote:
| Wow, but that cost - it's not a small thing to transition
| ISA, and don't forget that this transition is one of the
| simpler ones (more registers, fairly few devices). The
| risks of transitioning _everything_ away from arm would be
| much greater.
|
| I guess they have _some_ ISA flexibility (which is
| remarkable). But not much; each transition was still a very
| special set of circumstances and a huge hurdle, I 'm sure.
| rocqua wrote:
| At the low-level driver interface, transitioning ISA is a
| big deal. But I would guess that, at higher levels, most
| of the work is just changing the target of your compiler?
|
| As in, most of the work occurs in the low-level parts of
| the Operating system. After that the OS should abstract
| the differences away from User-space.
| emn13 wrote:
| No way; not at all.
|
| First of all: there's lots of software that's not the OS.
| The OS is the easy bit: everything else: grindy, grindy
| horrorstory. A lot of that code will be third-party. And
| if you think, "hey, we'll just recompile!", and you can
| actually get them to too - well, good luck, but
| performance _will_ be abysmal in many cases. Lots and
| lots of libraries have hand-tuned code for specific
| architectures. Anything with vectorization - despite
| compilers being much better than they used to be - may
| see huge bog downs without hand tuning. That 's not just
| speculation; you can look at software that's gets the
| vectorization treatment or was ported to arm from x86
| poorly - perfomance falls off a cliff.
|
| Then there's the JITs and interpreters, of which there
| are quite a few, and they're often hyper-tuned to the
| ISA's they run on. Also, they can't afford to run
| something like LLVM on every bit of output; that's way
| too slow. So even non-vectorized code suffers (you can
| look at some of the .net core ARM developments to get a
| feel for this, but the same goes for JS/Java etc).
| Webbrowsers are hyper-tuned. regexengines, packet
| filters, etc etc etc
|
| Not to mention: just getting a compiler like LLVM to
| support a new ISA as optimally as x86 or ARM isn't a
| small feat.
|
| Finally: at least at this point, until our AI overloads
| render that redundant - all this work takes expertise,
| but that expertise takes training, which isn't that easy
| on an ISA without hardware. That's why Apple's current
| transition is so easy: they already have the hardware;
| _and_ the trained experts some with over a decade of
| experience _on that ISA!_. But if they really want to go
| their own route... well, that 's tricky, because what are
| all those engineers going to play around on to learn how
| it works; what's fast, and what's bad?
|
| All in all, it's no coincidence transitions like this
| take a long time, and that's for simple (aka well-
| prepared) transitions like the one's Apple's doing now.
| Saying they have ISA "flexibility", like they're somehow
| interchangeable is completely missing the point on how
| tricky on those details are, and how much they're going
| to matter on how achievable such a transition is. Apple
| doesn't have general ISA flexibility, it has a costly
| route from specifically x86 to specifically ARM, and
| nothing else.
| simias wrote:
| Extremely aggressive optimizations are really special
| though, and they tend to require rewrites when new CPU
| extensions release (and workarounds to work on older
| hardware). If you rely on super low level ultra-
| aggressive micro optimizations your code is going to have
| a relatively short shelf life, different ISA or not.
|
| The vast majority of the code written for any given
| computer or smartphone doesn't have this level of
| sophistication and optimization though. I'd wager that
| for most code just changing the build target will indeed
| mostly just work.
|
| It won't be painless but modern code tends to be so high
| level and abstracted (especially on smartphones) than the
| underlying ISA matters a lot less than in the past.
| pas wrote:
| Do it more and more and they'll have the tools to
| efficiently manage them.
|
| Also likely the small tweaks they will want from time to
| time should be "easy" to follow internally, if you can
| orchestrate everything from top to bottom and back.
| headmelted wrote:
| Exactly. Apple's strategy here is very clear:
|
| Offer customers iOS apps and games on the next MacBook as a
| straight swap for Boot Camp and Parallels. Once they've
| moved everyone over to their own chips and brought back
| Rosetta and U/Bs they're essentially free to replace
| whatever they like at the architecture level.
|
| In their reveal I noticed that they only mentioned ARM
| binaries running in virtual environments. It makes sense if
| you don't want to commit to supporting GNU tools natively
| on your devices (as it would mean sticking with an
| established ISA)
| saagarjha wrote:
| I would be quite surprised if LLVM ever lost the ability
| to compile C for the platform.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I doubt Apple is dumb enough not to have basically a
| perpetual license for ARM.
| soapdog wrote:
| ARM was launched as a joint venture between Acorn, Apple,
| and VLSI. I believe that since day 0 Apple had perpetual
| access to the IP.
| ksec wrote:
| They sold all of the ARM shares in mid 90s to prevent
| themselves from going bankruptcy.
|
| Not to mention starting a JV has nothing to do with
| perpetual IP access. You will still have to pay for it.
| selectodude wrote:
| They can certainly have a contract with Arm that allows
| them to renew their arch license in perpetuity that
| nvidia won't be able to void.
|
| I obviously don't _know_ that for sure but the idea that
| Apple would stake their future on something they don 't
| have a legal ironclad position seems unlikely.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I would also agree, the thing is - businesses breakup and
| come together all the time. If it makes sense and both
| parties can agree despite of past disagrements and
| lawsuits, they will partner.
|
| Just because Apple and nVidia has bad relationship at the
| moment regarding their GPUs is probably orthogonal to what
| they'll do with this new branch of nVidia, that is ARM.
| scarface74 wrote:
| What need does Apple have with ARMs R&D going forward?
| They have their own chip designers, build tools, etc.?
|
| True about frenemies the entire time that Apple was suing
| Samsung, it was using Samsung to manufacture many of its
| components.
| pas wrote:
| But if your chip heavily builds on arm's IP you need a
| license for that at least as long as you can't replace
| the infringing parts of the design. Which sounds very
| much impossible if you also want to progress on other
| aspects of having the best chips.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Apple uses the ARM ISA. It doesn't use ARM IP - as in,
| the design of the chip. Apple designed their own damn
| chip!
|
| Since they're not branding it as ARM in any way, shape,
| or form, and they have a perpetual architectural license
| to the ISA, I suspect they could do pretty much what they
| please - as long as they don't call it ARM. Which they
| don't.
| pas wrote:
| During the design were they careful not to create any
| derivative works of arm IP and/or not to infringe on any
| of arm's patents?
| dannyw wrote:
| Apple would not get antitrust approval (iPhone maker controls
| all android chips????). So that's why.
| macintux wrote:
| Were it a serious enough threat to their ARM license,
| they'd find a way to buy ARM and keep it independent.
| kabacha wrote:
| Exactly, Apple is already straddling the line (and imho way
| past it) on anti-comp laws.
| jonhohle wrote:
| What is their monopoly or which of their competitors are
| they colluding with?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Neither of those are required to violate anti-trust laws.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Such as? https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-
| practices
| kzrdude wrote:
| I'm not defending Apple, just thinking that can't we say
| this for many of the biggest tech firms? They are way
| past the line on anticompetitive business.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Yes, Apple is not alone in this. Google is another
| example, and they are very aware of this and are acting
| very carefully
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The perpetual architecture license folks that make their own
| cores like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Fujitsu (I think they
| needed this for the A64FX, right?) will be fine
|
| There is one thing they would need to worry about though, which
| is that if the rest of the market moves to RISC-V or x64 or
| whatever else, it's not implausible that someone might at some
| point make a processor which is superior to the ones those
| companies make in-house. If it's the same architecture, you
| just buy them or license the design and put them in your
| devices. If it's not, you're stuck between suffering an
| architecture transition that your competitors have already put
| behind them or sticking with your uncompetitive in-house
| designs using the old architecture that nobody else wants
| anymore.
|
| Their best move might be to forget about the architecture
| license and make the switch to something else with the rest of
| the market.
| zdw wrote:
| > Their best move might be to forget about the architecture
| license and make the switch to something else with the rest
| of the market.
|
| This assumes that there isn't some other factor in
| transitioning architecture - this argument could boil down in
| the mid 2000's to "Why not go x86/amd64", but you couldn't
| buy a license to that easily (would need to be 3-way with
| Intel/AMD to further complicate things)
|
| Apple has done quite well with their ARM license,
| outperforming the rest of the mobile form factor CPU market
| by a considerable margin. I don't doubt that they could
| transition - they've done it successfully 3 times already,
| even before the current ARM transition.
|
| Apple under Cook has said they want to "to own and control
| the primary technologies behind the products we make". I
| doubt they'd turn away from that now to become dependent on
| an outside technology, especially given how deep their
| pockets are.
| fluffything wrote:
| Apple could transition in 10 years to RISC-V, just like how
| they transitioned 10 years ago to x86, 10 years before to
| PPC, 10 years before to .........
| thomasjudge wrote:
| It's kind of puzzling that Apple didn't buy them. They
| don't seem to be particularly aggressive/creative in the
| M&A department
| andoriyu wrote:
| Apple buying arm would never get approved. They have way
| to many direct competitors that heavily rely on SoCs that
| has arm cores.
| spullara wrote:
| They did dump ZFS when they decided they didn't like the
| licensing terms.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek all currently just use off the
| shelf A5x & A7x cores in their SoCs. Unless that part of the
| company is losing money I don't expect nVidia to cut that off.
| Especially since that's likely a key part of why nVidia
| acquired ARM in the first place - I can't imagine they care
| about the Mali team(s) or IP.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Qualcomm used to design their own cores up until the last
| generation or two, but you're right they use the reference
| designs now.
|
| EDIT: correction, make that the last generation or four
| (oops, time flies)
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Qualcomm hasn't used an in-house core design since 2015
| with the original Kryo. Everything Kryo 2xx and newer are
| based on Cortex.
| awill wrote:
| That was a really sad time honestly. QCOMM went from
| leading the pack to basically using reference designs
| (which they still arrogantly brand as Kryo despite
| essentially being a tweak of a reference design.
|
| It all happened because Apple came out with the first
| 64-bit design, and QCOMM wasn't ready. Rather than
| deliver 32-bit for 1 more year, they used an off the
| shelf ARM 64-bit design (A57) in their SoC called the
| Snapdragon 810, and boy was it terrible.
| himinlomax wrote:
| From what I gathered, they made at least _some_ risky
| architecture choices in their custom architecture that
| turned out not to be sustainable over the next
| generations. Also note that their Cortex core is indeed
| customized to a significant extent.
| klelatti wrote:
| What happens if/when Nvidia launches SoCs that compete with
| Qualcomm and MediaTek. Will it continue to offer the latest
| cores to competitors when it will make a lot more money on
| its own SoCs? This is the reason for the widepsread concern
| about Nvidia owning Arm.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| I don't know if Nvidia is eager to re-enter the SoC market.
| It wouldn't be a clear path to more money, since they would
| need to then handle modem, wifi, ISP, display, etc...
| instead of just CPU & GPU. And they'd need to work with
| Android & its HALs. And all the dozens/hundreds of device
| OEMs.
|
| They could, but that's more than just an easy money grab.
| Something Nvidia would already be familiar with from Tegra.
|
| What seems more likely/risky would be nvidia starts
| charging a premium for a Mali replacement, or begins
| sandbagging Mali on the lower end of things. But Qualcomm
| already has Adreno to defend against that.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Looks like Nvidia never left the SoC market to begin
| with.
|
| The latest Tegra SoC launched March of 2020.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| They released a new SBC aimed at autonomous vehicles.
| They haven't had a mobile SoC since 2015's Tegra X1.
| Which only made it into the Pixel C tablet, Nintendo
| Shield, and Nvidia's Shield TV (including the 2019
| refresh)
| riotnrrd wrote:
| You're forgetting the TX2 as well as the Jetson Nano
| ksec wrote:
| Mediatek are in the lower end market, something Nvidia's
| culture doesn't like competing in. Qualcomm holds the key
| to Modem. Which means Nvidia competing with Qualcomm wont
| work that well. Not to mention they have already tried that
| with Icera and generally speaking Mobile Phone SoC are low
| margin business. ( Comparatively Speaking )
| klelatti wrote:
| Completely take your point on Qualcomm.
|
| On mobile SoC margins I guess that margins are low
| because there is a lot of competition - start cutting off
| IP to the competition and margins will rise.
|
| I suspect that their focus will be on the server /
| automotive to start off with but the very fact that they
| can to any of this is troubling for me.
| himinlomax wrote:
| > nVidia could cut them off from any new designs
|
| Why would they do that anyway? The downsides are obvious
| (immediate loss of revenue), the risks are huge (antitrust
| litigation, big boost to RiscV or even Mips), the possible
| benefits are nebulous.
|
| Those who are most obviously at risk are designers of mobile
| GPUs (Broadcom, PowerVR ...).
| ATsch wrote:
| If they do it that directly, sure. But on a large enough
| (time)scale, incentives are the only thing that matters. And
| they'll certainly think hard about putting their fancy new
| research that would help a competitor into their openly
| licensed chips from now on.
| mbajkowski wrote:
| Curious as I don't know the terms of a perpetual architectural
| ARM license. But, is it valid only for a specific architecture,
| say v8 or v9, or is it valid for all future architectures as
| well? Or is it one of those things, where it depends per
| licensee and how they negotiated?
| 127 wrote:
| What does this change for STM32 and many other such low power
| MCUs? They're pretty ubiquitous in electornics.
| sshlocalhost wrote:
| I am really worried of a single company monopolising over the
| entire market
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| And there you have it. Perhaps the greatest thing to happen to
| RISC-V since the invention of the FPGA :-).
|
| I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to.
|
| Regarding the federal investment in FOSS thread that was here
| perhaps CPU architecture would be a good candidate.
| dragontamer wrote:
| RISC-V still seems too ad-hoc to me, and really new. Hard to
| say where it'd go for now.
|
| I know momentum is currently towards ARM over POWER, but...
| OpenPOWER is certainly a thing, and has IBM / Red Hat support.
| IBM may be expensive, but they already were proven "fair
| partners" in the OpenPOWER initiative and largely supportive of
| OSS / Free Software.
| darksaints wrote:
| OpenPOWER is pretty awesome but would be nowhere near as
| awesome as an OpenItanium. IMHO, Itanium was always
| mismarketed and misoptimized. It made a pretty good server
| processor, but not so good that enterprises were willing to
| migrate 40 year old software to run on it.
|
| In mobile form, it would have made a large leap in both
| performance and battery life. And it would have been a fairly
| easy market to break into: the average life of a mobile
| device is a few years, not a few decades. Recompilation and
| redistribution of software _is the status quo_.
| anarazel wrote:
| IMO VLIW is an absurdly bad choice for a general purpose
| processor. It requires baking in a huge amount of low level
| micro-architectural details into the compiler / generated
| code. Which obviously leads to problems with choosing what
| hardware generation to optimize for / not being able to
| generate good code for future architectures.
|
| And the compiler doesn't even come close to having as much
| information as the CPU has. Which basically means that most
| of the VLIW stuff just ends up needing to be broken up
| inside the CPU for good performance.
| darksaints wrote:
| Traditional compiler techniques may have struggled with
| maintaining code for different architectures, but a lot
| has changed in the last 15 years. The rise of widely used
| IR languages has led to compilers that support dozens of
| architectures and hundreds of instruction sets. And they
| are getting better all the time.
|
| The compiler has nearly all of the information that the
| CPU has, and it has orders of magnitude more. At best,
| your CPU can think a couple dozen _cycles_ ahead of what
| it is currently executing. The compiler can see the whole
| program, can analyze it using dozens of methodologies and
| models, and can optimize accordingly. Something like Link
| Time Optimization can be done trivially with a compiler,
| but it would take an army of engineers decades of work to
| be able to implement in hardware.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > At best, your CPU can think a couple dozen cycles ahead
| of what it is currently executing.
|
| The 200-sized reorder buffer says otherwise.
|
| Loads/stores can be reordered for 200+ different
| concurrent objects on modern Intel skylake (2015 through
| 2020) CPUs. And its about to get a bump to 300+ sized
| reorder buffers in Icelake.
|
| Modern CPUs are designed to "think ahead" almost the
| entirety of DDR4 RAM Latency, allowing reordering of
| instructions to keep the CPU pipes as full as possible
| (at least, if the underlying assembly code has enough ILP
| to fill the pipelines while waiting for RAM).
|
| > Something like Link Time Optimization can be done
| trivially with a compiler, but it would take an army of
| engineers decades of work to be able to implement in
| hardware.
|
| You might be surprised at what the modern Branch
| predictor is doing.
|
| If your "call rax" indirect call constantly calls the
| same location, the branch predictor will remember that
| location these days.
| KMag wrote:
| With proper profiling (say, reservoir sampling of
| instructions causing pipeline stalls), and dynamic
| recompilation/reoptimization like IBM's project DAISY /
| HP's Dynamo, you may get performance near a modern out-
| of-order desktop processor at the power budget of a
| modern in-order low-power chip.
|
| You get instructions scheduled based on actual
| dynamically measured usage patterns, but you don't pay
| for dedicated circuits to do it, and you don't re-do
| those calculations in hardware for every single
| instruction executed.
|
| It's not a guaranteed win, but I think it's worth
| exploring.
| dragontamer wrote:
| But once you do that, then you hardware optimize the
| interpreter, and then its no longer called a "dynamic
| recompiler", but instead a "frontend to the microcode".
| :-)
| KMag wrote:
| No doubt there is still room for a power-hungry out-of-
| order speed demon of an implementation, but you need to
| leave the door open for something with approximately the
| TDP of a very-low-power in-order-processor with
| performance closer to an out-of-order machine.
| branko_d wrote:
| Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge
| "call rax"?
|
| Morpheus: No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when
| you're ready, you won't need "call rax".
|
| ---
|
| Compiler has access to optimizations that are at the
| higher level of abstraction than what CPU can do. For
| example, the compiler can eliminate the call completely
| (i.e. inline the function), or convert a dynamic dispatch
| into static (if it can prove that an object will always
| have a specific type at the call site), or decide where
| to favor small code over fast code (via profile-guided
| optimization), or even switch from non-optimized code
| (but with short start-up time) to optimized code mid-
| execution (tiered compilation in JITs), move computation
| outside loops (if it can prove that the result is the
| same in all iterations), and many other things...
| saagarjha wrote:
| There is no way a compiler can do anything for an
| indirect call that goes one way for a while and the other
| afterwards. A branch predictor can get both with if not
| 100% accuracy about as close to it as you can possibly
| get.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > The compiler has nearly all of the information that the
| CPU has, and it has orders of magnitude more.
|
| The CPU has something the compiler can never have.
|
| Runtime information.
|
| That's why VLIW works great for DSP which is 99.9 % fixed
| access patterns, while being bad for general purpose
| code.
| dragontamer wrote:
| VLIW was the best implementation (20 years ago) of
| instruction level parallelism.
|
| But what have we learned in these past 20 years?
|
| * Computers will continue to become more parallel -- AMD
| Zen2 has 10 execution pipelines, supporting 4-way decode
| and 6-uop / clock tick dispatch per core, with somewhere
| close to 200 registers for renaming / reordering
| instructions. Future processors will be bigger and more
| parallel, Ice Lake is rumored to have over 300-renaming
| registers.
|
| * We need assembly code that scales to all different
| processors of different sizes. Traditional assembly code
| is surprisingly good (!!!) at scaling, thanks to
| "dependency cutting" with instructions like "xor eax,
| eax".
|
| * Compilers can understand dependency chains, "cut them
| up" and allow code to scale. The same code optimized for
| Intel Sandy Bridge (2011-era chips) will continue to be
| well-optimized for Intel Icelake (2021 era) ten years
| later, thanks to these dependency-cutting compilers.
|
| I think a future VLIW chip can be made that takes
| advantage of these facts. But it wouldn't look like
| Itanium.
|
| ----------
|
| EDIT: I feel like "xor eax, eax" and other such
| instructions for "dependency cutting" are wasting bits.
| There might be a better way for encoding the dependency
| graph rather than entire instructions.
|
| Itanium's VLIW "packages" is too static.
|
| I've discussed NVidia's Volta elsewhere, which has 6-bit
| dependency bitmasks on every instruction. That's the kind
| of "dependency graph" information that a compiler can
| provide very easily, and probably save a ton on power /
| decoding.
| moonchild wrote:
| Have you seen the mill cpu?
| javajosh wrote:
| Has anyone?
| dralley wrote:
| At the rate they're going, all the patents they've been
| filing will be expired by the time they get a chip out
| the door.
| jabl wrote:
| I agree there is merit in the idea of encoding
| instruction dependencies in the ISA. There have been a
| number of research projects in this area, e.g.
| wavescalar, EDGE/TRIPS, etc.
|
| It's not only about reducing the need for figuring out
| dependencies at runtime, but you could also partly reduce
| the need for the (power hungry and hard to scale!)
| register file to communicate between instructions.
| ATsch wrote:
| All of this hackery with hundreds of registers just to
| continue to make a massively parallel computer look like
| an 80s processor is what something like Itanium would
| have prevented. Modern processors ended up becoming
| basically VLIW anyway, Itanium just refused to lie to
| you.
| dragontamer wrote:
| When standard machine code is written in a "Dependency
| cutting" way, then it scales to many different reorder
| registers. A system from 10+ years ago with only
| 100-reorder registers will execute the code with maximum
| parallelism... while a system today with 200 to
| 300-reorder buffers will execute the SAME code with also
| maximum parallelism (and reach higher instructions-per-
| clock tick).
|
| That's why today's CPUs can have 4-way decoders and 6-way
| dispatch (AMD Zen and Skylake), because they can "pick up
| more latent parallelism" that the compilers have given
| them many years ago.
|
| "Classic" VLIW limits your potential parallelism to the
| ~3-wide bundles (in Itanium's case). Whoever makes the
| "next" VLIW CPU should allow a similar scaling over the
| years.
|
| -----------
|
| It was accidental: I doubt that anyone actually planned
| the x86 instruction set to be so effectively instruction-
| level parallel. Its something that was discovered over
| the years, and proven to be effective.
|
| Yes: somehow more parallel than the explicitly parallel
| VLIW architecture. Its a bit of a hack, but if it works,
| why change things?
| anarazel wrote:
| I don't understand how an increase, including the implied
| variability, of CPU internal parallelism and VLIW
| benefits go together?
| dragontamer wrote:
| I'm talking about a mythical / mystical VLIW
| architecture. Obviously, older VLIW designs have failed
| in this regards... but I don't necessarily see "future"
| VLIW processors making the same mistake.
|
| Perhaps from your perspective, a VLIW architecture that
| fixes these problems wouldn't necessarily be VLIW
| anymore. Which... could be true.
| KMag wrote:
| > And the compiler doesn't even come close to having as
| much information as the CPU has.
|
| Unless your CPU has a means for profiling where your
| pipeline stalls are coming from, combined with dynamic
| recompilation/reoptimization similar to IBM's project
| DAISY or HP's Dynamo.
|
| It's not going to do well as out-of-order CPUs that make
| instruction re-optimization decisions for every
| instruction, but I wouldn't rule out software-controlled
| dynamic re-optimization getting most of the performance
| benefits of out-of-order execution with a much smaller
| power budget, due to not re-doing those optimization
| calculations for every instruction. There are reasons
| most low-power implementations are in-order chips.
| csharptwdec19 wrote:
| I feel like what you describe is possible. When I think
| of what Transmeta was able to accomplish in the early
| 2000s just with CMS, certainly so.
| drivebycomment wrote:
| Itanuim deserved its fiery death and resurrection doesn't
| make any sense whatsoever. It's a dead end architecture,
| and humanity gained (by freeing up valuable engineering
| power to other more useful endeavors) when it died.
| darksaints wrote:
| Itanium was an excellent idea that needed investment in
| compilers. Nobody wanted to make that investment because
| speculative execution got them 80% of the way there
| without the investment in compilers. But as it turns out,
| speculative execution was a phenomenally bad idea, and
| patching its security vulnerabilities has set back
| processor performance to the point where VLIW seems like
| a good idea again. We should have made those compiler
| improvements decades ago.
| jabl wrote:
| > Itanium was an excellent idea that needed investment in
| compilers.
|
| ISTR that Intel & HP spent well over a $billion on VLIW
| compiler R&D, with crickets to show for it all.
|
| How much are you suggesting should be spent this time for
| a markedly different result?
| dragontamer wrote:
| NVidia Volta: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06826.pdf
|
| Each machine instruction on NVidia Volta has the
| following information:
|
| * Reuse Flags
|
| * Wait Barrier Mask
|
| * Read/Write barrier index (6-bit bitmask)
|
| * Read Dependency barriers
|
| * Stall Cycles (4-bit)
|
| * Yield Flag (1-bit software hint: NVidia CU will select
| new warp, load-balancing the SMT resources of the compute
| unit)
|
| Itanium's idea of VLIW was commingled with other ideas;
| in particular, the idea of a compiler static-scheduler to
| minimize hardware work at runtime.
|
| To my eyes: the benefits of Itanium are implemented in
| NVidia's GPUs. The compiler for NVidia's compiler-
| scheduling flags has been made and is proven effective.
|
| Itanium itself: the crazy "bundling" of instructions and
| such, seems too complex. The explicit bitmasks / barriers
| of NVidia Volta seems more straightforward and clear in
| describing the dependency graph of code (and therefore:
| the potential parallelism).
|
| ----------
|
| Clearly, static-compilers marking what is, and what
| isn't, parallelizable, is useful. NVidia Volta+
| architectures have proven this. Furthermore, compilers
| that can emit such information already exist. I do await
| the day when other architectures wake up to this fact.
| StillBored wrote:
| GPU's, aren't general purpose compute. EPIC did fairly
| well with HPC/etc style applications as well, it was
| everything else that was problematic. So, yes there are a
| fair number of workload and microarch decision
| similarities. But right now, those workloads tend to be
| better handled with a GPU style offload engine (or as it
| appears the industry is slowly moving, possibly a lot of
| fat vector units attached to a normal core).
| dragontamer wrote:
| I'm not talking about the SIMD portion of Volta.
|
| I'm talking about Volta's ability to detect dependencies.
| Which is null: the core itself probably can't detect
| dependencies at all. Its entirely left up to the compiler
| (or at least... it seems to be the case).
|
| AMD's GCN and RDNA architecture is still scanning for
| read/write hazards like any ol' pipelined architecture
| you learned in college. The NVidia Volta thing is new,
| and probably should be studied from a architectural point
| of view.
|
| Yeah, its a GPU-feature on NVidia Volta. But its pretty
| obvious to me that this explicit dependency-barrier thing
| could be part of a future ISA, even one for traditional
| CPUs.
| rrss wrote:
| FWIW, this article suggests the static software
| scheduling you are describing was introduced in Kepler,
| so it's probably at least not entirely new in Volta:
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-
| gtx-680-r...
|
| > NVIDIA has replaced Fermi's complex scheduler with a
| far simpler scheduler that still uses scoreboarding and
| other methods for inter-warp scheduling, but moves the
| scheduling of instructions in a warp into NVIDIA's
| compiler. In essence it's a return to static scheduling
|
| and I think this is describing more or less the same
| thing in Maxwell:
| https://github.com/NervanaSystems/maxas/wiki/Control-
| Codes
| dragontamer wrote:
| I appreciate the info. Apparently NVidia has been doing
| this for more years than I expected.
| drivebycomment wrote:
| By late 2000s, instruction scheduling research was
| largely considered done and dusted, with papers like:
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/923366
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/349299.349318
|
| and many, many others (it produced so many PhDs in 90s).
| And, needless to say, HP and Intel hired so many
| excellent researchers during the heydays of Itanium. So I
| don't know on what basis you think there wasn't enough
| investment. So I have no choice but to assume you're
| ignorant of the actual history here, both in academics
| and industry.
|
| It turns out instruction scheduling can not overcome the
| challenge of variable memory and cache latency, and
| branch prediction, because all of those are dynamic and
| unpredictable, for "integer" application (i.e. bulk of
| the code running on the CPUs of your laptop and cell
| phones). And, predication, which was one of the
| "solutions" to overcome branch misprediction penalties,
| turns out to be not very efficient, and is limited in its
| application.
|
| For integer applications, it turns out the instruction
| level parallelism isn't really the issue. It's about how
| to generate and maintain as many outstanding cache misses
| at a time. VLIW turns out to be insufficient and
| inefficient for that. Some minor attempts are addressing
| that through prefetches and more elaborate markings
| around load/store all failed to give good results.
|
| For HPC type workload, it turns out data parallelism and
| thread-level parallelism are much more efficient way to
| improve the performance, and also makes ILP on a single
| instruction stream play only a very minor role - GPUs and
| ML accelerators demonstrate this very clearly.
|
| As for the security and the speculative execution,
| speculative execution is not going anywhere. Naturally,
| there are many researches around this like:
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9138997
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3352460.3358306
|
| and while it will take a while before the real pipeline
| implements ideas like above thus we may continue to see
| some smaller and smaller vulnerabilities as the industry
| collectively plays whack-a-mole game, I don't see a world
| where the top of the line general-purpose microprocessor
| giving up on speculative execution, as the performance
| gain is simply too big.
|
| I have yet to meet any academics or industry processor
| architects or compiler engineer who think VLIW / Itanium
| is the way to move forward.
|
| This is not to say putting as much work to the compiler
| is a bad idea, as nVidia has demonstrated. But what they
| are doing is not VLIW.
| StillBored wrote:
| I think your conflating OoO and speculative execution. It
| was OoO which the itanium architects (apparently) didn't
| think would work as well as it did. OoO and being able to
| build wide superscaler machines, which could dynamically
| determine instruction dependency chains is what killed
| EPIC.
|
| Speculative execution is something you would want to do
| with the itanium as well, otherwise the machine is going
| to be stalling all the time waiting for branches/etc.
| Similarly, later itaniums went OoO (dynamically
| scheduled) because it turns out, the compiler can't know
| runtime state..
|
| https://www.realworldtech.com/poulson/
|
| Also while googling for that, ran across this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21410976
|
| PS: speculative execution is here to stay, it might be
| wrapped in more security domains and/or its going to just
| be one more nail in the business model of selling shared
| compute (something that was questionably from the
| beginning).
| xgk wrote:
| questionably from the beginning
|
| Agreed. If you look at what's the majority of compute
| loads (e.g. Instagram, Snap, Netflix, HPC) then that's
| (a) not particularly security critical, and (b) so big
| that the vendors can split their workload in security
| critical / not security critical, and rent fast machines
| for the former, and secure machines for the latter.
|
| I wonder which cloud provider is the first to offer this
| in a coherent way.
| Quequau wrote:
| I dimly recall reading an interview with one of Intel's
| Sr. Managers on the Itanium project where he explained
| his thoughts on why Itanium failed.
|
| His explanation centred on the fact that Intel decided
| early on that Itanium would only ever be an ultra high
| end niche product and only built devices which Intel
| could demand very high prices for. This in turn meant
| that almost no one outside of the few companies who were
| supporting Itanium development and certainly not most of
| the people who were working on other compilers and
| similar developer tools at the time, had any interest in
| working on Itanium because they simply could not justify
| the expense of obtaining the hardware.
|
| So all the organic open source activity that goes on for
| all the other platforms which are easily obtainable by
| pedestrian users simply did not go on for Itanium. Intel
| did not plan on that up front (though in hindsight it
| seemed obvious) and by the time that was widely
| recognised within the management team no one was willing
| to devote the sort of scale of resources that were
| required for serious development of developer tools on a
| floundering project.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I would love OpenPOWER to succeed. I just don't see the 48
| pin QFP version that costs < $1 and powers billions of
| gizmos. For me the ARM ecosystem's biggest win is that it
| scales from really small (M0/M0+) to really usefully big
| (A78) and has many points between those two architectures.
|
| I don't see OpenPOWER going there, but I can easily see
| RISC-V going there. So, for the moment, that is the horse I'm
| betting on.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Not quite 48-pin QFP chips, but 257-pin embedded is still
| smaller than Rasp. Pi. (Just searched what NXP's newest
| Power-chip is, and its a S32R274: 2MB 257-pin BGA.
| Definitely "embedded" size, but not as small as Cortex-M0)
|
| To be honest, I don't think that NVidia/ARM will screw over
| their Cortex-M0 or Cortex-M0+ customers over. I'm more
| worried about the higher-end, whether or not NVidia will
| "play nice" with its bigger rivals (Apple, Intel, AMD) in
| the datacenter.
| exikyut wrote:
| The FS32R274VCK2VMM appears to be the cheapest in this
| series; Digi-Key have it for $30, NXP has it for "$13 @
| 10K". This is for a 200MHz part.
|
| https://www.nxp.com/part/FS32R274VCK2VMM
|
| https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-
| inc/FS32R2...
|
| The two related devkits list for $529 and $4,123:
| https://www.digikey.com/products/en/development-boards-
| kits-...
|
| --
|
| Those processors make quite a few reference to an "e200",
| which I think is the CPU architecture. I discovered that
| Digi-Key lists _quite_ a few variants of this under Core
| Processor; and checking the datasheets of some random
| results suggests that they are indeed Power architecture
| parts.
|
| https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-
| ics/...
|
| The cheapest option appears to be the $2.67@1000, up-
| to-48MHz SPC560D40L1B3E0X with 256KB ECC RAM.
|
| Selecting everything >100MHz finds the $7.10@1000
| SPC560D40L1B3E0X, an up-to-120MHz part that adds 1MB
| flash (128KB ECC RAM).
|
| Restricting to >=200MHz finds the $13.32@500
| SPC5742PK1AMLQ9R has which has dual cores at 200MHz,
| 384KB ECC RAM and 2.5MB flash, and notes core lock-step.
|
| --
|
| After discovering the purpose of the "view prices at"
| field, the landscape changes somewhat.
|
| https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-
| ics/...
|
| The SPC574S64E3CEFAR (https://www.st.com/resource/en/data
| sheet/spc574s64e3.pdf) is 140MHz, has 1.5MB code + 64KB
| data flash and 96KB+32KB data RAM, and is available for
| $14.61 per 1ea.
|
| The SPC5744PFK1AMLQ9 (https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-
| sheet/MPC5744P.pdf) is $20.55@1, 200MHz, 2.5MB ECC flash,
| 384KB ECC RAM, and has two cores that support lockstep.
|
| The MPC5125YVN400 (https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/product-
| brief/MPC5125PB.pdf) is $29.72@1, 400MHz, supports
| DDR2@200MHz (only has 32KB onboard (S)RAM), and supports
| external flash. (I wonder if you could boot Linux on this
| thing?)
| rvense wrote:
| These are all basically ten-year-old parts, aren't they?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Yes but hey, the core ARM ISA is like 40 years old. The
| key is that they are in fact "low cost SoCs" which is not
| something I knew existed :-).
|
| Its really too bad the dev boards are so expensive but I
| get you need a lot of layers to route that sort of BGA.
| dragontamer wrote:
| They're all low end embedded parts with highly integrated
| peripherals. Basically: a microcontroller.
|
| No different than say, Cortex-M0 or M0+ in many regards
| (although ARM scales down to lower spec'd pieces).
| awill wrote:
| the war is over. Arm has won. That dominance will take a
| long time to fade. AWS and Apple's future is Arm.
| na85 wrote:
| I miss DIP chips that would fit on breadboards. I don't
| have steady enough hands to solder QFP onto a PCB, and I'm
| too cheap to buy an oven :(
| foldr wrote:
| A cheap toaster oven or hot air tool works fine for
| these. Or, as others have said, a regular soldering iron
| with lots of flux.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| https://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/smt-
| breakout-pc... can help. I have hand soldered STM32s to
| this adapter (use flux, a small tip)
| Ecco wrote:
| You're supposed to drag-solder those. Look it up on
| YouTube, it's super easy. The hardest part is positioning
| the chip, but it's actually easier than with an oven,
| because you can rework it if you only solder one or two
| pins :)
| IshKebab wrote:
| There's an even easier way than drag soldering - just
| solder it normally, without worrying about bridges. You
| can put tons of solder on it.
|
| The use some desoldering braid to soak up the excess
| solder. It will remove all the bridges and leave perfect
| joints.
| na85 wrote:
| Wow, just looked up a video and some guy did an 0.5mm
| pitch chip pretty darn quickly. Thank you!
| Ecco wrote:
| You're welcome! Also, flux. Lots of it. Buy some good
| one, and use tons of it. Then clean the hell out of your
| PCB!
| xigency wrote:
| > I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to.
|
| I understand what you're saying and this seems to be the
| prevailing pattern but I really don't understand it. ARM could
| easily be a standalone company. For some reason, mergers are
| in.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I would like to understand what you know about ARM that it's
| board of director's didn't (doesn't) know? In my experience
| companies merge when they are forced to, not because they
| want to.
|
| I have always assumed that their shareholders were offered so
| much of a premium on their shares that they chose to sell
| them rather than hold onto them. Clearly based on their
| fiscal 2015 results[1] they were a going concern.
|
| [1] https://www.arm.com/company/news/2016/02/arm-holdings-
| plc-re...
| Koshkin wrote:
| The next Apple machine I am going to buy will be using RISC-V
| cores.
| gumby wrote:
| Because of this transaction? I'm sure this deal will have
| absolutely no impact on apple's deal with ARM.
|
| Apple could of course Afford to invest in RISC-V (and surely
| has played with it internally) but they have enough control
| of their future under the current arrangement that it will be
| a long long time before they feel any need to switch -- 15
| years at least.
| acomjean wrote:
| Apple and Nvidia don't seem to see eye to eye. Nvidia
| doesn't support macs (CUDA support was pulled a year or two
| ago) and apples don't include Nvidia cards.
|
| This could change.
| gumby wrote:
| This is because Nvidia screwed apple (from Apple's POV)
| years ago with some bad GPUs to the point where Apple
| flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts. I don't know the
| internal details of course just the public ones so can't
| say if Apple is being petty or if Nvidia burned the
| bridge while the problem was unfolding.
|
| Given that the CEO was the supply chain guy at the time I
| suspect the latter, as I'd imagine he'd be more
| dispassionate than Jobs.
|
| In any case I seriously doubt nvidia could, much less
| would benefit from cancelling Apple's agreement.
| TomVDB wrote:
| > ... to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source
| Nvidia parts.
|
| I've seen this argument made before.
|
| It would be a valid point if Apple stopped using Nvidia
| GPUs in 2008 (they did), and then never used them again.
| And yet, 4 years later, they used Nvidia GPUs on the 2012
| MacBook Retina 15" on which I'm typing this.
| ksec wrote:
| And the 2012 GeForce GPU had GPU panic issues and let say
| higher chances of GPU failures.
|
| And then that was that. We haven't seen Nvidia GPU again.
| TomVDB wrote:
| I haven't seen any of those in 8 years, but I'll take you
| at your word...
|
| That said: AMD GPUs have also had their share of issues
| on MacBooks.
| gumby wrote:
| Thanks for this correction!
| saagarjha wrote:
| I suspect you'll be waiting for quite a long time, if not
| forever.
| dmix wrote:
| FWIW Apple isn't even listed on RISC-V's membership page:
|
| https://riscv.org/membership/members/
|
| While some like Google and Alibaba are listed as platinum
| founding members.
| nickik wrote:
| I agree that Apple wont do RISC-V but you don't need to
| be a member to us it.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| ROFL. Why not wait for the upcoming Josephson junction
| memristors, while you're at it?
| RubberShoes wrote:
| This is not good
| chid wrote:
| I have heard numerous arguments but they arguments don't feel
| that compelling, what are reasons why this is bad?
| wetpaws wrote:
| More power concentrated in a company that already has a de-
| facto monopoly over a gpu market.
| RobLach wrote:
| ARM will not be cheaper after this.
| stupendousyappi wrote:
| Conversely, Nvidia has done a solid job of advancing GPU
| performance even in the face of weak competition, and with
| their additional resources, ARM performance may advance
| even faster, and provide the first competition in decades
| to x86 in servers and desktops.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| The tech may have advanced due to the insatiable hunger
| of machine learning, but the weak competition has meant
| pricing has not decreased as much as it should have or
| could have, only enough to move more GPUs. (nvidia
| biggest competitor are the GPUs they manufactured two
| years earlier).
| dannyw wrote:
| Really? You get 2x perf per dollar with Ampere. That's
| not good enough on the pricing front?
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Yes really. Performance that is cleverly hampered by RAM
| (and driver licensing) on the low end from an ML
| perspective. The only reason they can do this is because
| of lack of competition. The performance of 3000 series
| cards could be dramatically improved for large models at
| a modest increase in price if RAM was doubled.
|
| It really is possible to be critical of a monopoly
| without disparaging the product itself. It is when a true
| competitor arises that we see the monopolist's true
| capabilities (see Intel and AMD).
| 867-5309 wrote:
| would that affect the value of Raspberry Pi and other
| budget devices?
| fizzled wrote:
| Ask Silicon Labs, NXP, STMicrolectronics, Dialog
| Semiconductor, ADI, Infineon, ON Semi, Renesas, TI, ... they
| all license Arm IP.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| An independent ARM that did not manufacture processors was
| the best outcome for everyone in the industry.
|
| ARM being owned by an organisation deeply embedded in
| processor design and manufacturing, will now be licensing
| designs to competitors, as well as getting a lot of intel on
| its competitors.
|
| ARM supercomputers were poised to take on Nvidia. Now its all
| one and the same.
|
| As others have said, this will do wonders for RISC-V.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Consider one of NVidia's rivals: AMD, who uses an ARM chip in
| their EPYC line of chips as a security co-processor. Does
| anyone expect NVidia to "play fair" with such a rival?
|
| ARM as an independent company, has been profoundly "neutral",
| allowing many companies to benefit from the ARM instruction
| set. It has been run very well: slightly profitable and an
| incremental value to all parties involved (be you Apple's
| iPhone, NVidia's Tegra (aka Nintendo Switch chip), AMD's
| EPYC, Qualcomm's Snapdragon, numerous hard drive companies,
| etc. etc.). All in all, ARM's reach has been because of its
| well-made business decisions that have been fair to all
| parties involved.
|
| NVidia, despite all their technical achievements, is known to
| play hardball from a business perspective. I don't think
| anyone expects NVidia to remain "neutral" or "fair".
| paulmd wrote:
| > Consider one of NVidia's rivals: AMD, who uses an ARM
| chip in their EPYC line of chips as a security co-
| processor. Does anyone expect NVidia to "play fair" with
| such a rival?
|
| Yes, absolutely.
|
| NVIDIA's not going to burn the ARM ecosystem to the ground.
| They just paid $40 billion for it. And they only had $11b
| of cash on hand, they really overpaid for it (because
| SoftBank desperately needed a big win to cover for their
| other recent losses).
|
| Now: will everybody (including AMD) probably be paying more
| for their ARM IP from now on? Yes.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Why does _SoftBank 's_ desperation make _NVIDIA_ pay too
| much?
| dragontamer wrote:
| When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems for $7.4 Billion,
| did you expect Oracle to burn Solaris to the ground, and
| turn their back on MySQL's open source philosophy? Then
| sue Google for billions of dollars over the Java /
| Android thing?
|
| Or more recently, when Facebook bought Oculus for $2
| Billion, did you expect Facebook to betraying the
| customer's trust and start pushing Facebook logins?
|
| The Oculus / Facebook login thin just happened weeks ago.
| Companies betraying the promises they made to their core
| audience is like... bread-and-butter at this point (and
| seems to almost always happen after an acquisition play).
| We know Facebook's modus operandi, and even if its worse
| for Oculus, we know that Facebook will do what Facebook
| does.
|
| Similarly, we know NVidia's modus operandi. NVidia is
| trying to make a datacenter play and create a vertical
| company for high-end supercomputers. Such a strategy
| means that NVidia will NOT play nice with their rivals:
| Intel or AMD. (And the Mellanox acquisition is just icing
| on the cake now).
|
| NVidia will absolutely leverage ARM to gain dominance in
| the datacenter. That's the entire point of this purchase.
|
| --------
|
| There's a story about scorpions and swimming with one on
| your back. I'm sure you've heard of it before. Just
| because its necessary for the scorpion's survival doesn't
| mean it is safe to trust the scorpion.
| RantyDave wrote:
| I'm not at all surprised they killed Solaris. Given that
| Oracle was pretty much the only software that ran on
| Solaris (or that there might be a good reason to run on
| Solaris), maybe it was just a big support headache. As
| for MySQL? Not surprised at all. They pretty much just
| bought a brand name, maybe just to spite red hat.
| rtpg wrote:
| > Or more recently, when Facebook bought Oculus for $2
| Billion, did you expect Facebook to betraying the
| customer's trust and start pushing Facebook logins?
|
| yes? I mean that felt eminently possible from the get-go.
| yyyk wrote:
| >When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems for $7.4 Billion,
| did you expect Oracle
|
| Yes, yes, and yes. This is _Oracle_ we 're talking about.
| Of course they'll invest more in lawyers than tech. The
| only reason they still invest in Java is the lawsuit
| potential. If only Google had the smarts to buy Sun
| instead...
|
| As for NVidia, their play probably is integration and
| datacenters. At the moment, going after other ARM
| licencees will hinder NVidia more than help (they're
| going after x86, no time to waste on bad PR and legal
| issues with small time ARM datacenter licencees; Qualcomm
| and Apple are in a different segment altogether). Of
| course, we can't guarantee it stays that way.
| gruez wrote:
| Bad for ARM, good for every other ISA.
| paulmd wrote:
| It wouldn't have been good if any of the people who could
| actually afford to buy ARM did so.
|
| Would you rather have TSMC in control of ARM? Maybe have access
| to new architectures bundled with a mandate that you have to
| build them on TSMC's processes?
|
| How about Samsung? All of the fab ownership concerns of TSMC
| plus they also make basically any tech product you care to
| name, so all the integration concerns of NVIDIA.
|
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Key-Apple-suppli...
|
| Microsoft? Oracle? None of the companies who could have
| afforded to pay what Son wanted for Softbank were any better
| than NVIDIA.
|
| There are a lot of good things that will come out of this as
| well. NVIDIA is a vibrant company compared to a lot of the
| others.
| leptons wrote:
| Microsoft can't afford to buy ARM? lol... well that's not
| true at all.
| paulmd wrote:
| But what would microsoft _do_ with ARM at a $40b valuation?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Qualcomm and Apple are going to be fine even with NVIDIA owning
| ARM. They are American companies under the protection of US
| legislation and representation.
|
| However the situation for Chinese companies is even clearer now.
| Huawei, Hikvision etc. need to move away from ARM. Probably on to
| their own thing as RISC-V is dominated by US companies.
| vaxman wrote:
| Qualcomm, Apple and NVidia will lose favor with the US
| government unless they bring (at least a full copy of) their
| FAB partners and the rest of their supply chains home to
| America (Southwest including USMCA zone). We love Southeast
| Asia, but the pandemic highlighted our vulnerability and, as a
| country, we're not going to keep sourcing our critical
| infrastructure in China --or it's back yard. If those American
| CEOs keep balking at the huge investment required, you will see
| the US government write massive checks to Intel (has numerous,
| albeit obsolete, domestic FABs), DELL and upstarts (like
| System76 in Colorado) to pick winners, while the elevator to
| hell gains a new stop in Silicon Valley and San Diego
| (nationalizing patents, etc) during a sort of "war effort" like
| we had in the early 1940s.
| unixhero wrote:
| It's so amazing Apple didn't win this M&A race.
| rahoulb wrote:
| Apple isn't interested in selling tech licences to other
| companies - they want to own their core technologies so they
| can sell products to consumers. And, as an original member of
| the Arm consortium, they have a perpetual licence to the Arm IP
| (I have no inside knowledge about that, just many people who
| know more than me have said it)
| easton wrote:
| Could Apple hypothetically use their perpetual license to ARM to
| license the ISA to other manufacturers if they so desired? (not
| that they do now, but it could be a saving grace if Nvidia
| assimilated ARM fully).
| pokot0 wrote:
| Why would they ever want to enable their competitors?
| newsclues wrote:
| To spite nVidia.
| hndamien wrote:
| If Larry David has taught me anything, it is that spite
| stores are not good business.
| mumblerino wrote:
| It depends on who you are. Are you a Larry David or are
| you a Mila Kunis?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they can't, but I also think there's no way in
| hell they'd do it if they could. It's not in Apple's DNA.
| Better for them if no one else has access to the instruction
| set.
|
| I bet they'd make a completely custom ISA if they could. Heck,
| maybe they plan to some day, and that's why they're calling the
| new Mac processors "Apple Silicon".
| mhh__ wrote:
| I could see apple being the next in line of basically failed
| VLIW ISAs - the cost/benefit doesn't really add up to
| completely redesign, prove, implement, and support a new ISA
| unless it was worth it technologically.
|
| If they could pull it off I would be very impressed.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _I bet they 'd make a completely custom ISA if they could.
| Heck, maybe they plan to some day, and that's why they're
| calling the new Mac processors "Apple Silicon"._
|
| That was my first thought.
|
| I'd be surprised if Apple wasn't already working on this.
| exikyut wrote:
| Thinking about that though, from a technical perspective
| keeping the name but changing the function would only produce
| bad PR.
|
| - "We changed from the 68K to PPC" "Agh!...fine"
|
| - "We changed from PPC to x86" "What, again?"
|
| - "We changed from x86 to Apple Silicon" "...oooo...kay..."
|
| - "We changed from Apple Silicon to, uh, Apple Silicon - like
| it's still called Apple Silicon, but the architecture is
| different" "What's an architecture?" "The CPU ISA." "The CPU
| is a what?"
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| This it terrible news for the FLOSS community.
|
| Nvidia has consistently for many years refused to properly
| support Linux and other open source OSs.
|
| Heck, Wayland compositors just say "if you're using nvidia then
| don't even try to use our software" since they're fed up of
| Nvidia's lack of collaboration.
|
| I really hope ARM doesn't go the same way. :(
| janoc wrote:
| ARM itself has little to no impact on open source community.
| They only license chip IP, they don't make any chips
| themselves. And most of the ARM architecture is documented and
| open, with the exception of things like the MALI GPU.
|
| Whether or not some SoC (e.g. in a phone) is going to be
| supported by Linux doesn't depend on ARM but on the
| manufacturer of the given chip. That won't change in any way.
|
| ARM maintains the GCC toolchain for the ARM architecture but
| that is unlikely to go anywhere (and even if it did, it is open
| source and anyone else can take it over).
|
| The much bigger problem is that Nvidia could now start putting
| squeeze on chip makers who license the ARM IP for their own
| business reasons - Nvidia makes its own ARM-based ICs (e.g. the
| Jetson, Tegra) and it is hard to imagine that they will not try
| to use their position to stiffle the competition (e.g. from
| Qualcomm or Samsung).
| hajile wrote:
| https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-
| sof...
|
| ARM directly maintains the main ARM parts of the Linux kernel
| among other things.
| [deleted]
| CivBase wrote:
| I was hoping that Apple's switch to ARM would prompt better ARM
| support for popular Linux distros. Given NVIDIA's track record
| with the OSS community, I'm definitely less hopeful now.
| ianai wrote:
| They sure seem to be marketing this as a logical move for their
| AI platform.
| Blammar wrote:
| No one has seemed to notice the following two things:
|
| "To pave the way for the deal, SoftBank reversed an earlier
| decision to strip out an internet-of-things business from Arm and
| transfer it to a new company under its control. That would have
| stripped Arm of what was meant to be the high-growth engine that
| would power it into a 5G-connected future. One person said that
| SoftBank made the decision because it would have put it in
| conflict with commitments made to the U.K. over Arm, which were
| agreed at the time of the 2016 deal to appease the government."
| (from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/nvidia-reportedly-
| to... )
|
| and
|
| "The transaction does not include Arm's IoT Services Group."
| (nvidia news.)
|
| which appear to contradict each other.
|
| I'm not sure about the significance of this. I would have guessed
| Nvidia would have wanted the IoT group to remain.
|
| Also, to first order, when a company issues stock to purchase
| another corporation, that cost is essentially "free" since the
| value of the corporation increases.
|
| In other words, Nvidia is essentially paying $12 billion in cash
| for ARM up front, and that's all. (The extra $5B in cash or stock
| depends on financial performance of ARM, and thus is a second-
| order effect.)
| manquer wrote:
| It is not "free", it means current shareholders of Nvidia are
| paying for the remaining money. Their stock is diluted on fresh
| issue of shares.[1]
|
| The $12B comes from Nvidia the company, the remaining money
| comes from Nvidia's shareholders directly.
|
| [1] Only if the valuation of ARM is "worth it" the fresh issue
| of shares will not cost the current shareholders anything. This
| is rarely the case , if Nvida overvalued(or less likely
| undervalued) the deal then current shareholders are giving more
| than they got for it.
| haten wrote:
| Yes
| finiteloops wrote:
| To me, "paying for" and "diluted" connotates negative
| emotions.
|
| Cash paid in this instance is treated no different than cash
| in their normal operating expenses. If either generates
| profits in line with their current expected returns, the
| stock price stays the same, and everyone is indifferent to
| the transaction.
|
| Same goes for stock issuance. If the expectation of the use
| of proceeds from the issuance are in line with the company's
| current expected returns, everyone is indifferent.
|
| Your statement is still true, and the stock market jumped
| today on the news, so I feel my connotation is misplaced.
| pc86 wrote:
| > _If either generates profits in line with their current
| expected returns, the stock price stays the same_
|
| This is a pretty naive depiction of Wall Street.
| bananaface wrote:
| And note that the $12B is _also_ owned by Nvidia 's
| shareholders (they own the company which owns the cash), so
| they're paying for that too.
|
| It's just different forms of shareholder assets being traded
| for other assets, by the shareholders (or rather, their
| majority vote).
| manquer wrote:
| Effectively all of it is funded by the shareholders who
| "own" the corporation.
|
| In the current example if the cash is coming from a debt
| instrument is it not bank funding it now?
|
| it is typically about who is fronting the money now, it
| could be your bank making loans, or from cash reserves you
| have, fresh stock issue, selling another asset, or even the
| target's bank as in the case of LBO.
|
| The shareholders always end up paying for it eventually in
| some form or other. Differentiating it by the current
| source helps understand the deal structure and risks
| better.
| pottertheotter wrote:
| It's still the shareholders even if debt financing is
| used. The shareholders, through the company, have to pay
| off the debt. It increases the risk of bankruptcy.
|
| When doing a deal, it comes down to price and source of
| funds. Changing either can drastically change how good or
| bad the deal is.
| bananaface wrote:
| Absolutely. I was just noting it for anyone reading.
| pathseeker wrote:
| >Also, to first order, when a company issues stock to purchase
| another corporation, that cost is essentially "free" since the
| value of the corporation increases.
|
| This isn't correct. If investors thing Nvidia overpaid, its
| share price will decline. There are many examples of acquiring
| companies losing significant value on announcements to buy
| other companies even in pure stock deals.
| siberianbear wrote:
| In addition, it's not even a valid argument if the cost was
| entirely in cash.
|
| One would be making the argument, "the cost is essentially
| free because although we spent $40B, we acquired a company
| worth $40B". Obviously, that's not any more correct than the
| case of paying in stock.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I pay the car dealer $20,000, I get a car worth $20,000.
| Was the car free?
| tonitosou wrote:
| actually as soon as u get the car its not a 20k$ car
| anymore.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Technically, yes. Your net worth is unchanged. The
| problem is that the car is no longer worth $20,000 as
| soon as you drive it off the lot.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I agree that paying in new shares doesn't make the
| acquisition free. But the value of shares is an expectation
| of future cash flows. If that expectation is currently on
| the high side for Nvidia and on the low side for Arm then
| paying in shares makes the acquisition cheaper for Nvidia
| than paying cash.
|
| Nvidia is essentially telling us that they think their
| shares are currently richly valued. I agree with that.
| bananaface wrote:
| Not necessarily. They could just prefer to be
| diversified. It can be rational to take a _loss_ of value
| in the pursuit of diversification (depends on the
| portfolios of the stakeholders).
|
| They could also think their shares are valued accurately
| but believe the benefits of synthesis would increase the
| value.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| How would any of that make payment in shares beneficial
| compared to cash payment?
| bananaface wrote:
| $12B cash appears to be all they have _available_. They
| can 't pay more cash.
|
| https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nvda/financia
| ls/...
|
| Their only other option would be taking on debt.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| Right, so Nvidia with their A2 rating and their solid
| balance sheet in a rock bottom interest rate environment
| still found it favourable to purchase Arm with newly
| issued shares.
|
| That's telling us something about what they think about
| their share valuation right now.
| xxpor wrote:
| Perhaps there are tax implications?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Correct, if it's shares, they just dilluted the value of
| the stock. If I owned 1% of the company, after printing and
| handing out $40bn worth of stock, then I keep the same
| amount of stock, but now it's (e.g.) 0.5%, which means I
| just lost 50% of that investment. Which means I will
| receive 50% of the dividend (since out of the next year's
| dividend 'pool' someone will get a big chunk. Which means
| NVidia just screwed the existing shareholders (for the time
| being, and once the numbers/$ are merged I should be
| getting my dividend by two parts, one from ARM and one from
| NVIDIA).
|
| If they gave away cash, that's a different story, it all
| depends.. if they were sitting on $1tn cash, and the spent
| $40bn, that's no biggie. I mean we went through COVID, what
| worse can come next?
| throwaway5792 wrote:
| That's not how equity works. Paying cash or shares, the
| end result is exactly the same for shareholders barring
| perhaps some tax implications.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| > If I owned 1% of the company, after printing and
| handing out $40bn worth of stock, then I keep the same
| amount of stock, but now it's (e.g.) 0.5%, which means I
| just lost 50% of that investment. Which means I will
| receive 50% of the dividend
|
| Well, you're now getting 50% of the dividend produced by
| the new combined entity. If the deal was correctly
| priced, your share of the Arm dividend should exactly
| replace the portion of your Nvidia dividend that you lost
| through dilution.
| smabie wrote:
| It's rare for the acquiring companies stock to not decline,
| regardless of whether the market thinks they overpaid.
| inlined wrote:
| I worked at Parse when it was bought by Facebook. The day
| the news broke, Facebook's market cap grew by multiples of
| the acquisition price. I remember being gobsmacked that
| Facebook effectively got paid to buy us.
| rocqua wrote:
| Unless Facebook itself actually issued stock at the new
| price, Facebook did not get paid. It were the Facebook
| shareholders that got paid.
|
| Really, it shows that the market valued Parse much more
| than the cash it cost Facebook. If Parse was bought with
| stock instead of cash, that's almost cooler. Since it
| allowed Parse to capture more of the surplus value they
| created. (Since the stock price popped).
| jannes wrote:
| Keep in mind that market cap is a fictional aggregate. It
| does not represent the real price that all shares could
| be sold for.
| walterbell wrote:
| There were two separate IoT business units: Platform
| (https://pelion.com) and Data (https://www.treasuredata.com/).
| The Platform unit fits the Segars post-acquisition comment
| about end-to-end IoT software architecture,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24465005
|
| _> One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make
| commitments to the UK government over Arm's future in Britain,
| where opposition politicians have recently insisted that any
| potential deal must safeguard British jobs._
|
| So the deal has already been influenced by one regulator. That
| should encourage other regulators.
|
| _> SoftBank will remain committed to Arm's long-term success
| through its ownership stake in NVIDIA, expected to be under 10
| percent._
|
| Why is this stake necessary?
| nautilus12 wrote:
| Does this mean they are or aren't buying treasure data? What
| would happen if not?
| walterbell wrote:
| That would be up to Softbank.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Are they getting 10% of nvidia or keeping 10% of Arm
| inopinatus wrote:
| Given the quality of the reporting so far it's possible
| that they are getting 10% of the UK.
| btown wrote:
| From the press release directly, it appears to be 10% of
| NVIDIA:
|
| https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-
| for...
|
| > Under the terms of the transaction, which has been
| approved by the boards of directors of NVIDIA, SBG and Arm,
| NVIDIA will pay to SoftBank a total of $21.5 billion in
| NVIDIA common stock and $12 billion in cash, which includes
| $2 billion payable at signing. The number of NVIDIA shares
| to be issued at closing is 44.3 million, determined using
| the average closing price of NVIDIA common stock for the
| last 30 trading days. Additionally, SoftBank may receive up
| to $5 billion in cash or common stock under an earn-out
| construct, subject to satisfaction of specific financial
| performance targets by Arm.
|
| Since NVIDIA currently has 617 million shares outstanding,
| if the earn-out were to be fully in common stock, this
| would bring Softbank to 8.8% of NVIDIA from this
| transaction alone (plus anything they already have in
| NVIDIA as public-market investors).
|
| (I believe that the Forbes analysis in the sibling comment
| is mistaken in describing this as a "10% stake in new
| entity" - no new entity is mentioned in the press release
| itself.)
| walterbell wrote:
| _> no new entity is mentioned in the press release
| itself_
|
| The Forbes article is based on a joint interview today
| with the CEOs of Arm and Nvidia, who could have provided
| more detail than the press release, specifically:
|
| _> Arm operating structure: Arm will operate as an
| NVIDIA division_
|
| This level of detail can be confirmed during the analyst
| call on Monday. Operating as a separate division would
| help assuage concerns about Arm's independence. The press
| release says:
|
| _> Arm will remain headquartered in Cambridge ... Arm's
| intellectual property will remain registered in the U.K._
|
| Those statements are both consistent with Arm operating
| as a UK-domiciled business that is owned by Nvidia.
| walterbell wrote:
| 10% of Arm division of Nvidia, https://www.forbes.com/sites
| /patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its-....
|
| _> Softbank ownership: Will keep 10% stake in new entity_
|
| That would mean Nvidia acquired 90% of Arm for $40B, i.e.
| Arm was valued at $44B.
|
| Is Softbank invested in Arm licensees, who may benefit from
| Softbank influence? Alternately, which Arm licensees would
| bid in a future auction of Softbank's 10% stake of Nvidia's
| Arm division?
| boulos wrote:
| > Why is this stake necessary?
|
| Edit: it's not necessary/a requirement.
|
| They're noting that after the transaction, SoftBank will
| still fall under the 10% ownership threshold that requires
| more reporting from the SEC [1]:
|
| > Section 16 of the Exchange Act applies to an SEC reporting
| company's directors and officers, as well as shareholders who
| own more than 10% of a class of the company's equity
| securities registered under the Exchange Act. The rules under
| Section 16 require these "insiders" to report most of their
| transactions involving the company's equity securities to the
| SEC within two business days on Forms 3, 4 or 5.
|
| [1] https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/officersand
| dir...
| oxfordmale wrote:
| The UK government never learns. Kraft made similar promises
| when buying Cadbury regarding jobs,but quietly reneged on
| them over time. The Kraft CEO was asked to show up before an
| UK parliament committee, but of course declined, and that was
| the end of the story.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| It absolutely outrages me. I've posted elsewhere on the
| thread about this, but I want to do something to prevent
| this sort of thing in future. Setting up a think tank seems
| like a viable idea. See my other response in the thread if
| you are interested and want to get in contact.
| lumberingjack wrote:
| Welcome to vulture capitalism it's been gutting American
| industry for about 10 20 years used to be four or five
| paper mills around here but now they're all in China and
| everyone who worked there is on drugs now
| fencepost wrote:
| _Welcome to vulture capitalism it 's been gutting
| American industry for about 10 20 years_
|
| More like 30-40.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity_in_the_1980s
| Torkel wrote:
| Get the deals in writing, with explicit liabilities if
| contract is broken. There, I fixed it.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| What, and the profits, investments and growth made by the
| company will stay inside the country? There's a much
| broader problem here.
| [deleted]
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| it's all posturing unless the government makes the company
| to agree to punitive severance packages to be put in an
| escrow account to be released to the company after 20 years
| or to the people if fired before that.
| sgt101 wrote:
| What's this "quietly reneged over time"! Kraft simply
| welshed on the deal instantly! There were explosions and a
| change in the law.
| djmobley wrote:
| Except the Cadbury-Kraft debacle led to major reforms in
| how the UK regulates foreign takeovers.
|
| In the case of Arm, the guarantees provided back in 2016
| were legally binding, which is why we're here, four years
| and another acquisition later, with Nvidia now eager to
| demonstrate it is standing by those commitments.
|
| Maybe in this particular instance they did learn something?
| bencollier49 wrote:
| They should learn to prevent the sale, period. Promises
| to retain some jobs (for ever? What happens if profits
| decline? What happens if the core tech is sold and ARM
| becomes a shell? Do the rules still apply?) address a
| tiny fraction of the problems presented by the sale of
| one of our core national tech companies.
| tomalpha wrote:
| I would have liked to see ARM remain owned in the UK. I
| think it's proven itself capable of innovation and
| organic growth on its own.
|
| But how can we evaluate the whether that will continue?
|
| What if ARM is not sold, and then (for whatever reason)
| stagnates, doesn't innovate, gets overtaken in some way,
| and enters gradual decline?
|
| Perhaps that's unlikely, but _prevent the sale, period_
| is feels too absolute.
| djmobley wrote:
| Who is to say ARM was "owned in the UK" prior to the
| SoftBank acquisition?
|
| Prior to that it was a publicly traded company,
| presumably with a diverse array of international
| shareholders.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| That feels like giving up, to me. We should have the
| confidence that British industry can development and
| flourish on its own merits without being sold off to
| foreign interests.
| fluffything wrote:
| What have confidence when we can just look at ARM
| financials?
|
| There are more ARM chips sold each year than those of all
| its competitors together. Yet ARM's revenue is 300
| million $.
|
| Why? Because ARM lives from the ISA royalties, and their
| revenue on the cores they license is actually small.
|
| With RISC-V on the rise, and west sanctions against
| china, RISC-V competition against ARM will only increase,
| and it is very hard to compete against something that's
| good / better and has lower costs (RISC-V royalties are
| "free").
|
| I really have no idea why NVIDIA would adquire ARM. If
| they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM
| isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu, etc. are
| built and designed by better teams). ARM cores are used
| by Qualcom and Samsung, but these aren't world-class and
| get beaten every gen by Apple Silicon. If they want ARM
| royalties, that's high risk business, and very low reward
| (there is little money to make there).
|
| The only ok-ish cores ARM makes are embedded low-power
| cores (not mobile, but truly IoT < 1W embedded). Hard to
| imagine that an architecture like Volta or Ampere that
| perform well at 200-400W would perform well at the <1W
| envelope. No mobile phone in the world uses nvidia
| accelerators, and mobile phones are "supercomputers" when
| compared with the kind of devices ARM is "ok-ish" at.
|
| So none of this makes sense to me, except if NVIDIA would
| want to "license" GPUs with ARM cores to IoT and low
| power devices like ARM does, but that sounds extremely
| far-fetched, because nvidia is super-far away from a
| product there, and also because the margins for those
| products are very very thin, and nvidia tends to like
| 40-60% margins. You just can have those when buying IoT
| chips for 0.12$. Its also hard to sell a GPU to these use
| cases because they often don't need it.
| als0 wrote:
| > If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-
| center, ARM isn't that (Graviton
|
| Graviton uses Neoverse CPU cores, which are designed by
| ARM. To say that ARM is not a world-class CPU team is
| unfair. Especially as Ampere just announced an 80 core
| datacenter SoC using Neoverse cores.
| [deleted]
| Followerer wrote:
| The main source of revenue for ARM is, by far, royalties.
| Licenses are paid once, royalties are paid by unit
| shipped. And they shipped billions last year.
|
| Revenue is not $300, we don't know what ARM's revenue is
| because it hasn't been published since 2016. And back
| then it was like $1.5 _billion_. $300 million was _net_
| income. Again, in 2016.
|
| I think you've already been adequately corrected on your
| misconceptions about ARM's CPU design teams.
| lumberingjack wrote:
| Apple mobile beating arm mobile is pretty irrelevant
| considering they can barely run the same type of tasks
| it's a miracle they both have the same benchmarks since
| they're operating systems are totally different. Beyond
| that it doesn't even really matter which one's faster
| because you got all that overhead of the os's that are so
| different. I would also like to say that Apple users are
| going to buy the newer chip whether it's faster or not.
| Because of planned obstinance at a software level. I've
| never heard an Apple user talk about speed or The
| benchmark of the phones because that marketing segment is
| clueless to that. My guess is that Nvidia needs arm for
| their self-driving stuff.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >" If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-
| center, ARM isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu,
| etc. are built and designed by better teams)."
|
| The latest Fujitsus HPC offering the A64FX is also ARM
| based though.[1][2] And it sounds as though this is
| replacing their SPARC64 in this role .
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)
| [deleted]
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The core is not designed by ARM.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Nvidia could still asset strip ARM, and then let ARM
| decline organically with redundancies justified by the
| decrease in revenue.
| lumberingjack wrote:
| Sounds like with all those new regulations it will be a
| limiting factor for new jobs not going to set up my
| company there if I got to jump through hoops like that.
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