[HN Gopher] Nvidia prepares to abandon $40B Arm bid
___________________________________________________________________
Nvidia prepares to abandon $40B Arm bid
Author : pseudolus
Score : 704 points
Date : 2022-01-25 10:51 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| londons_explore wrote:
| With an increasing number of countries worldwide using their
| powers to prevent the sale or merger of companies, will we see a
| devaluation of these companies? After all, owning something is
| only of value if you can sell it, and if you can only sell with
| permission from 10+ country governments, all of whom can say no
| for strategic reasons, then it isn't such a great purchase.
| neolefty wrote:
| Good point from a global view. I'd like to see a little more
| international cooperation, leading towards a global standard,
| but we have many hurdles between here and there, especially
| involving trust between nations.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| Owning a company is traditionally thought to be of value
| because you get a stream of dividend income from the profits
| the company earns, not because you can sell the company.
| klelatti wrote:
| Only two weeks ago SoftBank / Arm / Nvidia made a submission to
| the UK competition authorities with a singularly pessimistic view
| of Arm's prospects as a stand-alone company [1]. I wonder if this
| was wise given the where the deal seems to be now.
|
| Whilst this is a bit overdone, it does highlight the challenges
| that Arm faces. If the Nvidia deal is dead - which seems likely -
| then floating clearly seems unlikely to offer the prospect of the
| return that SoftBank was expecting when it paid a premium for
| Arm.
|
| The key question from an Arm user / customer's perspective seems
| to be 'Can Arm as a stand-alone company finance the investment it
| meets to stay competitive?'
|
| [1]
| https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/61d81a458fa8f...
| varelse wrote:
| Likely Qualcomm bales them out as they have offered to do so
| and eventually takes them over quietly by osmosis so no one
| notices until the deal is done.
|
| https://www.barrons.com/articles/qualcomm-offers-to-rescue-a...
| karmasimida wrote:
| > SoftBank / Arm / Nvidia made a submission to the UK
| competition authorities with a singularly pessimistic view of
| Arm's prospects as a stand-alone company
|
| They apparently want to sell the company and benefit from it
| together ... so it this surprising?
| klelatti wrote:
| Surprising when it seems clear it will be blocked and they
| will have to float Arm!
| 310260 wrote:
| From that document:
|
| > As Arm's CEO, Simon Segars, explained: "We contemplated an
| IPO but determined
|
| > that the pressure to deliver short-term revenue growth and
| profitability would
|
| > suffocate our ability to invest, expand, move fast and
| innovate."
|
| It sounds like Arm needs a change in leadership to me. Find the
| capital for long-term investment somewhere and follow a path to
| improvement like AMD did. Yes, there is pressure to deliver
| short term profit as there always is today. However, that's not
| a strategy that works for a company like Arm. Everyone around
| the world can see the value in what Arm produces. Find someone
| to invest who isn't a hedge fund manager and still sees that
| value.
| johnmarcus wrote:
| are we pretending that they didn't say that exclusively in
| hopes the deal would go through?
|
| They will turn around that statement on a dime and not a
| single investor will blink with "...but you said to the
| regulators...". No risk in making such a silly statement.
|
| They probably will get a change of leadership though. Often
| they chose the best-man-for-the-merger, and when it doesn't
| work out, they then actually search for the best-person-for-
| the-job.
| michelb wrote:
| Doesn't Softbank need their money back? ARM most likely has
| to IPO whether they like it or not, right?
| klelatti wrote:
| We have to distinguish between value created in the Arm
| ecosystem (a lot) and how much Arm retains (much less).
|
| Nonetheless Arm seemed to do OK as a public company for 25
| years but Son thought he saw an opportunity and paid a big
| premium for it.
|
| I do think there is an issue around Arm as a relatively small
| player competing for talent with Apple, Intel etc which feels
| suboptimal for the industry as a whole. Perhaps eg the cloud
| hyperscalers could jointly and directly fund development of
| server chips in the same way that firms prepay TSMC for
| capacity.
| cinntaile wrote:
| > Nonetheless Arm seemed to do OK as a public company for
| 25 years but Son thought he saw an opportunity and paid a
| big premium for it.
|
| Softbank tends to have a habit of overpaying. Maybe they
| just have more access to capital than available
| opportunities they can intelligently spend money on.
| roughly wrote:
| The sentiment around the time of the WeWork collapse was
| SoftBank was generally considered the dumbest money in
| the room.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Find the capital for long-term investment somewhere and
| follow a path to improvement like AMD did._
|
| They did, it was called SoftBank and now SoftBank needs its
| money back. The comparison to AMD isn't comparable; AMD
| already had a high margin business in a proven market; it's
| unclear what ARM is going to be pressured to do; either they
| will have to put the screws on their licensors or start
| making their own chips (which would be no different from the
| concern under nvidia)
| screenbreakout wrote:
| Is it possible Softbank would sell it to the Chinese and
| what would the consequences be? a bidding war?
| pkaye wrote:
| The ARM China venture has gone rogue anyway. It already
| has exclusive access to ARM IP within China.
|
| https://semianalysis.com/the-semiconductor-heist-of-the-
| cent...
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| I doubt that would be more palatable for the UK
| government
| neolefty wrote:
| Is this about market fundamentals? One way to think about ARM
| is as a vehicle for R&D, shared amongs competitors such as
| Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Huawei.
|
| * Do they each benefit from the R&D done by ARM?
|
| * Is that benefit enough to be worth the cost, even shared
| amongst the recipients?
|
| * Can they "agree" on an arrangement, and can ARM function
| well enough to stay healthy?
| monocasa wrote:
| That argument made negative sense to me. 'Don't IPO because
| public companies are inherently limited to short term growth,
| therefore we have to be bought by an already public company?'
| ryan_j_naughton wrote:
| It is very different to be a subsidiary of a public company
| than to be public yourself. Take Waymo vs Alphabet. If you
| are the public company, you need to have your unit
| economics working such that you generate short term
| profits.
|
| You can lose money in a subsidiary so long as it is small
| by comparison to your overall P&L (Waymo losses of a few
| billion over several years vs Google annual revenue is over
| $160B and profit over $34B).
|
| If on the other hand, Waymo were its own public company
| (and not a subsidiary), then it would need to show results
| on its own.
|
| Don't get me wrong: being a subsidiary of a public company
| is still worse than say being a private company with a
| massive warchest or being the subsidiary of a private
| company with strong cashflow / cash reserves.
| monocasa wrote:
| I'm not sure that's the case. The markets aren't very
| keen on missing profit goals, but are very understanding
| of intentionally not being profitable while you use
| revenue to invest hard in the business. For instance
| Amazon has famously not had a focus on yearly profits and
| regularly has negative profit. The markets are more than
| accepting of this because they continue to grow and it's
| information that the market had ahead of time rather than
| being an excuse for missed goals.
|
| The markets more want you to be honest in your 10-k and
| S-1 than strictly require short term profits.
| tester756 wrote:
| is this state slowing technological advancement
|
| or
|
| actually state protecting it?
| no_time wrote:
| advancement for the sake of advancement is not something to
| celebrate. I can't imagine a situation where more consolidation
| in this space is something beneficial for anyone except the
| company doing the acquisition.
| tester756 wrote:
| that's good point, naive of me.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Probably a mixture of both, I think NVIDIA had a chance to push
| ARM to new heights it would also have forced them to be far
| more open.
|
| Longer term the market might be in a better position with a
| public ARM.
|
| I think a lot of the concerns around NVIDIA were driven by
| hyperbolic statements and memes.
|
| ARM is a good example of a monumental success and relative
| failure as in their cores and their architecture is in
| everything but they never have been able to capitalize on their
| success at the same scale at least as far as it goes for
| converting it into revenue which sits only at around $2B per
| year.
|
| NVIDIA on the other hand has mastered capitalizing on every
| success no matter how small it is.
|
| Overall as acquisitions go on paper it was a good match. It
| would've given ARM access to a lot of capital, engineering
| resources and a driven management with a strategic vision.
|
| NVIDIA would've gotten the ability to set the path for one of
| the most commonly used CPU architecture and being able to offer
| a completely vertically integrated solution to both enterprise
| and end consumers.
|
| Arguably NVIDIA could achieve the latter on its own too at
| least by licensing ARM I do think it's a shame that they don't
| have an x86 license too. ARM on the other hand would need to
| undergo a massive change to get into the position they arguably
| deserve to be in.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _ARM is a good example of a monumental success and relative
| failure as in their cores and their architecture is in
| everything but they never have been able to capitalize on
| their success at the same scale at least as far as it goes
| for converting it into revenue which sits only at around $2B
| per year._
|
| ARM got to where it is by not being too greedy. If others
| perceived them to be making power grab then a lot fewer
| people would have been willing to stake their own futures on
| the architecture.
|
| To mix metaphors, ARM went with a 'rising tides floats all
| boats' approach to grow the pie in general instead of just
| their own slice of it.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| ARM has serious issues with investment their operating
| margins under SoftBank dropped form 50% to below 10% they
| can barely afford their current R&D investment.
|
| And the market now is more dependent on their reference
| designs and core IP than ever.
|
| ARM as a company isn't in a good position, they need a
| parent that can actual drive them forward or go public and
| get the investment they need and honestly deserve.
| ca01an wrote:
| What exactly has happened to them under SoftBank that
| caused their margins to drop so much? I have no idea why
| they can't turn a decent profit, given that, as you said
| yourself, the market is more dependent on their reference
| designs and core IP than ever.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| My guess is that it was because their revenue relatively
| remained flat whilst R&D expenses inflated as they always
| do with more and more advanced SoCs and processors.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1132064/arm-
| quarterly-ne...
|
| If ARM was only about the instruction set and high level
| IP it wouldn't be an issue but they develop full designs
| and those are the ones that get implemented by most
| users.
|
| Considering the exponential growth in ARM processors and
| SoCs in mobile devices and IOT/IOE devices since SoftBank
| acquired ARM it's really a mystery tbh on how the hell
| they mismanaged them so badly that they didn't managed to
| capitalize on an exponentially growing TAM.
|
| They kinda flatlined before that too but at least they
| had a steady growth rate in the years prior to the
| acquisition.
|
| Something went wrong somewhere.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Probably a mixture of both, I think NVIDIA had a chance to
| push ARM to new heights it would also have forced them to be
| far more open.
|
| No way. Even losing the most popular electronics brand
| (Apple) didn't sway NVIDIA from its course.
|
| > ARM on the other hand would need to undergo a massive
| change to get into the position they arguably deserve to be
| in.
|
| Intel has completely botched the last six-ish years, and
| Apple proved that ARM-based processors cannot just _compete_
| with Intel 's offerings but outright _destroy_ them, while
| still keeping backwards compatibility. All that ARM (as an
| architecture) needs now is Microsoft also offering ARM
| support and runtime emulation in Windows and a CPU vendor
| willing to sell decently powerful chips to vendors... and
| then, _snap_ , Intel is gone.
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| > Apple proved that ARM-based processors cannot just
| compete with Intel's offerings but outright destroy them
|
| Your average ARM processor is a Qualcomm Snapdragon or
| Amazon Graviton, it's not going to win any performance
| awards. Even the M1 loses out to most Desktop processors
| once you start talking about multi-threaded performance.
| It's a great laptop part, proof that a BIG.little
| architecture is a good idea, and it's massively energy
| efficient, but it's not 'destroying' Intel parts on raw
| performance.
|
| ETA: We hear this same rhetoric every time AMD would come
| out with a part that was better than Intel (Athlon, Ryzen,
| etc). Intel isn't going anywhere, give them 4-5 years and
| they'll optimize and sell a part the eliminates the
| advantages. They've been doing exactly that for 30+ years.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It's a great laptop part, proof that a BIG.little
| architecture is a good idea, and it's massively energy
| efficient, but it's not 'destroying' Intel parts on raw
| performance.
|
| Raw performance _does not matter_ for 99% of the market
| (which is PCs for corporate drones shifting data around
| in Word, Excel and a data warehouse application). Your
| average Snapdragon is performance-constrained on mobile
| anyway because of cooling and power usage concerns - put
| that flagship CPU in a laptop or a NUC-sized case, and
| you will get more than enough to satisfy said corporate
| drones. Especially those who have some KPI target for
| "corporate sustainability" - claiming to have halved your
| IT fleet's energy consumption will net your average
| VP/C-level exec quite the bonus.
|
| All the market needs to do is provide the environment for
| that.
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| >All the market needs to do is provide the environment
| for that.
|
| It's already been here and Dell/HP is still an X86 shop.
| Intel will survive, they've been doing this for 50+
| years. With far, far fiercer competition in the past.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It's already been here and Dell/HP is still an X86 shop
|
| Yeah, because Dell and HP are enterprise vendors - and as
| long as there is no ARM Windows version that offers x86
| backward compatibility, no enterprises (and frankly, most
| private customers) will shift to ARM.
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| Every ARM version of Windows has an x86 emulation layer:
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on...
|
| "Windows on ARM can also run Win32 desktop appps[sic]
| compiled natively for ARM64 as well as your existing x86
| Win32 apps unmodified, with good performance and a
| seamless user experience, just like any PC. These x86
| Win32 apps don't have to be recompiled for ARM and don't
| even realize they are running on an ARM processor."
| monocasa wrote:
| It doesn't work well for multithreaded applications
| because of the difference in memory model. It uses some
| heuristics to try and not issue memory barriers after
| each memory access, and sometimes gets it wrong at the
| expense of correctness.
| trasz wrote:
| >they never have been able to capitalize on their success
|
| As in, they failed to destroy the company for short term
| gains, like companies usually do.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| SoftBank arguably ruined them, they went from an operating
| margin of around 50% when they were public to 10% under
| SoftBank.
|
| Considering where ARM designs and architecture are today
| their revenue and profits are pitiful and it does hold them
| back considerably.
|
| ARM justifiably so should've been one of the largest
| companies in the world by now.
| syshum wrote:
| I think you have an oversized understanding of what ARM
| does, and what value it brings to companies using an ARM
| chip
|
| It is not intel, it is making the chip or even really
| designing the chip, though they do have reference
| designs...
|
| ARM is ARM exactly because companies can take the
| instruction set and design their own chips around it for
| their own needs, they are not holding out for the next
| AMD or intel design..
|
| That however means the individual companies take on more
| of the design costs, and risk if the design is a failure.
|
| No Arm should not be one of the largest companies in the
| world right now, not even close.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| The vast majority of ARM users do not design their own
| chips anymore, even Qualcomm has abandoned that.
|
| 99% of all ARM based chips use reference ARM designs.
| syshum wrote:
| You would need to provide a source for both those claims
|
| First off, Qualcomm just spent 1.4 Billion on a design
| firm, for the purposes to bolstering the internal design
| team [1]
|
| Then there is a 99% claim, is that by sales, volume, etc?
| Has I know many companies that design their own ARM
| processor that make up more than 1% of the market, Apple,
| and Samsung alone would refute that statement
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/qualcomm-
| closes-nuvi...
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Qualcomm is using reference ARM cores these days so does
| Amazon in Graviton and Samsung in Exynos for example
| their latest and greatest SoC uses Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710
| and Cortex-A510 cores with an AMD GPU, Apple is probably
| the only big player today with custom cores.
|
| The small players also all tend to use Cortex cores.
|
| You still need a design team to integrate ARM IP blocks
| with your own IP or within the constraints of a given
| manufacturing process but almost no one is making their
| own cores.
|
| Qualcomm used to have custom core, and maybe they bought
| Nuvia for that after seeing that the X2 cores from ARM
| won't be enough to compete with Apple. My own personal
| bet is that they'll attempt to dabble with custom again
| and will eventually give up as it's too expensive.
|
| Apple managed to make it work because they are designing
| cores for their own use and they essentially poached an
| entire development team from Intel.
| uxp100 wrote:
| > You still need a design team to integrate ARM IP blocks
| with your own IP or within the constraints of a given
| manufacturing process but almost no one is making their
| own cores.
|
| To emphasize this a little, I think the headcount needed
| for the this is quite a bit larger than the additional
| headcount need for making your own core.
|
| There is a lot of working in making a high performance
| SoC using Cortex cores, and a lot of work in making a
| custom core, but I think some commenters here think that
| so many more custom cores are being made than in reality
| because they think that the rest is the easy part and the
| hard part is all cpu design, so if these fabless
| semiconductor companies are spending (overlapping) years
| per chip with thousands of employees it must be because
| everything is custom (regardless of what you can learn
| just looking up SoCs on wikipedia)
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Yeah I would agree, there is ton of work that has to go
| into getting as much performance from the SoC given all
| the design constraints and designing your own cores would
| probably not help to remove enough of the problems you
| would need to solve to be worth while especially if you
| need to hit a very wide range of products and use cases.
|
| Apple is in a unique position they both have a world
| class leading design team and they have complete control
| over the entire product so they have far more levers to
| tweak and they don't need to compete with anyone but
| themselves.
|
| And you can see that with how the went about with their
| SoC design. For the most part they had a single design
| with a few power envelopes for cheaper / less powerful
| products their solution was always to use SoCs from
| previous years.
|
| Even for special cases like the Apple Watch etc they
| tended to repurpose cores from their existing designs.
| The S series SoC is essentially one or two efficiency
| cores from their A series further clocked down and
| sometimes on a more power efficient node to squeeze a bit
| more battery life out of them.
|
| But beyond that until the M series it was pretty much
| always you get a new A series SoC for the new iPhone/iPad
| with the only major difference being the power envelope
| and everything else would use an SoC form 1-3 years
| earlier.
|
| If Qualcomm could've play this game they might have still
| be using custom cores too.
| uxp100 wrote:
| more than 1% of what market? I think it is possible apple
| + Samsung produce less than 1% of all arm cores by
| volume. But sources for all of this would be nice, there
| is a lot of speculation in this thread, and most of it
| seems wildly uninformed (not a dig at you, thinking of
| elsewhere in the thread where a good portion of comments
| don't have a great grasp of what arm does).
|
| Another factor to consider: I believe in-house designed
| core, on an SoC, ends up producing more ARM IP cores than
| apple/samsung/nvidia/whoever IP cores. 8 or 12 in house
| designed main cores may be supported by up to 20 cortexes
| as various controllers, boot processors, audio whatsits,
| and security widgets. I don't know if Apple made their
| own small space and/or low power designs for supporting
| processors, but that's not how other in-house arm core
| based SoCs I am familiar with worked.
| czzr wrote:
| No, it shouldn't. ARM is ARM precisely because it doesn't
| charge a huge amount - if it did, it would not be as
| widely used.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| There are many ways to have better operating margins and
| higher revenue conversion than just charging more.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Correct. Arm _was_ much more expensive for a time which
| is what kept Tensiluca and MIPS going.
| justinclift wrote:
| > ... revenue which sits only at around $2B per year.
|
| Err... plenty of places would be happy to have $2B revenue
| per year. ;)
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| On balance, protecting.
|
| When ARM was bought by SoftBank the main argument for it being
| acceptable was that SoftBank were not chip manufacturers in
| their own right. And that because of this, ARM would have every
| incentive to carry on treating all of ARM's existing customers
| reasonably fairly under SoftBank's ownership.
|
| That's obviously not the case with Nvidia.
|
| So while, it's possible to imagine that Nvidia wouldn't (at
| least initially) abuse any ownership of ARM. From a societal
| pov, why risk allowing a situation that relies on humans
| behaving well on an ongoing basis not to fail? And two, given
| the way ARM operates i.e. all customer $$$'s are equal, why
| would Nvidia bother if they didn't think there was an
| advantage?
| thedigitalone wrote:
| Paywall, archive link here: https://archive.fo/vl5Or
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I never understood this deal. Nvidia can hire some CPU designers
| and make a RISC-V core and join a much more vibrant ecosystem.
| Why settle for ARM?
| Blammar wrote:
| Bird in the hand versus two in the bush, perhaps. ARM is
| proven, RISC-V isn't (do you know of a RISC-V chip that is
| competitive with Apple's M1 ARM-based chip?)
| kunai wrote:
| God bless Lina Khan.
| Symmetry wrote:
| As a NVidia shareholder I'm relieved at this. ARM is clearly less
| valuable as part of NVidia with all the conflicts of interest
| that entails than as an independent company. NVidia talked about
| synergies but they could pursue all of those with an
| architectural license for far less money. It's actually something
| of a pattern that most mergers fail to provide synergy and
| destroy value, it's just that they enlarge the empire of the CEO
| and so seem attractive from that standpoint.
| monocasa wrote:
| Nvidia also clearly already has an architectural license for
| their Denver cores and derivatives.
| snvzz wrote:
| ARM gets the short end of the stick here.
|
| NVIDIA being a well known hostile company, the industry did not
| miss the news about its ARM purchase intent. And thus they
| looked for alternatives. That's RISC-V.
|
| Today, pretty much every company designing microcontrollers or
| SoCs is involved with RISC-V. They won't cancel those efforts
| to embrace ARM again.
| klelatti wrote:
| I think it's reasonably clear SoftBank's stewardship of Arm
| has been poor - sure they have invested but the Arm China
| move backfired badly and this Nvidia uncertainty has also
| hindered Arm's development.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Sad memories of Nokia. The N9 debuted to great reviews and
| was built on a promising tech stack that continues to outlive
| it today (Qt, etc.). Repeated takeover attempts and intent by
| Microsoft, and finally installing an ex-MS VP who cancelled
| the platform internally before an actual sale to Microsoft,
| was too much of a distraction.
|
| It's hard to survive a bodged takeover attempt, much less an
| actual takeover.
| mdasen wrote:
| That's actually an interesting side-effect. What happens to
| ARM now?
|
| New players who are looking for a long-term strategy are
| looking at RISC-V (as you note) in part due to Nvidia's
| reputation. Despite the deal being quashed, they're probably
| going to continue along that route.
|
| However, it seems like ARM licensees might also be making
| plans to become less dependent on ARM (the company). The
| Nvidia/ARM deal was announced September 2020. Qualcomm
| announced that it was going to buy Nuvia (founded by ex-Apple
| Silicon people) in January 2021 along with plans to launch
| their own internally-designed CPUs (rather than relying on
| ARM reference designs). I think this is a smart plan
| regardless of the Nvidia/ARM deal, but creating your own
| cores means that ARM has little-to-no leverage over you. You
| don't need their new CPUs. Sure, ARM still updates their
| architecture periodically, but you can happily continue along
| making your own CPUs under a perpetual license. Qualcomm is
| making the jump to its own cores so that it doesn't need ARM
| reference designs.
|
| SoftBank is somewhat souring on ARM since it isn't getting
| the huge returns it was expecting by owning the CPU that
| everyone was going to use in the future. Will SoftBank end up
| short-changing R&D at ARM making their reference cores less
| competitive with Apple Silicon and future Qualcomm cores?
|
| Even if SoftBank was able to sell ARM for $40B, they bought
| the company for $31-32B in 2016. Basically, the sale meant
| only 5% annual returns which is pretty bad compared to the
| huge gains an index fund would have made during that time. I
| think there's going to be pressure to find a way to squeeze
| money out of ARM.
|
| Heck, with Qualcomm moving away from ARM reference cores,
| that's a lot less revenue for ARM. Even if Qualcomm cores
| aren't better, Qualcomm is still a huge portion of the mobile
| CPU market. Every ARM CPU maker that starts making their own
| custom cores means less revenue for the reference designs and
| less reason for ARM to invest in those reference designs. If
| ARM starts reducing investment in their reference designs a
| bit, that will put pressure on more companies to create their
| own custom cores.
|
| The sky isn't falling and I don't want this comment to sound
| like that. I think ARM has a fine, sustainable business. At
| the same time, it seems like there will be pressure from
| SoftBank given the lackluster returns even with the Nvidia
| deal and Qualcomm buying Nuvia puts further pressure on ARM
| and it's hard to justify a major investment in something that
| is likely to continue having lackluster returns.
| luma wrote:
| Another concern is which regulators are going to allow such
| a sale to take place? As noted in the article, the FTC
| filed a suit against the merger and China was likely to
| take a similar stance. If NVIDIA cannot buy ARM without
| running into anti-trust issues, who reasonably could? Any
| tech company that a) has the capital and b) has the
| interest would almost certainly run into the exact same
| problem.
|
| I think an IPO might be the only exit strategy Softbank has
| for ARM.
| sizzle wrote:
| Where does Intel fit into all this?
| ac29 wrote:
| Intel has a 5 year plan started last year to take back
| the number one spot in performance, efficiency, and fab
| capabilities. Its ambitious, but certainly not
| impossible. Apple is currently top in efficiency with M1
| and TSMC's 5nm manufacturing, but Apple has lost talent
| and Intel is fabbing with TSMC now too (TSMC is building
| Intel an entire 3nm plant).
|
| Apple aside, laptop and desktop sales are still x86's to
| lose, so unless both Intel and AMD take major stumbles, I
| dont see ARM shipping in much more volume in PCs than it
| does now.
| mrandish wrote:
| > it seems like there will be pressure from SoftBank given
| the lackluster returns
|
| If the rumor Softbank wants to IPO ARM is correct, there
| will be pressure to get all the fundamental metrics of the
| business pointing up and to the right to maximize the
| valuation of the IPO. The increased proceeds from a good
| ARM IPO vs just an 'okay' IPO would likely swamp any
| potential cash that Softbank might be able to milk from ARM
| in the short-term.
|
| It will be interesting to see how much of ARM Softbank
| intends to offer in the IPO vs how much they might continue
| to hold.
| miohtama wrote:
| I spoke with ARM employees last summer and although it
| was not mentioned aloud, it was obvious the process had
| been started the make the bride pretty for the IPO.
| sjtindell wrote:
| As an outsider, it looks like RISC-V is ipv6. It's always
| coming, everyone's interested...but nothing.
| cbsmith wrote:
| I dunnoh. IPv6 is pretty widely distributed at this point:
| https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
|
| On the other hand, RISC-V seems to be used so far primarily
| as a stalking horse to keep ARM in line.
| b20000 wrote:
| RISC-V still does not offer an alternative to high-
| performance ARM SoCs such as the A17.
| cbsmith wrote:
| > ARM gets the short end of the stick here.
|
| In terms of "if the deal fails", yes. If the deal succeeds,
| they made out like bandits.
| bitwize wrote:
| I think Apple should buy ARM. Then they will own the entire
| iPhone and Mac tech stack -- right down to the ISA. It's hard
| to think of a more competent steward for the technology than
| Apple.
| yencabulator wrote:
| That would make even more companies bail from ARM to RISC-V
| than NVidia. While NVidia tends to be hostile and lay out
| traps for competition, Apple downright shuts down anything
| external facing of the companies they acquire. Just as the
| parent is saying, that would make ARM less valuable, for
| sure.
| bibinou wrote:
| Does Apple still rely on ARM?
| maxwell86 wrote:
| > No
|
| Arm and Softbank said so much last week.
|
| Arm does not take profits from Apple CPUs.
| fredoralive wrote:
| Apple's chips implement ARM ISAs, although Apple creates their
| own implementations rather than licence ARM's own core designs.
| How much this affects them depends on the licensing agreements
| between ARM and Apple, which only they know about, although
| Apple apparently have a favourable deal. They didn't publicly
| seem phased by the idea of Nvidia owning ARM, anyway.
| mdasen wrote:
| The ARM deal would have impacted all other ARM licensees a
| lot more than Apple. As you note, Apple is making custom
| cores so they don't need ARM's reference designs.
|
| For example, Google's Tensor processor in the Pixel 6 uses
| ARM Cortex-X1, Cortex-A76, and Cortex-A55 cores and ARM's
| Mali GPU. They add some ML cores to the design, but the
| CPU/GPU is really designed by ARM. Apple, on the other hand,
| makes its own internally designed cores for its processors
| rather than using ARM's designs.
|
| While you're right that the general public doesn't know
| ARM/Apple's deal, we do know that ARM offers a perpetual ISA
| license. Even if Nvidia bought ARM, Apple could still make
| current ISA processors forever (it seems unrealistic to think
| they don't have a perpetual license). While Nvidia might not
| want to help Apple, it would be in Nvidia's interest to offer
| new ISAs to Apple at reasonable rates because a) one probably
| doesn't _need_ updates to the ARM ISA at this point b) Apple
| not getting on board with a new ISA could impact the rest of
| the industry getting on board with it given that Apple is so
| large (and respected) c) Apple puts a lot of time and money
| into LLVM and having them against an update to the ARM ISA
| would (at the very least) mean that there wasn 't free labor
| (from Nvidia's perspective) adding compiler support for the
| ISA update.
|
| It's true that we don't know all the details about deals
| between Apple and ARM, but at this point it seems like Apple
| doesn't really need ARM. Samsung, Google, Amazon, and others
| use ARM's reference designs. If ARM disappeared, they
| wouldn't get updated cores and would have to build up in-
| house design teams. If ARM disappeared, Apple would just keep
| on making new designs. I think Qualcomm is looking to go more
| custom in the future as they bought Nuvia and are looking to
| make inroads into things like laptops over the next few
| years.
|
| In some ways, it seems like ARM getting bought by Nvidia
| would be good for Apple. If Nvidia becomes really harsh for
| third-party licensees, it could mean a few years where the
| costs skyrocket in the Android ecosystem while their costs
| remain the same. Even after that, it might lower the number
| of manufacturers for ARM processors. Would MediaTek spin up a
| custom-design shop? Would Samsung? Maybe, but it would add a
| lot of cost over re-using reference designs.
|
| Apple isn't really reliant on ARM for anything at this point.
| The rest of the industry is pretty reliant on ARM's reference
| designs. If Nvidia ownership meant that those reference
| designs went up in cost or if Nvidia wanted its best work to
| go into Nvidia processors and put out weak updates, that
| would benefit Apple with Android manufacturers scrambling to
| figure out what to do: buy expensive Nvidia processors, ship
| weaker updates, invest in the custom-core route?
| JiNCMG wrote:
| Yes but Apple's license for ARM v7 allows it to do anything it
| wants with the tech regardless of who owns ARM. Only 5 to 7
| companies have this license and it's very expensive.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Apple also has a license for ARMv8.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| This was never going to happen. US, UK, China and EU all have
| regulatory leverage, and they were about to go 0-4
| syadegari wrote:
| Does anyone know why they decided to go for buying Arm in the
| first place? If they needed tight integration with their GPUs and
| wanted to move away from x-86, can't they come up with Arm-based
| solutions like Apple did?
| chrisjc wrote:
| Yes, I imagine they could. I wonder if they acted out of fear
| that someone would come along and gobble up ARM and do them
| what everyone is now scared of Nvidia doing to everyone else.
|
| Now the question is, who will that "someone" be next? What kind
| of suitor is fit for ARM?
|
| The curse of ARM being so successful and incredibly crucial to
| many pervasive industries, yet seemingly unable to go it alone.
| maxwell86 wrote:
| I always assumed NVIDIA wanted to license IP through Arm just
| like Arm does.
| bayindirh wrote:
| nVidia is trying to become a full-stack company.
|
| They have GPUs. Got network capabilities with Mellanox. Add ARM
| knowledge on top and you have a complete platform building
| capability.
|
| TL;DR: nVidia just wants to dominate the whole stack. Like
| Apple, but for data center / scientific / AI / HPC, etc.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| I am an NVIDIA employee in a niche of the HPC business. This
| is not an NVIDIA official opinion.
|
| HPC is nice, but when you hear Jensen getting really excited,
| it's not about dominating some niche like that, it's about a
| vision of the shiny sci-fi high tech future, and actually
| delivering the tech to make it real.
|
| So don't _just_ look at HPC to understand the NVIDIA
| ambition. Start at edge computing; imagine a world with
| ubiquitous autonomous robots (cars and drones and otherwise).
| Think of the onboard chips driving their vision and speech
| recognition models: That's a great place for ARM and NVIDIA
| chips together, whether as one company or two. Watch a recent
| keynote and see how all the rest of the tech fits into place
| as part of that: 5G signal processing chips, for instance,
| something you might gloss over if you're not in telecom. You
| don't need a roadmap to see how it is all connected in
| support of this world of the future.
|
| (I certainly don't have the roadmap, either, I just watch the
| keynotes and help shuffle bits.)
| Atreiden wrote:
| > Start at edge computing;
|
| It seems pretty clear that this what they're thinking of.
| They want to be able to license an integrated architecture
| that includes power-efficient computing and a powerful ML
| engine. They've been so heavily investing in this space for
| a reason.
|
| What I can't figure out is why this is such a big deal to
| regulators. Nvidia doesn't manufacturer these things (aside
| from Jetson I believe? Not 100% clear on this). They
| license IP. And this is IP that I think the world would
| really like to have.
|
| Currently the only player in this space is Apple. They've
| built their own integrated silicon with their perpetual ARM
| license that is now giving them a huge market advantage,
| and will continue to do so until there is another
| competitor. The R&D required to compete with a cash-liquid
| >2.5 Trillion dollar company is just not feasible for any
| of the other major players at present. Nvidia/ARM opens
| doors for tons of other companies.
|
| I also think it's foolish to think that Apple won't try to
| expand this tech offering well beyond personal computers
| and tablets. They will expand to IoT/Edge devices and
| services. But the difference is they won't be licensing
| their IP to other manufacturers, they will be building it
| themselves (or contracting Foxconn to) and keeping
| everything in their walled garden.
|
| Guess I'm just frustrated that of all ridiculous
| acquisitions and anticompetitive nonsense I've seen in the
| past decade, THIS is the one getting smothered.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > What I can't figure out is why this is such a big deal
| to regulators.
|
| Because when you own all the IP, you can cut your
| competitors off by revoking licenses to them, and it'll
| _instantly kill_ a huge ecosystem from Raspberry
| /OrangePi to Ampere A1 and everything in between.
|
| I'm not sure nVidia would make such a drastic move, but
| I'm sure that they'll move strategically to ensure their
| leadership, which is understandable from a corporate PoV,
| but it'll be very bad for everybody else.
|
| This is not a big deal, it's a _huge_ deal, and I 'm
| happy that we're here as of today.
|
| nVidia can of course license ARM to embed and/or further
| improve upon this, or they can use any other ISA or come
| up with their own. I'm sure they're capable of this, and
| it'll be much better in the long run for everyone.
|
| > I also think it's foolish to think that Apple won't try
| to expand this tech offering well beyond personal
| computers and tablets. They will expand to IoT/Edge
| devices and services. But the difference is they won't be
| licensing their IP to other manufacturers, they will be
| building it themselves (or contracting Foxconn to) and
| keeping everything in their walled garden.
|
| nVidia's walled garden is not different in any scale when
| compared to Apple. Considering how friendly nVidia was
| towards OpenCL, I'm guessing that they'll be at roughly
| the same distance towards Vulkan for GPGPU applications,
| keeping CUDA the only possible thing to run with any
| meaningful performance on their hardware. On the open
| driver front, they're equally friendly. So it's more like
| the pot is calling the kettle black here.
| foobiekr wrote:
| At least in the networking side, nvidia's HW merchant silicon
| nature is quite evident. They have a very marginal SW stack
| (at this point still trying to beat the dead horse of cumulus
| and doing the weakest of investment in Sonic) and basically
| nothing at all meaningful beyond that. They keep approaching
| friends trying to sell their ToRs but it's not happening
| outside of HPC.
|
| They seemingly don't see any value in SW. architectures like
| end-to-end designs (DPU->Network->DPU->pcie) can be great but
| without SW to make them consumable it's doa outside of
| dedicated clusters.
| Traster wrote:
| Nvidia absolutely could come up with their own ARM-based
| solutions like Apple did. Guess where all the people who know
| how to do that work? Arm. If nothing else, Arm offers a great
| engineering team to accelerate Nvidia's plans and it also means
| Nvidia can push new ideas into the latest ISAs much easier. A
| similar thing happened a few years ago with Imagination
| Technologies who produced Apple's GPU IP. Except instead of
| Apple buying them, Apple built an office next door and poached
| the entire engineering team. Leaving ImgTec as a deeply scarred
| company that eventually got sliced up and sold off.
| monocasa wrote:
| Nvidia has their own totally custom ARM cores. That team was
| leftovers from Transmeta.
| greatjack613 wrote:
| For all those that need to get around the paywall.
|
| https://webreader.app/?url=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ar...
| pseudolus wrote:
| Link to the Bloomberg source story with more details:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-25/nvidia-is...
| awill wrote:
| It seems crazy to me that Blizzard/Activision is worth more than
| Arm. I get BA has tons of world-famous games, but almost every
| phone on earth is Arm. Arm is taking over laptops and servers
| too.
| mbesto wrote:
| I like this quote about entertainment:
|
| _" Two weeks ago, at the Code Conference, Endeavor CEO Ari
| Emanuel claimed "the total addressable market of content is
| infinite." Netflix is spending $17 billion a year to validate
| his thesis. So far, they're both right."_
|
| https://www.profgalloway.com/stream-on-2/
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Microsoft saw how successful sony's strategy of exclusive games
| was last generation and is copying it to help their
| SAASification of the gaming market. Microsoft is also well
| positioned to build a successful VR headset since they control
| the enterprise productivity software market and can parlay that
| into hardware employers will buy for their VR meetings.
| Combining their exclusive games and employer sponsored headsets
| could lead to Microsoft dominating the VR market.
|
| So really I think the synergy between microsoft and activision
| is where a lot of the price comes from as opposed to the actual
| cash flow that activision brings in.
| papito wrote:
| As Scott Galloway put it, Call of Duty _alone_ generates $55M a
| day, as if it were a door-busting Marvel movie opening weekend,
| all the time.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| This is one of those arguments that the stock market doesn't
| really align value with social need. Making games is good and
| all, people like and need entertainment, but from a social
| perspective we need ARM more than we need Activision.
| missedthecue wrote:
| The stock market (attempts to) align value with future
| projected cashflows, not social need. I don't believe it's
| ever been the case that social need was part of the equation,
| particularly given that it's such a subjective measure.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _almost every phone on earth is Arm. Arm is taking over
| laptops too._
|
| Is there a RISC-V analog to Blizzard/Activision?
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Ubisoft?
| jdhawk wrote:
| SiFive?
| mhh__ wrote:
| Is there a RISC-V analog to ARM? They're simply not in the
| same league (yet).
| throwaway946513 wrote:
| Indie developers?
| __s wrote:
| I imagine Blizzard would be worth less if all their IP was
| licensed out to other large game studios with very liberal
| terms
| stefan_ wrote:
| And everyone actually making competitive products was doing
| so because of their own extensions, not whatever Blizzard
| did.
| mrandish wrote:
| Yes, that's a big reason why the valuations are different.
| ARM's designs being so central to the products of so many
| companies has occurred only because of ARM's licensing terms
| being so liberal, including things like forward pricing caps,
| MFN clauses, etc. They basically chose to trade away pricing
| power (hence margin) for ubiquity and longer-term
| relationships.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Arm has an unusually high relevance/value ratio. As Softbank
| found out, you can't just ramp up the licence costs. It's also
| not as scalable as software and doesn't have the revenue of the
| hardware licensees. I wish it would be bought by an open
| consortium to protect the millenia of engineering hours from
| snatch-and-grabs like these or the tyranny of uninformed
| investors but FAANG et al passed up the chance to secure their
| computing future last time. They've been blessed with another
| chance, hopefully this debacle has been eye opening.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if Arm employees create more value for
| other companies than they do for Arm.
| klelatti wrote:
| Great comment and your last para is undoubtedly true. Really
| surprised that the hyperscalers don't see the value in
| investing in Arm to develop competitive server / cloud CPUs.
| 01100011 wrote:
| > open consortium
|
| You expect an open consortium to continue to innovate in an
| industry leading way? An open consortium is how you kill ARM.
| ARM didn't get where it is now by being sub-par.
|
| I appreciate your intent and it seems like a nice idea, but
| my experience with community development means ARM would turn
| into an absolute shit show as various stakeholders fight for
| control and ram through a mish-mash of their pet personal
| features.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| That's how Arm already works! The customers help to set the
| roadmap.
|
| There's also prior art in RISC-V
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Everytime I see someone recommend a special interest group
| or consortium... I think of Bluetooth and it's literally
| thousands of pages spec.
|
| Then when they have the chance to almost completely start
| over... the make BLE with approximately 1/2 of what people
| want and spend years bloating the spec on that too.
|
| I'll take a talented lunatic with autonomy over 20
| different voices in a bureaucratic community every time.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| And how many PCI-E cards do you think this comment took
| to reach my screen?
| wallacoloo wrote:
| so your argument against consortiums (bluetooth) is that
| they work?... but at a higher cost (lengthy specs)?
|
| the historic alternative is a _slightly_ lower cost (most
| of BT complexity is of the plumbing type, not the PhD
| type) and much more significant market risks (due to
| incompatibilities: smaller addressable market and less
| ability to pivot from one market to a different one).
|
| from the engineer PoV, i agree with you: i'd love for
| these specifications to be simplified. from the business
| PoV, i don't think it actually matters that much.
| [deleted]
| gigatexal wrote:
| Huzzah! Good. Keep ARM free to sell its IP to all.
| realmsalah wrote:
| Nice
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Non paywall version?
| metahost wrote:
| Here you go: https://archive.fo/NEg6u
| yrro wrote:
| Relevant parts:
|
| > Nvidia Corp. is quietly preparing to abandon its purchase of
| Arm Ltd. from SoftBank Group Corp. after making little to no
| progress in winning approval for the $40 billion chip deal,
| according to people familiar with the matter.
|
| > Nvidia has told partners that it doesn't expect the
| transaction to close, according to one person, who asked not to
| be identified because the discussions are private. SoftBank,
| meanwhile, is stepping up preparations for an Arm initial
| public offering as an alternative to the Nvidia takeover,
| another person said.
|
| > The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued to stop the
| transaction in December, arguing that Nvidia would become too
| powerful if it gained control over Arm's chip designs.
|
| > The acquisition also faces resistance in China, where
| authorities are inclined to block the takeover if it wins
| approvals elsewhere, according to one person. But they don't
| expect it to get that far.
|
| > Both Nvidia and Arm's leadership are still pleading their
| case to regulators, according to the people, and no final
| decisions have been made.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Would it be way too cynical to suggest that the reason that this
| deal was/is not likely to close, is because Intel is
| influentially and aggressively/successfully lobbying against
| this?
|
| How would smoothing out the current Intel/AMD machine not be
| healthy overall?
| justinclift wrote:
| Wonder if this means Nvidia will jump on the RISC-V bandwagon
| instead?
| maxwell86 wrote:
| > Wonder if this means Nvidia will jump on the RISC-V bandwagon
| instead?
|
| Nvidia is a big contributor to the RISC-V standard, all Nvidia
| GPUs have had RISC-V chips in them for many years, etc.
|
| So no need to wonder, this already happened, many years ago.
| dannyw wrote:
| No chance. Nvidia will invent their own proprietary standard.
| kelnos wrote:
| I would doubt it. They already use both ARM and RISC-V in
| their products, why would they invent a new ISA? That's not a
| trivial thing to do, and it doesn't seem worth their time.
| uxp100 wrote:
| In some sense they already have an ISA, denver. But I'd say
| the odds of this deal falling apart leading them to making
| SoCs that (primarily) run an ISA besides Arm is exactly 0%.
| If they eventually do do that, my baseless speculation is
| it would be because of demands of automotive customers. If
| it was decided that risc-V was a selling point for
| automotive, then maybe. (Proprietary ISA? I'd guess never.)
| selimnairb wrote:
| Yeah, Apple, who has more money than god, didn't invent
| their own ISA.
| [deleted]
| monocasa wrote:
| Apple codesigned AArch64 with ARM. That's how they beat
| every other vendor to having a 64 bit ARM chip on the
| market and with a core that wasn't even an ARM design at
| all.
|
| They arguably did invent their own ISA.
| mdasen wrote:
| Apple now has that kind of money, but they didn't in 2006
| when ARM was selected for the iPhone (which would launch
| in 2007). Apple was a $50B company back in 2006. A decade
| later, they have a lot of experience and investment with
| ARM. For example, how much time has Apple put into LLVM
| for ARM?
|
| I don't think Nvidia will make their own ISA, but when
| Apple chose ARM they didn't have lots of money and needed
| to launch something sooner than later. Even when it came
| to switching their laptops in 2020, creating a new ISA
| would have meant a lot of time and effort (and money)
| over continuing with ARM. Apple was able to use the same
| Firestorm/Icestorm design for the iPhone CPUs and laptop
| CPUs.
|
| While Apple has a lot of money, it takes time to bring
| new stuff to market. Would Apple also move the iPhone to
| a new ISA and require Rosetta 2 on mobile? How long would
| it take them to get similar performance from compilers
| for the new ISA?
|
| Likewise, Apple benefits from large investment in the
| whole ARM ecosystem. Microsoft wants to support ARM with
| their stuff because they want Windows on ARM and iOS
| support for C#. While the Mac is a compelling platform,
| requiring more work for something custom means less
| enthusiastic support from third parties and longer times
| before things are supported.
|
| Money can certainly do a lot, but Apple launched M1 at a
| very auspicious time when Intel was at a real low point.
| If they'd chosen to go with a new ISA, does it take an
| extra couple years? Does it launch with a smaller
| performance boost because it isn't as mature? Is it
| harder to get third-party support because there's nothing
| in it for anyone else?
| IceWreck wrote:
| Developing your own instruction set and getting all compilers
| to work with it is a pain and very expensive compared to
| adopting an up and coming open standard.
| baq wrote:
| they'll combine the worst of both approaches: pretend to use
| an open standard and establish extensions that will become de
| facto standard, like CUDA.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| A new proprietary standard is DOA in today's environment. No
| one wants to be locked in to that.
| [deleted]
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| Looks like they are already using RISC-V:
| https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-
| NVIDI...
| amelius wrote:
| Interesting to see that slide (8) about embracing open
| source. Would it go both ways?
| mkdirp wrote:
| There's probably an internal memo saying they'll embrace
| open source _iff_ it benefits them. So forget about OSS
| drivers.
| the-dude wrote:
| > embrace open source iff it benefits them
|
| That must be true for any company.
| froggertoaster wrote:
| I love that this would make Nvidia too powerful.
|
| Uh, exactly what have Google and Microsoft been up to? I'd say
| they're "too powerful" at this point...
| Dah00n wrote:
| It doesn't get better by adding a third to the list. Seems to
| me you could add Apple above those two though.
| nexuist wrote:
| > exactly what have Google and Microsoft been up to?
|
| Buying chips from Nvidia to power their data centers, for one.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Insider trading much?
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| China for one won't approve the deal. China is feeling the
| squeezes of tech cut off. only 3 companies is allowed to make
| x86. RISC-V is not there yet. the only option left is ARM.
| huawei's hisilicon was designing top notch ARM cpu for huawei's
| phone. ARM is just too important for China.
| scrubs wrote:
| Since when do I care what China thinks? Frankly, it wouldn't
| kill for global trade (where the west is concerned) to swing
| back 15-20 deg to more autonomy. To zero? Madness; just a
| correction.
|
| The salad years of buying almost anything at Walmart, Tesco,
| Amazon for 15% less than what it'd cost from the west and
| taking that to the hoop as success are long gone.
|
| The low fruit is increasingly picked for them too. They can't
| do cheap labor 24/7/365 forever just like we can't do cheap
| prices for ever. Eventually we'll both need to rebalance price,
| jobs, security, and so on.
| monocasa wrote:
| > They can't do cheap labor 24/7/365 forever
|
| They're already adjusting their economy. The cheap labor is
| now found in the rest of SE Asia with east Africa viewed as
| growth potential for cheap labor by the Chinese.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >The salad years of buying almost anything at Walmart, Tesco,
| Amazon for 15% less than what it'd cost from the west and
| taking that to the hoop as success are long gone.
|
| Not according to the _vast_ majority of consumers. Look what
| trouble far less than a 15% rise in costs due to inflation is
| doing to consumers.
|
| >They can't do cheap labor 24/7/365 forever
|
| The west cannot do expensive labor forever. It's dying faster
| than cheap labor.
| scrubs wrote:
| >The salad years of buying almost anything at Walmart,
| Tesco, Amazon for 15% less than what it'd cost from the
| west and taking that to the hoop as success are long gone.
|
| Picking a current tangential issue and globbing it on to a
| needed global trade correction which has been in the making
| for the last 20 years is opportunistic. Inflation like this
| hasn't been seen in the US since the late 70s, for which
| there are many factors including Covid.
|
| >The west cannot do expensive labor forever. It's dying
| faster than cheap labor.
|
| US labor & regulation (where I am) is medium. Not stupidly
| high certainly not lowest. I think other places in the west
| find it harder here than us. Still I am not particularly
| pleased with US governmental institutional competence in
| the last 15 years. We are nowhere near our best, and sadly
| sucking in a few important areas.
|
| I would remind that outsourcing to China did not start the
| behest of a US politician taking a call from Joe Smoe
| manager who asked if he should outsource. The move east
| with consequent impact on labor and larger issues was done
| by US business people. Further examples are obvious, but
| let's not dismiss self interest either.
|
| Going back to my original point: I absolutely could not
| care less what the Chinese think on this particular issue.
| ARM isn't theirs anyway. China, whenever strategic
| dependency arises, wants their own lock-stock-and-barrel-
| stuff. MC/VISA will _never_ be top there. And Intel
| /ARM/AMD/TSMC will never rule the roost there either. They
| will not be dependent on the west. So my question for the
| west: how much and how long are you gonna play a part in
| their goal? What are the limits? How do we know when enough
| is enough?
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >Picking a current tangential issue and globbing it on to
| a needed global trade correction which has been in the
| making for the last 20 years is opportunistic
|
| What you call opportunistic to make it less relevant I
| call illustrative of what a 15% rise in costs or prices
| means in reality.
|
| Can you show me a place where such a large class of items
| went up in price that was not catastrophic? Yet you think
| it will be some golden return to rose colored yesteryear.
|
| >US labor & regulation (where I am) is medium. Not
| stupidly high certainly not lowest.
|
| I'm in the US also. US wages are among the highest few
| countries out of around 200 countries over the world.
| They're among the highest in the OECD. I'd hardly call
| that medium. Those countries with a higher average or
| median wage are barely above the US, so I'd think it's
| safe to say US wages are just about the highest in the
| world.
|
| Why does an unskilled worker here make more than around
| 90% of the world population? Because he so amazing? Or
| because we have extraordinarily high labor costs? That
| unskilled work wage is not going to last, no matter how
| you slice it. Blaming China has pretty much zero to do
| with it - most low end jobs lost went to automation, and
| trying to make goods cost 15% more will only add pressure
| to automate more.
| scrubs wrote:
| You're spitting into the wind with inflation. Move on.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| Not a logical reply. I provided evidence that cost
| increases below the magnitude you think will not cause
| harm will in fact cause harm.
|
| Please provide an example where the 15% increase you
| think will not cause harm in fact does not cause harm.
| This is the second time I've asked for an example, and I
| suspect again you will not provide one.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >They can't do cheap labor 24/7/365 forever
|
| Yes and no. China can't, no, but history tells us exactly
| what will happen. Japan used to be the "cheap and crappy
| electronics maker". At some point the population has been
| lifted enough that some other poor country will take over the
| bottom jobs. Likely somewhere in Africa. It is not as if
| China at some point will start to fall back to where it once
| were and even if it did all it would do would be to hold the
| production in China instead of the next country.
|
| >Eventually we'll both need to rebalance price, jobs,
| security, and so on.
|
| That will never happen.
| scrubs wrote:
| >It is not as if China at some point will start to fall
| back
|
| I never said they were. Also babysitting Chinese outcomes
| is another not-my-problem. There's a whole invasive
| inflexible CCP state control thing going on there who, by
| the way, claim it as their problem.
|
| It's also not a feature for China to fall back to some pre-
| Deng era. Knowing what I care and don't care about it is
| not equivalent to hoping China fails. Certainly not. Maybe
| China will rock and roll. Maybe they fall in disinflation
| like Japan did starting somewhere around the 1990s, from
| which I'm not sure they recovered.
|
| I am saying the west has got to do a better job at
| realizing what the end game is for China in some important
| areas. And know what our concerns are, and do a better job
| at holding the line. Here, in the US, "show me the
| discount! show me the cheap!" cannot be the last thing
| heard.
|
| >Eventually we'll both need to rebalance price, jobs,
| security, and so on.
|
| Good! I love it when people lay down a hard line. Hard
| lines are easy to bust.
| intrasight wrote:
| As I never thought there was synergy here, I think Nvidia will do
| better without ARM. There is plenty of growth in their core
| domain.
| mrtri wrote:
| stabbles wrote:
| What will this mean for NVIDIA's Arm based Grace CPU?
| JiNCMG wrote:
| Nothing. NVidia still has it's ARM license and as long as they
| are kept out of the x86 chip business (thanks to Intel and AMD)
| they are happy to renew the license with ARM.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| The licensing deal is most likely completely separate, but
| agree that it adds some uncertainty to the relationship
| d3mon wrote:
| Nothing. They will continue developing their own CPUs.
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/330671-nvidia-announce...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a bigger story for SoftBank than it is for NVIDIA. NVIDIA
| can do OK without ARM, but for SoftBank it was a way to be able
| to pay redemptions for the failing Vision Fund.
|
| Back in the day a Japanese businessman who screwed up the way Son
| did would find a knife in their room and know what they were
| supposed to do with it. The ARM deal took the pressure off but it
| is back on again.
| sealeck wrote:
| I really don't think suggesting that Son should commit ritual
| suicide is an appropriate comment to make.
| paulus_magnus2 wrote:
| The regulators should never approve such a takeover or should
| state that this takeover will inevitably result in a forcaful
| split of NVIDIA. There will be a conflicf of interest between
| Nvidia a consumer of ARM and Nvidia provider of IP to competitors
| (Samsung, Qualcom, Apple, AMD).
|
| Nvidia should play ball (or somehow the regulators should nudge
| them to play ball ) and invite all big ARM customers to form a
| co-op.
| d3mon wrote:
| Plenty of headwinds for Nvidia have emerged recently: -Declining
| crypto -Dead arm acquisition -Increasingly competitive amd /Intel
| GPUs (both integrated and discrete) -Rising tsmc wafer prices
| trollied wrote:
| I couldn't help but read your -D and -I things as compiler
| flags....
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yeah, and the unescaped spaces really destroyed it.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| LOL me too, maven CLI arguments...
| sgerenser wrote:
| -DACQUIRE_ARM=0
| terafo wrote:
| AMD is increasingly competitive, but still doesn't have good
| software compatibility outside of gaming. GPUs are not the
| priority for them. They basically make 10 times less cards and
| aren't going to make more. Which is sad since we need more
| competition. Rising TSMC prices aren't as big of a deal for
| them since they are mostly on samsung right now.
|
| I wouldn't say that things are so bad for Nvidia. They are
| selling more cards than ever, their "Ultimate Play" to rise the
| prices across the board will, most likely, be successful in the
| long run. Sub 200 dollars segment is dead, like sub 100 before
| it. Since they are going to make monstrous MCM GPUs, the price
| for an absolute high end is going to rise to unseen
| heights(performance will rise with them). I hope Intel will
| stop this madness eventually, but they won't be able to do it
| fast, even if they try as hard as they can.
| ColinWright wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070289
|
| Comments both there and here.
| [deleted]
| captainbland wrote:
| Nvidia would be amongst the worst possible custodians of ARM.
| Their business models are quite strongly opposing:
|
| ARM's is to create a fair, competitive playing field between CPU
| producing companies and reap licensing fees for the pleasure,
| Nvidia's is to nakedly leverage all of its technologies for
| Nvidia's products' benefit and Nvidia's products' benefit only.
| naruvimama wrote:
| Microsoft used to be in the same place, they started growing
| once they opened up. Instead of rent seeking. VLSI is hard, but
| with massive investments in fabs and design across the board,
| Nvidia will be forced to go the MS way.
|
| Nvidia licensing their GPU to ARMs customers will itself be a
| big start.
| tombert wrote:
| While I too was against the NVidia+Arm merger, and am glad it's
| being abandoned, a large part of me feels like they wouldn't do
| it just because it could be an antitrust nightmare, with Apple
| and Qualcomm and LG all suing because of anti-competitive
| practices, and probably winning. I'm not a lawyer, but that
| seems like a likely scenario from the very little I understand
| about US law.
|
| I don't think NVidia would be quite that stupid; I think if
| they were smart they would keep ARM business as usual just to
| avoid that, and just reap the licensing fees from the above
| companies.
| WheatM wrote:
| d3mon wrote:
| Related : NVIDIA setting up cpu R&D team in Israel
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/330671-nvidia-announce...
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| Just like Intel has it
| 01100011 wrote:
| I wonder how the average ARM employee feels about this. Are they
| losing out on a windfall from their labors because the deal fell
| through? I wonder if that will affect retention?
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| May be related to Arm China going rogue? [0] It is starting to
| look like Britain's sale of Arm was a good deal after all.
| Foisted!
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28329731
| zinekeller wrote:
| No, that didn't deter Nvidia, it's mainly with EU, UK and
| American regulatory pressures (which might formally stop the
| acquisition). Additionally, some civil servants within the UK
| government have said that the ministers are considering to
| declare Arm as a critical company (and considering the
| "partygate" has made the Johnson government more populist, it's
| becoming more likely that pro-Britain moves will be made, at
| least as perceived by voters).
| [deleted]
| nivenkos wrote:
| But ARM was already sold to SoftBank (Japanese). It's not
| like it's still Acorn producing British microcomputers...
| Traster wrote:
| Yes, this was the insanity, they waved through selling it
| to Softbank, but then cottoned on to how important it was
| once they realised it was going to be acquired by Nvidia.
| They shouldn't have let it sell in the first place, but
| atleast they're fixing that now, and if they can guide it
| towards an IPO that would be a very good result.
| chasil wrote:
| As a public company, shareholders with enough stock can
| offer competing slates of directors.
|
| Even with an acquisition blocked, if Nvidia is in that
| position, they can dictate ARM's policies.
|
| Perhaps the UK would force them to divest, but a
| coalition of shareholders might be more difficult to
| stop.
| meepmorp wrote:
| The US FTC sued to block the merger, in December.
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/12/ftc-s...
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| I don't think it's a neither a good nor bad news, actual owner
| -Softbank- is not the best for ARM, but also ARM-AMD could make
| almost a monopoly in the GPU market.
| Dah00n wrote:
| In the GPU market? I doubt Nvidia sees it that way with its
| current share of 83%
| nixass wrote:
| Now Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard
| interator7 wrote:
| It always blew my mind that Arm is worth that much solely
| licensing intellectual property. Wouldn't it be more cost
| efficient for some of their biggest customers to simply hire
| engineers who can produce similar output? Can someone give me
| insight into their design team?(size, history, experience, etc.)
| Aissen wrote:
| Designing a CPU is easy. Very easy, any grad student can do it.
| So why is Arm worth so much ?
|
| Because it's only part of the problem. If Arm is so successful,
| it's (IMHO) because of software. Sure, they have world-class
| CPU designers. But in order to launch a new CPU, you need a
| full software ecosystem, as RISC V startups are discovering.
|
| One other advantage of Arm is that it has strong anti-
| fragmentation measures in place. With enough money you can
| design your own cores, but in order to deviate from standard
| Arm architecture, you need Arm's signoff. This serves the first
| advantage: it keeps the software ecosystem value intact.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > But in order to launch a new CPU, you need a full software
| ecosystem, as RISC V startups are discovering.
|
| You should have seen the state Raspberry Pis were in
| circa-2011. Everyone online was treating it like the RISC-V
| of today, criticizing it for a complete lack of software and
| calling it a novelty board. Lo and behold, come 2018 everyone
| and their mother wanted a Raspberry Pi for _some_ purpose.
| Sure, 70% of the software people wanted to use wasn 't
| available, but the things it had were power efficient and
| performed just about on-par with it's x86 counterparts.
| RISC-V is between both of those stages right now, the biggest
| limiting factor is getting hardware into the hands of
| developers, which is starting to dissolve as manufacturers
| are catching on.
|
| > This serves the first advantage: it keeps the software
| ecosystem value intact.
|
| Why do people assume that adding an extension to your RISC-V
| processor throws the software ecosystem out the window? It's
| the exact same scenario as ARM, except you're not beholden to
| arbitrary version updates (eg. v6, v7, v8) that break
| compatibility. If you want to upgrade your ISA, you just...
| do. Your base instructions will still run fine, and software
| compiled for RISC-V will just run. The only way you could
| fragment like that is if your chip failed compliance tests,
| which... why would you even ship it then?
| Aissen wrote:
| I think you misread my comment this as an anti-RISC-V
| shill. I'm just saying there are challenges which were
| known in the past 10+ years since RISC-V was invented, and
| will still be here in the next 20. FWIW I think the
| direction the ecosystem has taken is not that bad (yet).
|
| > You should have seen the state Raspberry Pis were in
| circa-2011.
|
| Yeah, I was one of the naysayers initially. And in
| retrospect the biggest advantage of Raspberry was its
| price. It sold at a price-point where no one could compete,
| and that helped overcome most other disadvantages, in a
| self-sustaining snowball.
|
| And that might very well be the case for RISC-V as well.
| klelatti wrote:
| > It's the exact same scenario as ARM ..
|
| Except it's not. A large RISC-V user could add their own
| proprietary extension that isn't available to anyone else.
| monocasa wrote:
| Apple have added proprietary extensions to their cores
| that aren't available to anyone else.
| klelatti wrote:
| I knew this would come up!
|
| Fair enough but they are very much the exception and
| their impact on the wider ecosystem is minimal. In
| general Arm's controls on this happening are much
| stronger than for RISC-V.
| monocasa wrote:
| In practice I don't see it as a big deal.
|
| On the x86 side generally one of the vendors makes a new
| extension and then once it's shown that there's value,
| their legal teams get together and cross license. The
| world hasn't fallen apart.
|
| I agree that ARM has more controls, but disagree that
| those controls have value.
| klelatti wrote:
| Isn't x86 situation due to a legally enforceable cross
| licensing deal arising out of a long history of
| litigation? No reason why this would apply to any other
| architecture.
| monocasa wrote:
| My understanding is that there's no existing cross
| licensing for new extensions. That's why vt-x and svm are
| totally different implementions for x86 hardware
| virtualization; most of the newer supervisor state
| extensions aren't worth the overhead of cross licensing
| because it's only kernels and hypervisors utilizing them
| anyway rather than the orders of magnitude more user code
| out there.
|
| Also notice how there aren't any Zen cores with AVX512.
| Even Zen4 is backporting BF16 out of AVX512 to AVX2, and
| BF16 is just 'use the top 16 bits of a normalizd f32' and
| was designed specifically to probably be without too much
| IP overhead.
| klelatti wrote:
| You probably have better sources than me so I'll defer to
| your info on this.
|
| Doesn't this sort of make the point though that we're
| seeing fragmentation in x86 ISAs with only two
| participants. I may be wrong but I do worry that without
| Arm like controls every big designer who has a good idea
| for their niche adds something proprietary on and before
| long we have a very messy situation.
| monocasa wrote:
| I just don't see fragmentation as a problem, nor
| something that can be solved. Even under AArch64, there's
| close to a hundred FEAT_XXX bits that can even be
| different for the same microarchitecture, just the
| integrator was given an option at hardware instantiation
| time. The only archs without fragmentation are dead archs
| that no one cares to make new versions of and evolve.
| What matters is being able to depend on a standard core
| set so that your tooling can make sense of your code, but
| if there's cool optional features tacked on the side
| that's great too. So far RISC-V has been doing a great
| job defining that core feature set.
| klelatti wrote:
| Sure this is fine but incompatible proprietary
| extensions, from powerful vendors who can use them to try
| to differentiate their products seems like a bad
| destination.
|
| I guess we'll have to agree to respectfully disagree!
| smoldesu wrote:
| Precisely what I was getting at, thank you. At this
| point, fragmentation is just a built-in part of most
| ecosystems. RISC-V embraces this nature and gives both
| hardware and software engineers a huge degree of control
| over how their code compiles and runs, rather than
| constraining them to a happy-path scenario that has
| traditionally encouraged breakage and proprietary
| extensions.
| klelatti wrote:
| It's not about a single design team - it's about a thirty year
| effort to make available ISAs / CPU designs that SoC designers
| can incorporate into their products (sharing the costs of their
| development) and immediately tap into a wider hardware /
| software ecosystem.
|
| A large company could do it but do you really want to build
| your own LLVM backend? And the largest Arm customers do design
| their own CPUs.
|
| Of course RISC-V potentially challenges this model.
| lewisjoe wrote:
| Quick summary on why it matters that Nvidia abandons ARM
| takeover:
|
| 1. ARM doesn't own any factories. Its entire workforce publishes
| blueprints for making chips (like a software company where the
| entire asset is intellectual)
|
| 2. Buying this type of intellectual asset, means owning and
| controlling a technology.
|
| 3. This also means, all the other customers who depend on this
| tech (Apple, Samsung, Amazon, pretty much all big tech companies)
| are now at a disadvantage with NVIDIA as a competitor.
|
| 4. China heavily depends on ARM (Huawei, the company's biggest
| tech manufacturer rely on ARM)
|
| 5. This means, the after ARM gets owned by a US company, the US
| can possibly just cut-off ARM supply to China
|
| 6. Since ARM is basically like a software company, it's better to
| not be owned by a hardware maker. That way, it can prioritize
| demand from several hardware makers instead of being directed to
| cater to one market)
|
| So, all-in-all this is a good thing :)
| londons_explore wrote:
| > This means, the after ARM gets owned by a US company, the US
| can possibly just cut-off ARM supply to China
|
| But IP is very hard to control the supply of, especially one
| like this where hundreds of companies have a copy of the IP. If
| the US won't license it on fair terms, China will just stop
| enforcing IP laws and allow anyone to copy it for free.
| criley2 wrote:
| With all due respect to China, licensing on fair terms has
| never been a requirement for state-sponsored intellectual
| property theft.
| azmodeus wrote:
| With all due respect to the USA, never been a requirement
| for United States state-sponsored intellectual property
| theft either.
| criley2 wrote:
| bennysomething wrote:
| But goods infringing IP can presumably be prevented from
| import into western markets?
| hughrr wrote:
| That's fine until your entire planet runs on ARM IP made in
| china. China pulls the plug then we're all in trouble.
|
| What would happen is another mutually assured destruction
| stalemate.
| ayende wrote:
| Except that the response would be that any product with that
| IP will be banned from EU/USA. That is a huge hit to take.
| londons_explore wrote:
| But it's pretty hard to know what devices even contain that
| IP... Does that Amazon Basics optical gaming mouse contain
| an ARM CPU? It would probably take weeks of decapping the
| chip and reverse engineering the CPU to be sure, and even
| then, figuring out if that CPU is licensed or not is non-
| trivial. Is customs really going to do that for every item
| that comes through the border?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Well suffering sanctions and being left without
| foundamental technology is already a huge hit
| xaxaxb wrote:
| There should be quick summaries for all posts like this. +1
| uxp100 wrote:
| This summary is not very good. Not wrong, but misleading I
| guess? Seems sort of confused about how arm and fabless
| semiconductor companies interact?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| na85 wrote:
| 5 at least is a non factor since the Chinese government doesn't
| play by the rules of intellectual property anyway.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| > 5. This means, the after ARM gets owned by a US company, the
| US can possibly just cut-off ARM supply to China
|
| China has already hijacked the ARM branch in China[1] and taken
| over ARM's IP.
|
| [1] https://semianalysis.com/the-semiconductor-heist-of-the-
| cent...
| greatpatton wrote:
| Seems that it's not as simple as mentioned here:
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326617-arm-refutes-
| acc...
| ksec wrote:
| The article is a very very strange read. ( At least the
| tone of it, may be under legal threat )
|
| Yes, ARM China didn't _steal_ any ARM UK 's IP. But ARM
| China is also no longer under the control of ARM UK,
| practically speaking. And the New IP offered by ARM China
| are also _independent_ of ARM UK. I am wondering if the
| deal with ARM China and ARM UK are the same as AMD 's JV,
| where China currently has AMD Zen's IP. Given the people
| involved I would not be surprised.
|
| ARM UK are also well aware of the RISC-V threat, which
| China is currently pouring all the resources into it. I
| would not be surprised if you see a free high performance
| RISC-V IP offered by China just to destroy the ARM market
| along with some other x86 market. The threat is real. But
| then again HN will rejoice because it is free and RISC-V.
| Taniwha wrote:
| China? already done
|
| https://riscv.org/news/2021/10/alibaba-announces-open-
| source...
|
| New Zealand too .....
|
| https://github.com/MoonbaseOtago/vroom
| ssl232 wrote:
| On the topic of China and IP, I watched an interesting debate
| on China between two politicians recently:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEchkn3unl8. Funnily Vince
| Cable, arguing in favour of China as a friend to the West,
| defended their IP offences saying this is what lots of
| Western nations did to each other (and, arguably, though he
| doesn't make a big deal of it, China) on the way to becoming
| fully developed.
| halpert wrote:
| Has he heard of a zero sum game?
| imron wrote:
| > This means, the after ARM gets owned by a US company, the US
| can possibly just cut-off ARM supply to China
|
| Good thing ARM China already decided to go its own way [0].
|
| 0: https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/the-semiconductor-
| heist-...
| option_greek wrote:
| Wow that's an interesting read. So anyone who holds a rubber
| stamp of a company can steal the whole company? That's some
| screwed up legal system.
| duxup wrote:
| The judiciary in China isn't independent, or consistent. I
| suspect the reason for the decision is just a handy reason
| to give.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| My impression is that the CCP's idea of justice is
| whatever benefits the CCP.
|
| This doesn't differ too much from other nations except in
| degree and in their ability or willingness to hide that
| fact.
| jl6 wrote:
| I squinted, but I can't see any way to draw a moral
| equivalence between the Chinese justice system and, say,
| the UK justice system. There's a fundamental and massive
| difference in approach to the rule of law.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I'm from the U.S..
|
| I initially was going to say that CCP really only cares
| about its own interests.
|
| Then I thought about my own country's actions and
| policies for a moment before posting (Guantanamo, labor
| and privacy laws, the 'medical system', and 'education
| system').
|
| My revised thought was that the main difference is in
| whether the country still _even pretends_ to seek justice
| for its citizens.
|
| I do think there are differences, especially in degree,
| but the general motivations and actions seem similar
| enough.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> My impression is that the CCP 's idea of justice is
| whatever benefits the CCP._
|
| Of course, there's no separation of powers in China, the
| courts are not independent, they are part of the
| Communist Party of China. Nor is there a constitution
| that all court decisions must uphold. The only guidestar
| of the Chinese court system is to keep the CPC in power,
| and uphold laws passed by the CPC, nothing else.
|
| _> This doesn 't differ too much from other nations
| except in degree and in their ability or willingness to
| hide that fact._
|
| It differs from Constitutional republics where the court
| system is independent from political parties and mandated
| to ensure all laws passed by the legislative branch and
| actions taken by the executive branch do not violate the
| constitution, regardless which party is in power at the
| time.
|
| Yes different political parties will try to pack the
| court when they can, but that pendulum swings back and
| forth over time. There's a social contract with the
| citizenry that doesn't exist in Communist countries -
| adhere to the constitution or be kicked out of power in
| future elections. You can see the evidence in how often
| power changes hands between parties.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| > There's a social contract with the citizenry that
| doesn't exist in Communist countries - adhere to the
| constitution or be kicked out of power in future
| elections
|
| I am thankful for that difference. That said, recent
| political events in the U.S. have shown how much of that
| 'contract' is just convention.
| Nokinside wrote:
| There are significant inaccuracies in this take
|
| (2) "controlling tech" All big players: Apple, Nvidia, Samsung,
| Amazon, Qualcomm, Intel, .. have so called Architectural
| license with heavily crafted clauses in them that make them
| free from Arm control except for some minor details. They use
| just the instruction set and make their own microarchitecture.
|
| (3) Arm China was robbed from Arm. The CEO stopped taking
| orders and just kept IP and is running company like their own.
| Chinese courts did nothing. China does what it wants inside
| China.
|
| (5) No difference. There are too many cross-atlantic IP and
| design tool connections. Arm must comply completely to US
| government sanctions.
|
| (6) Just like Nvidia. Both fabless hw IP companies. Difference
| is that Nvidia sells chips, Arm sells IP. Nvidia wanted Arm
| because they want to sell Nvidia IP to others. Nvidia has Arm
| architecture license, they don't need Arm IP to use Arm.
| Aissen wrote:
| (3) Arm is refuting that there was IP theft, see
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326617-arm-refutes-
| acc...
| Coding_Cat wrote:
| > Chinese courts did nothing. China does what it wants inside
| China.
|
| Lots of people calling this out as 'a bad thing', but at the
| end of the day the Chinese government/courts handled in what
| it thought was in the best interest of Chinese citizens.
|
| For other countries that might look like respecting IP
| clauses but for China it doesn't seem to be. I think it makes
| perfect sense and is perfectly moral for a country to do so.
|
| and for 6) I think one of the fears there is that nVidia
| would use ARMs near de-facto monopoly to force their tech
| onto the market and push out competitors, like qualcom on the
| mobile GPU market.
|
| Whether it be trough integrating nVidia tech more deeply into
| the architectural offerings essentialy forcing competitors to
| license both techs, or by using the ARM IP to in the future
| outcompete direct competitors by charging more for the IP
| that they can now use without any cost. Even if they're not
| planning any of that, I think the fear that they might in the
| future is what's giving many people (and regulators) pause.
|
| ARM itself is never in direct competition with its customers
| _because_ it only sells IP, nVidia sells chips and is in
| direct competition with others who depend upon ARM for their
| chips.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| >but at the end of the day the Chinese government/courts
| handled in what it thought was in the best interest of
| Chinese citizens
|
| In the short-term, you're absolutely right. In the long-
| term, no one will continue to invest in Chinese businesses
| if China gets a reputation for banditry like this. Is it in
| the best interests of Chinese citizens to ruin their
| reputation for the next generation?
| Steltek wrote:
| It's likely that China will use illegal or underhanded
| techniques to get ahead today then clean up their act and
| claim rehabilitation later. You can see the mental
| groundwork being laid in the whataboutism rebuttals
| comparing the US today vs past history.
| periheli0n wrote:
| > in the best interest of Chinese citizens.
|
| Of course you can do that but that is not how you do trade.
| Trade requires trust and a move like this undermines trust.
| And I find it difficult to argue that it's in the best
| interest of citizen to undermine foreign investors' trust
| in the marketplace. In the end it means that less money
| will flow in.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| > Lots of people calling this out as 'a bad thing', but at
| the end of the day the Chinese government/courts handled in
| what it thought was in the best interest of Chinese
| citizens.
|
| If somebody came into my house, ate my food, set themselves
| up in a bedroom and enjoyed the comforts of my household,
| then when I told them to leave declared everywhere they had
| lodged and dined in my house an independent territory, that
| would be an immoral act. Blatant theft in the eyes of
| anyone.
|
| Allen Wu was removed from his post. Not only did he
| decline, he took off a chunk of the company with him. That
| is a move of douchery in business I've never seen anywhere
| in the Western world in my time alive.
|
| If the company I work for fires me, I will _leave the
| premises_. I may not like the decision but I respect it.
| And in Denmark we have courts of law that ensure one
| vacates the premises by the date of termination.
|
| The CCP is playing fast and loose with whatever it likes.
| That's bad behavior, whether you're a business or a human
| being.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| (2) *I thought Apple had complete control over their Arm(TM)
| based chips as in they can do anythign they want and pay no
| licensing fee as long as they keep the Arm branding?
| A_non_e-moose wrote:
| > (3) Firstly, Arm China was robbed from Arm. The CEO stopped
| taking orders and just kept IP and is running company like
| their own. Chinese courts did nothing. China does what it
| wants inside China.
|
| Did ARM cut off any new IP access from ARM China? Seems like
| a logical next step. And how is ARM China going to continue
| innovating? On their own?
| johnebgd wrote:
| Doing what they always do, stealing without repercussions
| from innovators around the world.
| phatfish wrote:
| So the same way all the other countries developed
| technical skills that can support entire economies then.
| Nokinside wrote:
| You are correct, but I dislike the tone that what they do
| is "typically Chinese" or what Chinese do.
|
| * When Chinese were ahead, European stole and smuggled
| manufacturing technologies from China.
|
| * Industrial revolution in the United States was started
| by ruthlessly stealing the British innovations. Samuel
| Slater -- the "Father of the American Industrial
| Revolution" -- is known as "Slater the Traitor" in
| Britain.
|
| * Japanese stole and copied every design and technology
| from the US and Europe they could from the start of Meiji
| era 1868- to 1960s.
|
| Piracy is not a theft in a sense that it's just illegal,
| not fundamentally immoral. I think it's actually cool
| historical constant that moves the world ahead.
| elteto wrote:
| georgeecollins wrote:
| >> When Chinese were ahead, European stole and smuggled
| manufacturing technologies from China.
|
| Two wrongs make a right..
| neolefty wrote:
| Great historical perspective. I'm curious how
| international intellectual "piracy" looks when one thinks
| of the world as a single place and humanity as a single
| people.
| naruvimama wrote:
| Unless the people have free and unrestricted level
| playing field, it would not make sense to have the same
| conditions across the world.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Piracy is not a theft in a sense that it's just
| illegal, not fundamentally immoral.
|
| Piracy is definitely a theft. It's ludicrous to suggest
| that IP doesn't have any value like physical property.
| ddingus wrote:
| It's not a theft at all.
|
| For a claim of theft to be made, someone, somewhere,
| somehow must be denied property of some kind.
|
| Piracy is infringement, and we have that word because the
| hard fact is nobody, anywhere, anyhow is denied property.
|
| There is value, and all that, but it's not theft, and
| it's not simple.
|
| In the case of say movie piracy, or music, some
| entertainment work, infringement can actually add value
| back to the creator by making that creator relevant and
| with that relevancy, a potential buyer of works. Bob
| likes a band, shares a track with Joe, who likes it and
| buys an album they would not have otherwise purchased if
| it were not for Bob...
|
| In the case of a technology, someone learns how to do
| something other people would rather they not know. No
| party is denied understanding or property, unless one
| wants to talk about a physical instance of the
| understanding, but that's a side show really. The value
| is in the info, not the piece of paper detailing it, but
| I digress too.
|
| Here's the interesting thing:
|
| Once more parties have that understanding, and despite
| originators preferring they not have that understanding,
| all parties can gain from new understanding that always
| happens on top of existing understanding, and in the end?
|
| That's how we advance.
|
| Question is what is worth what?
|
| It's not one of theft, but infringement and of what makes
| sense in economic terms as well as our overall
| development as beings.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's ludicrous to suggest that value is proof of theft.
| cft wrote:
| I think the US will be taught a valuable lesson in this
| regard. In the 70s and 80s the MBAs figured that they
| could strip industrial assets and rely on "intellectual
| property". In the 21 century their children will be shown
| by China how wrong they were.
| ddingus wrote:
| OH and thanks for this too!
|
| All wealth is the product of labor. Intellectual labor is
| labor, and the understanding it brings is wealth, but
| that inherently leaks out into the body of people,
| eventually becoming common knowledge, or at a minimum
| well known, or documented. Some secrets do die with their
| originators too, but that's more rare.
|
| I changed careers watching those MBA's tear great
| companies apart, and the example close to home for me was
| Tektronix. There is a video out there "Spirit of Tek"
| that kind of gets at the powerful innovation culture once
| practiced there. In that culture, Joe Bloomstone can walk
| off the street, get training and advance into product
| design and even spin off into a company backed by Tek!
|
| It happened a lot and the area was rich with technical
| understanding, manufacturing, all the good stuff.
|
| Then it got sent over there...
|
| Today, people want it back, many people are taking hard
| won skills to their graves, leaving current people to
| climb back to regain what was sold off for a little money
| in the now, leaving the region doing hair, nails,
| tires...
|
| The people who can make stuff matter. Physical things
| matter.
|
| Agreed.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| IP is a government-granted privilege, that is why the
| word "royalties" is derived from the word "royal". In
| Great Britain of the 18th century, where the concept
| began, the one who guaranteed your IP rights was the
| Sovereign and his/her courts. There isn't anything like
| IP in the Common Law or other traditional legal systems,
| while ownership of physical property dates at least until
| Antiquity. Two very different concepts.
|
| I am not against IP as such, but violation of a legally
| guaranteed monopoly, even though it causes some loss of
| capturable value, isn't the same as theft/larceny.
|
| Words have meanings and we should respect them. Piracy is
| legally similar to a non-organized blacksmith setting up
| shop in a city where every blacksmith must be member of a
| certain guild to work. This kind of monopoly was
| routinely granted before by either the Sovereign or
| particular cities.
| wwtrv wrote:
| > Piracy is legally similar to a non-organized blacksmith
| setting up shop in a city where every blacksmith must be
| member of a certain guild to work.
|
| No. It's legally similar to a blacksmith copying another
| blacksmith's designs and putting his trademark mark on
| their products. IP laws do not inherently restrict anyone
| from freely practicing their trade nor do they force you
| to join any trade/industry associations.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| > IP laws do not inherently restrict anyone from freely
| practicing their trade nor do they force you to join any
| trade/industry associations.
|
| While true, it's a gray area when you get into certain
| industries. Cell phones, for example, are chock-full of
| cross licensed patents regarding the baseband chips and
| radio waves. There's a term in the industry for these
| kinds of patents (my mind is blanking). Ignoring the
| necessary industry talent, there's no way in hell one can
| make a new baseband processor without dozens of NDAs and
| patents that you yourself can offer up as leverage.
|
| IMHO (and one many here share), IP laws (with regard to
| software) have gone way too far. The big problem is that
| the companies with the might to enact change tend to be
| part of the problem themselves.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| How is this any different than saying "Cell phones are
| too complicated so lets just skip all that research for
| practical reasons?"
|
| I agree that many patents are held by groups that don't
| use them how we'd like them to, but they still had to
| _buy_ the patent. Society promised them that the patent
| would be enforced and it is. Combating abuse of the
| courts is a separate matter.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Forging a trademark is bad because it's a deception, not
| a theft. Trademarks have nothing do do with piracy,
| they're about counterfeiting.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| It's not forging. It's putting your own.
|
| You spend twenty years designing the perfect steel
| production method, spending millions of dollars, and
| start selling it as Pessimizer Steel. It's obviously
| superior. You start making some of your money back. I
| spend an hour watching you through the window and start
| selling it as Super Steel and claiming that it's just as
| good because I made it the same way. I sell it at half
| price because I'm not paying off any business loans. You
| go bankrupt.
|
| That's the system you want? Who is going to invest in
| steel research in that system?
| pmyteh wrote:
| That's not an argument about forging trademarks - it's an
| argument for respecting patents (if the Pessimizer
| manufacturers got one) or trade secrets (if they didn't).
|
| You _can_ make an argument for trademark law on the basis
| of sunk costs to develop an intangible brand with
| intrinsic value, as opposed to as a consumer protection
| mechanism, but this isn 't that.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Similar" isn't "the same", but "similar".
|
| In one case, you forbid everyone but the licensees to
| produce a certain type of nails. In another case, you
| forbid everyone but the guild members to produce nails at
| all.
|
| Both are government-granted monopolies.
| cheschire wrote:
| What is theft / larceny if not an abstract definition of
| ownership? How does theft work in cultures where
| ownership doesn't exist?
|
| Isn't ownership a government-granted privilege as well
| then?
|
| So if piracy is simply the act of ignoring sovereign
| privilege in open water (sea, space, internet), then I
| think the only contention one could make that piracy !=
| theft is by asserting that piracy is not _only_ theft.
| jyounker wrote:
| Correct. Ownership is a legal concept.
|
| Possession exists in a physical sense, but ownership does
| not.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| IMHO the defining part of theft / larceny is that the
| original owner can no longer use the thing that was
| stolen.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| We see this opinion on HN frequently yet various legal
| systems recognize the concept of theft of nontangible
| services
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services).
|
| One wonders if the HN readers denying the concept of IP
| also support copying GPL code without adherence to the
| GPL. It would be logically consistent.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I do not deny the concept of IP (if it is _me_ who you
| were addressing; see my other comments), but I believe
| that sloppy nomenclature leads to sloppy thinking.
|
| Fraud vs. theft vs. copyright violation vs. insider
| trading etc. are all different categories of illegal
| activity and we shouldn't mix them up by using their
| names interchangeably.
|
| I admit that as a maths major, I tend to be pedantic
| about definitions, at least in things as serious as
| crime.
|
| There is a moral dimension as well. I do not believe that
| we should cut punishments for theft in half. But I do
| believe we could well cut copyright protection periods
| back to the levels where they were in 1960 without
| causing any major problems or undue hardship to anyone.
| lanstin wrote:
| Saying theft and copyright violation are different
| morally is not suporting copyright violation. It is to
| ask as the difficulty of copying wanes, perhaps it is
| time to rebalance giving up the right to copy in exchange
| for more innovation. When the right to copy was traded in
| exchange to protect publishers, it was a lot harder to
| copy stuff, so relatively less was sacrificed. Now
| copying things is super easy and crucial to normal work
| flows.
|
| And yet taking a snap of a museum artifact still is quite
| distinct from stealing someones pen.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| This definition is almost explicitly crafted to make IP
| seem worthless.
|
| Information that requires investment to gain is
| considered valuable. This argument is basically "any job
| that isn't physical manufacturing should not be paid,
| since the ideas only spread instead of move."
|
| Oh you spent $500m developing a novel cognitive treatment
| for ptsd and proving it works better than sota? Humanity
| thanks you! Enjoy your total loss."
|
| Oh you wrote a book? Hopefully it wasn't a book on
| business building, since you'll be earning nothing for
| your effort.
|
| Oh you're a consultant? How charitable of you!
| toopok4k3 wrote:
| You seem to lack the simplest terms when talking of IP
| laws. Copyright is something you infringe. You don't even
| say what you are referring to here by talking of "IP".
| The important stuff is always in details.
|
| There's a large amount of misinformation and people
| lacking an understanding on the differences between
| copyright, patents and trademarks. Making these threads
| repetitive to read. Always such a pointless anecdotes
| such as yours, truncating all IP systems under "IP laws".
|
| For example. The patent system came to existence to
| ensure that inventions were not hidden, but published to
| the public in a form patent. Instead of the inventor
| hiding the invention, the society grants the inventor
| sole rights to the invention thanks to them making it
| public.
|
| Copyright and Trademark are different beasts to Patents,
| and all these are very linked to the laws of single
| countries, bar signed treaties. Please distinguish what
| you are talking about. Otherwise your point is moot.
| pfraze wrote:
| It's hard to ignore the intuitive meaning of stealing an
| idea, as in stealing the benefit
| bubblethink wrote:
| This meaning of stealing relies on creating artificial
| scarcity. It doesn't seem that intuitive.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| People also say that someone stole their heart, but it
| does not mean that they have a gaping hole in their
| chest. Casual use of a language for narrative purposes is
| one thing, speaking about actual criminal activity
| another.
|
| To be clear, I make some money on my IP (being a self-
| published author who sells his books) and I encountered
| people pirating scanned copies of my work. I do not mind
| on this scale, but I am aware that if someone just
| started publishing my books commercially and I had no
| copyright to protect me, I would be in trouble.
|
| But it still wouldn't be theft, rather a foul kind of
| "competition". My physical books wouldn't disappear from
| my (rented) garage and readers who like me would still
| hopefully buy them directly on my e-shop.
| Maursault wrote:
| The most sold book in the world, by a large margin, for a
| long long time, is The Bible. If genetic historians and
| biblical scholars succeed, perhaps someday the unknown
| decedents of the unknown authors and other known valid
| holders of IP rights, such as the decedents of Moses and
| brothers, sisters and cousins of Jesus, could one day be
| fairly compensated. But it would end up being everyone
| alive, so we should do that, fairly compensate all the IP
| holders for the unpaid use of all that IP, including all
| the movies and TV shows, and including all interest
| accrued across the centuries, and literally everyone will
| get rich off the proceeds of past, current and future
| Bible sales. Crazy idea, but it just might work.
| ddingus wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| And it's strange, in that you could become relevant and
| have your audience expanded by the infringers hand.
|
| Question there is how to benefit from that...
| jhgb wrote:
| Then you'd have to sue your business competitors if they
| manage to capture a part of your market. After all you've
| been deprived by them of the benefit of getting money
| from that part of the market.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| This is basically how it works
| temac wrote:
| It's not legally, because it is not philosophically. And
| that's without denying that e.g. copyrighted works,
| inventions, models, etc., can and often have value.
| pokepim wrote:
| I agree, a lot of hackernews users recently been using
| derogatory racist comments towards China. I wonder what
| are demographics of this site. I guess majority white
| male, with right wing tendencies yields those results.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| How is this 'racist'
|
| >Doing what they always do, stealing without
| repercussions from innovators around the world.
|
| They, in this context are chinese companies, existing
| under the protection of the chinese state. You have to
| really go out of your way in bad faith to construe the
| above as some sort of criticism of someone just because
| they are _ethnically_ chinese. You 're the one injecting
| racism into what is otherwise a completely valid concern
| with chinese companies.
| starfallg wrote:
| The difference is how the CCP effectively encourage and
| cover for this type of stealing, for example how the HSR
| contracts were structured, which was daylight robbery of
| all of the technologies from the different leaders in the
| field.
|
| Chinese companies are also aggressive in marketing stolen
| technologies but because of incomplete knowledge and
| expertise, end up in sub-standard/broken products, such
| as the capacitor electrolyte issues around 10-15 years
| ago.
| oblio wrote:
| The difference?!?
|
| I don't support the CCP, but have you heard of the Opium
| Wars? Literal drug smuggling wars waged by outside
| countries? Countries literally forcing drugs down Chinese
| throats...
|
| What they're doing is ugly but it pales in comparison to
| abuses they've suffered. The only redeeming factor is
| that those abuses happened a long time ago and China
| should definitely know better than eye for an eye.
| ipaddr wrote:
| So Chinese companies stealing ip is nothing to be
| concerned about because of the Opium wars?
|
| The current human rights abuses like forced sterilization
| of minorities, body part removal of prisoners or the past
| abuses of chairman Mao are on a much grander scale of
| evil where do they fit into your worldview?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| All countries have done bad things in the past. Mao
| Zedong killed millions.
| oblio wrote:
| He killed his own countrymen (primarily) and this is a
| discussion about international affairs.
| dahfizz wrote:
| You want to pretend like China has a stellar
| international affairs record? How do you feel about the
| Chinese treatment of Hong Kong and Taiwan?
|
| I don't see how any of this is relevant anyway. What
| China is doing today with IP is bad. The opium wars have
| nothing to do with that.
| oblio wrote:
| Hong Kong and Taiwan could be argued as internal affairs,
| honestly. No matter how much it would pain me that 2
| developed and thriving democracies (maybe Macau, too, if
| you squint really hard at it) are very exposed to nasty
| regime abuses. "Cuius regio, eius religio" isn't a
| Chinese saying, it's a Latin one from the Western world.
| Can't have it both ways.
|
| If you want to go into more unequivocally international
| affairs abuses, use examples more like the Spratly
| Islands or the Chinese fishing fleets in international
| waters.
|
| And regarding IP, I'm kind of torn. China is genuinely
| developing and innovating and making amazing products for
| the rest of the world. The UK, the US did the same at the
| start, also through blatant disregard for IP. Maybe this
| kind of competition is ok. After all, "If we each trade
| one apples, at the end we each have one apple. If we each
| trade one idea, at the end we each have two ideas".
| varjag wrote:
| He killed plenty Koreans too.
| oblio wrote:
| Most people using that phrase don't care much about that,
| it's about the Great Leap Forward. Plus you could argue
| that his intervention was legitimized by the North Korean
| government asking for it.
|
| Anyway, we're getting side tracked here.
| zekrioca wrote:
| Whataboutism at its best
| dahfizz wrote:
| oblio is the one who brought up the Opium wars as a
| justification for China stealing IP. _That_ is
| whataboutism. Responding to whataboutism with examples
| showing the original whataboutism as invalid is perfectly
| fine, IMO.
| oblio wrote:
| The thing is, that's not even showing my whataboutism as
| invalid.
|
| Only wwtrv addressed by direct point and I can say that I
| only half-agree with him.
|
| But GekkePrutser's reply is something like the OP saying
| the tram is going straight, me saying that it's going to
| the right pointing at a 15 degree angle and then
| GekkePrutser saying that there is no tram, it's a rocket
| instead and it's actually pointing down and to the left
| at a 30 degree angle, i.e., waaaaay off-mark.
|
| Anyway, I'm probably breaking a chunk of HN rules
| continuing this discussion :-)
| starfallg wrote:
| The difference being the scale and scope of government
| involvement in the stealing of _technology_ specifically,
| not colonial antics of forcing the port of Canton open so
| opium can be imported from British India.
|
| We're not talking about the history and legacy of
| colonialism. I think that debate has been long settled
| and traditional colonialism is behind us. The type of
| colonialism we are now seeing is, for example,
| infrastructure loans that end up as a backdoor into
| gaining control of strategic assets in resource-rich but
| underdeveloped countries, which seems to be the MO of the
| belt-and-road initiative.
| wwtrv wrote:
| That's largely a misconception, Chinese authorities
| seazing illegally smuggled opium did spark the first
| opium war, however France and Britain did not invade
| China so that they could force Chinese to buy their
| opium. They wanted to force China to open more ports for
| trade and to stop persecuting christian missionaries and
| Chinese christians (obviously mainly due to political
| reasons, christians functioned basically like a 5th
| column inside China and allowed European powers to
| justify their military interventions to their own
| citizens).
|
| The highly unequal treaties signed between Britain (and
| other European countries) after the war did not even
| require China to legalize opium and allow it to be freely
| imported (that would have been extremely hard to justify
| politically and the opium trade was not even a primary
| concern for the British government in the first place).
| China did legalize opium on their own during the second
| opium war basically as way to boost tax revenues (because
| of the Taiping rebellion the Manchu Qing government was
| near collapse) and Chinese domestic production soon
| surpassed the imports from British India.
| oblio wrote:
| > force China to open more ports for trade
|
| of opium...
|
| This is a bit like that debate about Confederate states
| fighting for state rights. The right to own slaves.
|
| China didn't want to trade much except for silver and
| opium. The Chinese trade was emptying British coffers of
| silver so the British forced trade of one of the few
| things the Chinese were willing to trade in exchange for
| their highly sought out goods.
| wwtrv wrote:
| > China didn't want to trade much except for silver and
| opium
|
| The Manchu Qing government wanted this, many Chinese
| considered them to be foreign oppressors not much better
| than the British and the French and were happy to trade
| with the Europeans (not only for opium).
|
| > of opium...
|
| Again, opium was only a part of it and it was not that
| important by the second Opium war. China was falling
| apart due to internal issues and European powers
| opportunistically used this to peel of parts of China and
| to expand their overseas markets (for all kinds of goods
| besides opium) further increasing internal instability.
|
| I'm not trying to exonerate the British or to downplay
| their imperialist policies but the 'Opium wars' were not
| merely about the opium trade, they weren't even widely
| called that until much later. The modern popular
| perceptions of the wars is highly influenced by Chinnese
| civil war propaganda (from both sides) which portrays
| them as beginning of some western plot to destabilize and
| destroy China while it's much more complicated than that.
| rscho wrote:
| China never was ahead.
| mc32 wrote:
| This take ignores the history of the development of
| intellectual property rights, convention signatories and
| WTO.
|
| Many, many things were unregulated in the past but ARE
| regulated today.
|
| If they wanted to maintain a policy of ignoring IP, etc.,
| they they should not have joined the WTO and signed
| conventions that hold them to obligations.
|
| These organization and conventions set the stage or
| provide the framework and law by which signatories are
| bound.
|
| Your argument amounts to: hey, the US and Brazil and the
| Middle East and many other countries used slave
| workforces in the past therefore it's okay for China to
| do the same today, else they are at a developmental
| disadvantage.
|
| In any event, I'm quite sure any patent [had the concept
| existed] would have run out by the time they were adopted
| elsewhere.
| [deleted]
| ectopod wrote:
| Keeping slaves is inherently harmful. Copying things is
| not.
| mc32 wrote:
| Then they should not have signed on to the WTO and other
| organizations that bind them to obligations with regards
| to IP, among other things.
| lazide wrote:
| The history of sovereign nations is the history of
| 'consequences or not', as compared to 'right or wrong' -
| for a great many reasons, including that right or wrong
| is generally a cultural idea that is rarely consistent
| across cultures, and is often fluid based on trade offs
| and not as set in stone as we'd all like to believe.
|
| If folks were foolish enough to assume a sovereign nation
| was going to do what they think is right or wrong
| (including following a treaty when there are obviously no
| real consequences despite it benefiting them to not
| follow it), then they weren't paying attention to
| history.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| I don't understand this sentiment at all. Basically
| "thinking isn't work and nothing anyone spends time
| thinking up has any value."
| ballenf wrote:
| > If they wanted to maintain a policy of ignoring IP,
| etc., they they should not have joined the WTO and signed
| conventions that hold them to obligations.
|
| Entering into agreements with another party that doesn't
| share your values or over whom you have little power or
| leverage is a restatement of the advice to avoid being
| unequally yoked.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| I would like to remind that the unequal treaties [0], and
| other treaties signed during the century of humiliation
| [1] were also actual treaties signed by the corresponding
| nations.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_treaty
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
| stickfigure wrote:
| All the people that were involved are dead now.
| mc32 wrote:
| Perhaps you should remind China of this as they exercise
| their economic power with their 1B1R policies[1] in the
| Indian Ocean basin.
|
| [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/deepening-debt-crisis-in-
| sri-la...
| otrahuevada wrote:
| Unless they have like a country-wide e-mail address or
| some kind of HN-exclusive PA system, I don't think this
| figure of speech really means much other than a childish
| retort that does not really further dialogue.
|
| The validity of treaties signed under duress on the other
| hand I think really deserves some questioning.
| clusterfish wrote:
| You are correct, but I dislike the offended whataboutism
| tone. That other countries did the same 100 years ago, or
| even some other countries still do today, is not the
| point.
|
| The point is it's typical of China to steal IP. It's a
| problem because it gives Chinese companies an unfair
| advantage as they grow big by stealing all they want from
| others, but have their own IP protected in other
| countries.
|
| It would be nice to live in a world without patents, _but
| that 's not the world we live in_. So if you're ok
| ignoring reality, might as well go on a tirade how
| stealing cash is "not immoral" because you don't believe
| in government issued tender or something.
| patrickk wrote:
| Chinese price dumping from state-sponsored companies also
| largely wiped out the German solar PV industry[1,2].
| Germany was an early innovator in solar, especially in
| regards to inventing the concept of a feed in tariff when
| solar PV was still hideously expensive, thereby driving
| wider adoption. Planet Money did a nice podcast on the
| history of it [3].
|
| [1] https://www.dw.com/en/chinese-exports-crushing-
| german-solar-...
|
| [2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/last-major-
| german-solar...
|
| [3]
| https://www.npr.org/2020/01/17/797322305/episode-965-das-
| gre...
| Dah00n wrote:
| >state-sponsored companies
|
| Your comment reads as if there's something wrong with
| state-sponsored companies but there really aren't and
| _everyone_ does this including the US and Germany. How
| they do it might differ but the end result is the same.
| Directly, tax cuts, giving foreign aid that have strings
| attached like the US does with almost all its "aid" ("we
| give you $XXX million and you agree to use it to buy from
| US defense contractors A, B and C" isn't aid - it is
| state-sponsoring of companies). It is only seen as a
| problem in the West when done by a country like PRC and
| it hurts a company in a country like the US or Germany -
| never the other way around. I don't know what to call it
| but it smells like a mix of nationalism and racism.
| prewett wrote:
| I think the difference is what the effect is. If China or
| the US or whoever subsidizes its own industry, people
| complain but it's not a big deal. I've never really heard
| any complaints about any of China's state-owned
| enterprises. Nobody complains that China sells
| electricity inside China for less than the cost of
| production; nobody complains about US farm subsidies.
| What people complain about is when it alters market
| dynamics. Selling solar panels below the cost of
| production (I assume that's what happened) upsets people.
| Balvarez wrote:
| I think Mexican corn farmers would disagree with you on
| US farm subsidies.
| encoderer wrote:
| yls wrote:
| IIRC Germany, by subsidizing its solar PV industry too
| heavily, took the innovation pressure out of the latter.
| This made it way too easy for Chinese companies to take
| over the market.
| croes wrote:
| You forgot german politicians that helped killing it, to
| protect the long-established energy suppliers.
|
| Peter Altmaier is one of those politicians.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yeah they pretty much did the same in the USA as well.
| wwtrv wrote:
| > When Chinese were ahead, European stole and smuggled
| manufacturing technologies from China.
|
| Not disputing this but what technologies did Europeans
| ever steal from China? I'm only aware of tea and
| silkworms..
| bigbizisverywyz wrote:
| >I'm only aware of tea and silkworms..
|
| And er... china. That stuff you make nice cups and
| saucers from.
| throwaway946513 wrote:
| Paper, Gunpowder, Woodblock Printing (predecessor to
| printing press), Compass, Crossbows, Fireworks (see
| gunpowder), Handguns (see gunpowder)
|
| For more information,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions
| wwtrv wrote:
| All of those inventions were not stolen but rather spread
| organically across Eurasia over several decades or
| centuries until they reached Europe.
| retrac wrote:
| Gunpowder, modern canal building with locks, porcelain?
| Just off the top of my head. Porcelain is a particularly
| relevant example; Europeans experimented with it for
| about a century, intentionally trying to duplicate the
| Chinese process, finally having success c. 1700 or so
| with trade secrets being smuggled out by the Jesuits.
|
| But these days I think it's the immaterial
| cultural/cognitive tools that came from China which tend
| to be underrated. For example, the Chinese invented the
| concept of the civil service and examinations, as we
| think of them today. Meritocratic experts admitted based
| solely on an anonymous written examination (duplicated by
| scribes so even the handwriting couldn't given the
| applicant away). This would influence the British East
| India Company, which ultimately led to it being
| implemented in Britain:
|
| > Even as late as ten years after the competitive
| examination plan was passed, people still attacked it as
| an "adopted Chinese culture." Alexander Baillie-Cochrane,
| 1st Baron Lamington insisted that the English "did not
| know that it was necessary for them to take lessons from
| the Celestial Empire."[184] In 1875, Archibald Sayce
| voiced concern over the prevalence of competitive
| examinations, which he described as "the invasion of this
| new Chinese culture."
|
| I'm not sure that's patentable, though.
| oytis wrote:
| > the Chinese invented the concept of the civil service
| and examinations, as we think of them today.
|
| That's a bit of overstatement I think, regarding the
| civil service I mean. Civil service was known in Babylon,
| in Egypt and in Roman Empire. From some point Roman
| Empire also introduced requirements for public servants'
| education. Not a formalized meritocratic system like in
| Han China, but we don't have a formalized examination of
| public servants today either.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Which is why a guy whose primary managerial experience
| was equestrian shows was in charge of FEMA when Hurricane
| Katrina hit New Orleans.
|
| Heck of a job brownie!
| Retric wrote:
| It's often stated that the Chinese invented gunpowder,
| but we have evidence that it existed hundreds of years
| before it's supposed date of invention making the
| original inventor completely unknown.
|
| That said, people living in what is now China likely
| invented some of the earliest forms of guns, but again
| it's fairly ambiguous. Fire Lances for example where used
| circa 1132CE which didn't fire projectiles. Mongols used
| gunpowder bombs delivered via trebuchet in 1274, but
| again it's unclear where those bombs where first invented
| and if cannons where unknown or simply ineffective. All
| we can say is over these timescales information was
| flowing in and out of various nations. Possibly because
| the actual inventors where also moving around.
|
| By 1350 cannons were in common use in Italy and much of
| Europe, but there is evidence they existed in some form
| in 1128. Though if they had been effective it was likely
| they would have seen widespread use much earlier. What's
| more clear is many early advancements occurred in Asia
| and quickly spread.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| All of those things were taken well after any reasonable
| patent would have expired, so I don't think they are
| comparable to the ip theft currently being discussed in
| this thread. I thought the upstream comment was talking
| about more recent examples.
|
| Did China try to prevent gunpowder or porcelain from
| being made by outsiders?
| oytis wrote:
| They definitely did try to keep porcelain a secret. As of
| gunpowder it wasn't stolen by Europeans, rather it seems
| that it was Mongol invasion that let the knowledge
| spread.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| Thanks. I didn't know anything about porcelain's origin.
| I'm adding porcelain's wikipedia page to my "to-read"
| list.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > All of those things were taken well after any
| reasonable patent would have expired, so I don't think
| they are comparable to the ip theft currently being
| discussed in this thread.
|
| "IP" is broader than patents that tend to have an expiry
| date - but even the expiration periods of patents is
| determined by the host government and not the
| appropriator. The US has a lot of classified information
| that would have long since expired had it been a patent,
| e.g. 1970's nuclear tech, alloys used in submarines,
| stealth coating on jets. Porcelain and the other examples
| gp gave would have fallen under the blanket of "National
| Security" rather than patents.
| christophilus wrote:
| Gun powder, iirc? Also, delicious chicken dishes.
| Maursault wrote:
| Also gunpowder, pasta, and Chinese food.
| perth wrote:
| This may surprise you, but American Chinese food is not
| served in China, or a Chinese dish, but actually an
| invention based on American food that people associate
| with the Chinese.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chinese_cuisine
| Maursault wrote:
| Thanks, that is quite interesting, but I was already
| aware. So let's not confuse which culture invents with
| which culture consumes. Also should add the stirrup,
| paper, hand guns, and using petroleum as fuel. I wonder
| if any of these IP thefts could be successfully
| litigated, and if so, what the result would be.
| jhgb wrote:
| Gunpowder spread to Middle East first, pasta was already
| being made in Ancient Rome at the very least, and lots
| of, if not most of "Chinese food" is Chinese-in-name-
| only.
| Maursault wrote:
| It is vanishingly unlikely pasta was invented in Ancient
| Rome. China had been trading with the West since the
| earliest possible founding of Rome, at the latest.
| American-Chinese cuisine was invented by Chinese in
| America, and I doubt any Romans tasted it, ancient or
| otherwise, but it is possible there was some Ancient
| Roman analog, but don't confuse who invented with who
| consumed: a culturally Chinese cook in ancient Rome is
| not Roman (though not logically impossible, there could
| have been a Chinese Roman citizen, but I strongly doubt
| there were any).
| jhgb wrote:
| Tea is not "a technology". It's a drink.
| edgyquant wrote:
| True but the British did steal tea from China. It's
| actually pretty interesting it's akin to espionage the
| way one British guy secretly went around learning how the
| tea was grown and taking seeds before setting up shop in
| India to grow it.
| jholman wrote:
| Computers are not "a technology". They're processed
| rocks.
|
| Insofar as tea involves technique, including selection,
| cultivation, harvest, processing, and preparation, it's a
| technology. One that I personally dislike.
| jhgb wrote:
| The notion of pouring hot water over plant leaves is
| _not_ something that had to be "stolen" from China. For
| example it's been known in Ancient Egypt already.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Right but the seeds needed and the growing and processing
| of the tea leads was definitely stolen from China in a
| way similar to how China acts today
| asveikau wrote:
| I mean, it's a leaf.
| jon-codes wrote:
| Last I checked, tea doesn't occur naturally. Creating it
| requires a technique (technology).
| jhgb wrote:
| Infusion may be a technology, but tea is definitely a
| drink.
| the-smug-one wrote:
| So I recently watched a video on this. Black tea is
| fermented green tea, Europeans did not know this before
| getting that knowledge through a spy. Europeans "stole"
| everything regarding the production of tea, and poached a
| few Chinese tea masters along with it.
| sgift wrote:
| "Poached"? Did they enslave them? Or did they make them a
| deal and the masters decided they'd rather work for
| someone else?
| the-smug-one wrote:
| The latter AFAIK, "poaching talent" is a pretty common
| term so I thought the meaning would be clear :-).
| lightbulbjim wrote:
| Good book on this subject:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3081255-for-all-the-
| tea-...
| pomdapi wrote:
| gunpowder, movable type, etc.
| varjag wrote:
| For better or worse, these all predate the modern
| conventions of intellectual property.
| Maursault wrote:
| You are wildly incorrect. Intellectual property rights
| were invented by ~500BC by Greek colonists in Sybaris
| (Italy) predating the invention of movable type and the
| use of gunpowder in warfare by well over a millennia.
| perth wrote:
| IIRC the technology behind the original nicotine vape pen
| was invented in China. I'm not sure what its status is in
| terms of patents/IP.
|
| Also in terms of further back history, wasn't the recipe
| behind silk kept as a Chinese secret for years and also
| foundational for the "silk road"?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| > Piracy is not a theft in a sense that it's just
| illegal, not fundamentally immoral. I think it's actually
| cool historical constant that moves the world ahead.
|
| In as much as the Chinese firms (which in many cases are
| quasi-state-owned) that do the theft are breaking treaty
| and contractual commitments, then the piracy is both
| illegal, and immoral. Not honoring binding commitments is
| wrong.
|
| I have personal experience with this, with, as it
| happens, Huawei, who licensed code from the European
| company I worked for, used it far more widely than the
| license permitted, and then, when we attempted to
| negotiate a broader license, simply dropped their license
| entirely, continuing to use the code until they had
| reverse engineered it and could generate new
| instantiations on independently of us. (That much I know
| to be true; I actually suspect, but don't have conclusive
| evidence, that employees of our Chinese subsidiary who
| went to work for Huawei stole source code on their way
| out the door, making most of the reverse engineering a
| simple hiring decision for Huawei. I also have reasonable
| evidence that another Chinese firm did the same with a
| major American technology company I later worked for,
| although again, it's difficult to prove).
| vlovich123 wrote:
| By your criterion, what Samuel Slater did was also
| immoral. Yet I'd argue it was actually for the common
| good. There's an argument to be made that most IP law
| itself is immoral as it grants monopoly rights whereas in
| most other context we recognize monopolies as naturally
| immoral. In fact, it goes against a very natural
| inclination to share interesting knowledge and stories.
|
| IP law is an attempt to recognize that there's some value
| in granting limited term immoral monopolistic rights
| because it net produces a better result longer term. That
| doesn't mean that IP law itself doesn't open up an
| immoral land grab and is itself open to abuse. Similarly,
| we obviously recognize that the commitments themselves
| may be immoral & thus can be broken (e.g. marriage to an
| unfaithful spouse) or licenses with immoral clauses
| should be free to be broken (e.g. you can't sell yourself
| into bondage).
|
| That's not to say that your experience isn't one where
| the other player was immoral. I'm just trying to broaden
| the horizon of the discussion beyond your personal story
| to how we should think about IP more broadly. It's
| nowhere near as clear cut as you make it and that
| illusion stems from how the Western legal and education
| systems work (which is a whole other topic - passing off
| another's work in education is "plagiarism" whereas if
| you do it literature it's "ghost writing").
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| As I understand history, Slater reconstructed technology
| of which he had gained a robust understanding. That's
| quite different from theft of an actual constructed
| artifact, or knowledge that you've licensed. And if he
| violated patents in the process, they were patents that
| had force of law only in the United Kingdom.
|
| I think there is room for robust discussion and argument
| on how long, and for what, patents or other pure ip
| protection should be granted. I don't believe permanently
| hiding knowledge, or locking it for indefinite time in
| the vaults of a single rent-seeking entity is right. But
| enforcemenbt of time and circumstance limited exclusivity
| is arguably worth some cost to society, as a means of
| incenting people and companies to invest in
| commercializing their innovation. Violating the agreed
| rules around those things - whether those are contracts,
| patents, or other forms, is wrong. Specifically, it is
| theft.
| azinman2 wrote:
| The amount of mental gymnastics going on to validate IP
| theft in the GP's comment is unreal. Assuming the comment
| is true (and it matches with enough documented cases to
| warrant that assumption), they had an agreement, Huawei
| clearly violated it and then usurped it illicitly and
| immorally. This is not a good thing. It's even worse that
| there are no consequences for bad actions because China
| is playing an extremely asymmetric game. As a result, if
| the GP's company went under, you're still suggesting this
| is somehow good for the world? It's good for Huawei, and
| not many others. Unless you're Chinese and benefit, know
| they're playing for keeps with your losses. This isn't
| what trade looks like, it's not what the WTO agreement
| was for, and is very zero sum.
| croes wrote:
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180313/10404539417/us
| -na...
|
| It's only piracy if others do it, isn't it.
| azinman2 wrote:
| No, it's wrong for anyone. And in this case, the German
| company has recourse to actually sue the US military, and
| with plenty of history backing this up, can actually win!
|
| Good luck trying to sue the Chinese military for contract
| breach of installing software on more computers than
| specified...
|
| Further, note that this is an instance of piracy versus
| IP theft that then directly competes with the original
| source, as a coordinated playbook with government support
| to advance local industries. It's pretty much apples &
| oranges.
| lanternfish wrote:
| I think the commenter would agree with most of what
| you're saying - I just don't think they care. The
| argument would be that raising the quality of life of the
| Chinese citizen through accelerated economic development
| as brought on by IP theft outweighs the costs of the
| theft due to the fact that those costs are relatively
| minor. They'd claim that the precedents being set don't
| matter, because they were set by all those other counties
| throughout history already. The claim would be that while
| China may be breaking the rule de jure, the de facto
| playbook has already been written by convention.
| woopwoop wrote:
| Do you feel the same way about pirating music or
| television shows?
| kelnos wrote:
| > _By your criterion, what Samuel Slater did was also
| immoral. Yet I 'd argue it was actually for the common
| good._
|
| I'll start with: I know I can never be unbiased about
| this.
|
| But I'm much more comfortable with the US (and Europe,
| and other democratic societies) engaging in this sort of
| common-good "theft" than a country like China. The US et
| al. are of course flawed in our implementation of
| democratic principles, but I do not look forward to
| living under Chinese global political/economic dominance.
| I do not believe an authoritarian government in that
| position would be a good outcome for humanity.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Acquiring/stealing/conquering techs from competing
| players via any means necessary in Civilization was a key
| means to closing the power gap with rivals on upper
| levels of difficulty.
|
| China has done this to perfection in the real world.
|
| Stealing a tech was a massive diplomatic blow in
| Civilization. The US just shrugged (because the rich made
| a huge amount of money and increase of relative wealth
| status by acquiring a massive slave labor force in China
| rather than deal with the uppity American middle class).
|
| I just did a light google pass to see if any
| international relations academics have done anything with
| Sid Meier's Civ and various other types of games. I
| expected them to not, because of course academics are
| STILL "ew, computers" and even worse, it's gauche mass
| market entertainment.
|
| But the abstraction is, I would argue, more detailed than
| a lot of academic analyses which are largely bloviation,
| the game theory quantifiable and measurable, and reduces
| a lot of complexity that normally would be hard for a
| garden variety person (aka a gamer) to wrap their head
| around.
|
| Civ always tried dropping historical tidbits and
| education into it, but arguably its most potent
| contribution is simply the more honest treatment of
| history: civilizations rising and falling, fighting over
| resources, getting conquered, and getting destroyed, and
| the roles of economic strength, military strength, and
| tradeoffs.
| ddingus wrote:
| You mean infringing, right?
|
| It's not like anyone is denied property here. The
| conflict boils down to people doing things other people
| don't like / want them to do.
|
| Once humans know how to do something, they know. It will
| spread, eventually becoming common knowledge.
|
| Infringement is the right term here, and it's all about
| that spread, the timing, etc...
| mullingitover wrote:
| > Doing what they always do, stealing without
| repercussions from innovators around the world.
|
| The US invented this practice, we didn't respect the IP
| of other countries until we started generating
| significant amounts of our own. China even stole this
| idea!
| [deleted]
| Nokinside wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Arm China is now AnMou Technology. They have "two wheels"
| strategy. ARM CPU architecture development for local
| customers and new Core Power architecture.
| selestify wrote:
| According to [1], the IP theft narrative is not actually
| true.
|
| > There is an ongoing dispute between ARM and ARM China.
|
| >
|
| > But the accusations that ARM China had stolen ARM IP
| and was relaunching it under its own banner? Those don't
| appear to be true.
|
| [1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326617-arm-
| refutes-acc...
| sipos wrote:
| > how is ARM China going to continue innovating? On their
| own?
|
| Yes. Thery may do badly, but this isn't going to be much of
| a problem for China for ages. They are unlikely to do that
| badly though - among 2 billion people there will be plenty
| of good people.
|
| Their much bigger problem though is their lack of access to
| cutting edge semi-conductor manufacturing technology. I
| imagine they are on this though, probably through
| industrial espionage (invading Taiwan would help, but they
| will face similar issues for acccess to tech long term
| unless they also get access to ASML work I think).
| chasil wrote:
| SMIC is already at 14nm, and ASML is allowed to continue
| to sell equipment for this process. The more advanced
| process nodes have several drawbacks; the domestic market
| could likely adjust to 14nm long-term.
|
| The MIPS processor was copied for production in China
| (illicitly, until fully licensed), as was the DEC Alpha.
| There is significant processor design knowledge, and
| ample ability to copy any new designs produced by ARM-UK,
| even if they have to be scaled up to 14nm for domestic
| production.
|
| Oddly enough, I learned recently that Russia prefers
| SPARC (known as Elbrus).
| terafo wrote:
| Elbrus are not SPARC. They are developed by Moscow Center
| of SPARC Technologies(MCST) though, that's where your
| confusion comes from(and there were few SPARC machines
| under Elbrus brand, but that was a long time ago). They
| were basically design team for hire in the 90s and were
| named such to attract customers. Then Intel wanted to
| acquire them in mid-2000s, but ended up just hiring
| almost everyone and leaving company as an empty shell.
| Now they are doing their own ISA and it's very different
| from SPARC. For starters, they are the only ones who are
| doing VLIW in CPUs nowadays(outside of CPUs I can think
| of only one other company, Groq).
| chasil wrote:
| Thanks, I just saw their association with SPARC from 1993
| to 2010, so I assumed it was their main architecture.
|
| On the subject of VLIW, Sophie Wilson was talking up
| Firepath as late as 2020.
|
| "In 1992 a spin-off company Moscow Center of SPARC
| Technologies (MCST) was created and continued
| development, using the "Elbrus" moniker as a brand for
| all computer systems developed by the company."
|
| "Elbrus-90micro (1998-2010) is a computer line based on
| SPARC instruction set architecture (ISA)
| microprocessors."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_(computer)
| monocasa wrote:
| Elbrus is a custom VLIW, not a Sparc.
| parasense wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Technically Soft Bank still owns 49% of arm-china
| subsidiary, and they could theoretically take control
| back... but the belligerent CEO of arm-china has supposedly
| setup private security forces barring access to the
| facilities, and there is something about a legal seal. So
| far Soft Bank has opted not to escalate the situation any
| further. There is of course a lot more to the story.
| paulmd wrote:
| > there is something about a legal seal
|
| for those not aware: seals are a big cultural thing in
| asian cultures (at least Japan and China for sure). I saw
| some surplus processors shipped from china with a stamp
| on them, I asked a Chinese friend about it thinking it
| was some kind of disposition mark (trying to make sure it
| didn't say "DEFECTIVE" or something ;) and she told me it
| was the seller's name, and that was his personal stamp,
| basically like his signature.
|
| That got me looking into it and a signature is a pretty
| good analogy. In Japan at least it appears you need a
| seal to do any sort of serious transaction (buying a
| house, etc). The seals are officially registered and
| indeed basically like a signature, if you stamp a
| document that means it's "signed".
|
| For a business, control of the seal is pretty much
| control of the business, I'm guessing. It's certainly
| going to be difficult to do any governing of the company
| without it, even if you otherwise have legal ownership of
| the company it's going to be difficult to exercise it
| without the seal.
|
| Bit of an interesting cultural touchstone, seems minor to
| westerners but it's apparently a big deal to them.
| [deleted]
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > And how is ARM China going to continue innovating? On
| their own?
|
| Why not?
|
| When I was young, the common wisdom was that Japan couldn't
| innovate, and once I saw an old bit of early 20th century
| analysis that said Germany couldn't either.
|
| Both of those were wrong, why is China so different that it
| would be otherwise?
| drcode wrote:
| Unhelpfully-successful innovators in China have a way of
| ending up in jails or unofficial house arrest
| sangnoir wrote:
| I'm curious about the origin of the fallacy that
| intelligence/innovation can only be found in anti-
| authoritarians/rebels (this is often deployed as "Our
| Freedom(TM) is why the US will always be number 1!").
| Pro-government people can innovate just fine (e.g. GCHQ,
| NSA & defense industry)
| drcode wrote:
| Well we now have a natural experiment, let's see if more
| innovation comes out of the US or China in the coming
| years. I'm confident it won't be China, but certainly no
| guarantees.
| hasmanean wrote:
| It's like when the Portuguese seized Macau. Even if it was
| wrong there was no higher authority who was going to step
| in and put things right.
| uluyol wrote:
| (2) is untrue. Most players use ARM core designs, not just
| the instruction set.
|
| Qualcomm used to make their own (back in 2014 or so) but
| hasn't since. Samsung tried after and quit in 2019. The cloud
| cores are all standard ARM designs (neoverse).
| Nokinside wrote:
| They have bought architecture licenses that allow them full
| control. They can still buy and use ARM core IP if they
| want.
| zibzab wrote:
| Not "full controll". They need to meet a ton of
| requirements towards ARM.
|
| And many of these "completely resigned" CPUs are nothing
| more than small (but important) adjustments of the
| pipeline and memory subsystem.
| uluyol wrote:
| Sure, but allow and use are different things.
| chasil wrote:
| More importantly, both Apple and Fujitsu use custom
| designs.
|
| Fujitsu has the fastest-ranked supercomputer with their
| custom ARM, and Apple felt confident enough in their M1 ARM
| to evict Intel.
| uluyol wrote:
| I'm not claiming that all ARM licensees use ARM cores.
| Rather, if ARM stopped offering competitive core designs
| (or limited them to just Nvidia), it would have a big
| impact on the ecosystem.
|
| A few players doing otherwise doesn't change that,
| regardless of how well they execute.
| conradev wrote:
| "They use just the instruction set and make their own
| microarchitecture."
|
| Is that really the case? My understanding is that while, yes,
| they make their own microarchitectures, they rely heavily on
| IP from ARM to make that happen
|
| Do they write their own instruction decoders, FPUs, etc? I
| thought they started with the reference designs for a core
| and then tweaked them to their liking, some companies
| tweaking more than others
|
| A peek inside Qualcomm's upcoming chips, for example:
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/17091/qualcomm-announces-
| snap...
|
| All of the main cores are ARM reference designs. Qualcomm
| does add proprietary IP, but it is more oriented around their
| strengths, like integrating their 5G modem into the die,
| which is something that none of the other big chip
| manufacturers can do at the moment (to my knowledge)
| brigade wrote:
| All of those companies except Amazon have shipped ARM CPU
| cores fully designed in-house, yes. But all except Apple
| and NVIDIA have since completely dropped their custom core
| design, and NVIDIA goes back and forth.
|
| Qualcomm did buy Nuvia though, so they might yet come back
| with something new.
| gsnedders wrote:
| If they have an architecture license, they can make their
| own implementations of the ISA.
|
| Certainly, they may choose to derive their implementations
| from ARM's designs (or use them wholesale), but the license
| allows them to make their own.
|
| That said, in the mobile space, AIUI only Apple and ARM are
| nowadays developing their own implementations. In the HPC
| space, there are others (Fujitsu, Marvell, etc).
|
| (ARM also sells more limited licenses which only allow
| their cores to be used.)
| Nokinside wrote:
| As uluyol corrected me, most of these seem to se ARM cores
| today. Few years back Samsung and Qualcomm had their own
| architectures. But the fact remains, if they have
| architecture license, ARM can't control them too much.
|
| Apple designs everything by themselves.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| I am an NVIDIA employee in an unrelated part of the business
| and not inclined to comment in depth on these matters and this
| is not an NVIDIA opinion or official but
|
| i thought it worth mentioning
|
| I don't see the distinction? NVIDIA is fabless too??
|
| (Heck, so is AMD I think)
| fredoralive wrote:
| Nvidia doesn't licence its designs to other companies for
| incorporation into their own chip designs, ARM does. That is
| the main distinction I think, and why people want it to be a
| neutral third party.
| maxwell86 wrote:
| IIUC, part of the deal was that NVIDIA would license its
| designs via ARM.
| 310260 wrote:
| They say that now... It could even very well be the case.
| However, there are plenty of ways to manipulate those
| licensing agreements to work more in Nvidia's favor than
| they do today.
| maxwell86 wrote:
| They've been saying that from the beginning. There are
| billions of ARM devices, the ability to sell a GPU to
| each is worth money.
| uxp100 wrote:
| AMD spun their manufacturing off as Global Foundries, so yes.
|
| And yeah, I'm not sure this distinction the poster is making
| between arm as like a software company and NVIDIA like a
| hardware company makes much sense.
|
| Arm makes IP (in the chip design sense). NVIDIA makes IP and
| combines it with IP from Arm and others, and produces some
| product designs based on the chip, which NVIDIA tests and
| writes software for. But ODMs make the products and fabs make
| the chips. I really don't think calling some of this like
| software and some like hardware is very explanatory, at least
| partially because NVIDIA writes a lot of software, and
| because I think the person reading that description might
| come away with the impression that arm just produces the
| architecture, and not actual core designs (which NVIDIA,
| Denver aside, uses).
| cogman10 wrote:
| They also stopped using global foundries and now use TSMC.
| Global foundries, like pretty much everyone other than
| TSMC, fell behind in process shrinks. Their primary
| business is fabricating secondary chips.
| chasil wrote:
| Global Foundries is still used as the northbridge chiplet
| inside modern AMD processors; only the CPU core chiplets
| are from TSMC.
|
| Global Foundries has sizable operations in Dresden,
| Germany. Interestingly, this was a major semiconductor
| supplier of the Eastern Block, prior the fall of the iron
| curtain. AMD placed their primary foundry in Dresden,
| likely for the infrastructure and technical knowledge.
|
| Global Foundries has decided that more money can be made
| at 14nm and above, than what is required for smaller
| process nodes.
| [deleted]
| newsclues wrote:
| Your points 1 and 6 seem to conflict.
|
| NVIDIA isn't a hardware manufacturer.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Since ARM is basically like a software company_
|
| It's is not. Being a fabless designer of hardware IP doesn't
| make them "basically a SW company".
|
| It's still very much a HW IP company any way you slice it.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| People understand software better than they under HDL
| designs. To most people, they're pretty comparable
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Well, we can always clarify things for people who don't
| understand HW as good as SW, but for correctness we have to
| call a spade a spade and not help spread misinformation
| just because it sounds easier to understand than the facts,
| for the less informed users.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| It's an analogy.
| yccs27 wrote:
| Software and hardware IP companies are indeed not the same,
| so we should be more precise about the ways in which they are
| similar.
|
| * Their work is in both cases a mix of design and
| engineering.
|
| * Both produce goods that are reproducible at zero cost, and
| are protected (only) by intellectual property laws.
|
| So while ARM definitely does not produce software, their work
| is somewhat comparable.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > Both produce goods that are reproducible at zero cost
|
| I mean the blueprint is zero cost but building your own fab
| costs tens of billions of dollars these days.
| criddell wrote:
| That's true, but ARM only sells the blueprints.
|
| I would guess there are a lot more ARM licensees than
| there are fabricators. Most licensees probably pay
| somebody else to manufacture their designs.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Their work is in both cases a mix of design and
| engineering.
|
| > Both produce goods that are reproducible at zero cost,
| and are protected (only) by intellectual property laws._
|
| You forgot fabrication. Unlike SW IP where as long as it
| compiles it's ready to ship but stays virtual, ARM's IP
| must be manufacturable into physical things you can touch
| by the major fabs therefore must be grounded in the
| processes and cell libraries that those fabs can
| manufacture.
|
| Unlike a SW company, they can't just freely innovate
| whatever shiny new IP they want without concern for the
| silicon manufacturing processes, therefore it's closer to
| HW than SW, as all their IP is eventually manufactured into
| real things you can touch and therefore must follow the
| manufacturing constrains.
|
| If you follow their news announcements, they constantly
| talk about their partnership with Samsung and TSMC to adapt
| their IP to each of their upcoming process nodes, so their
| their customer like Apple or Qualcomm can just buy the IP
| and plop it into their design knowing it's already been
| validated for Samsung/TSMC and can reliably be sent to the
| fab. So ARM is still very much a HW IP company.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Arm is a British company, currently owned by Softbank, a
| Japanese company.
|
| This means that in practice the US can already cut off supply
| to China.
|
| See for example ASML: they are a Dutch company. So the US
| government only needed a friendly word with the Dutch
| government for the Dutch government to ban ASML from exporting
| certain advanced processes to China.
|
| For the British government I'm sure there would be no need to
| call... A text would suffice ;)
|
| (leaving aside all the drama with ARM China already because of
| those issues...)
| C19is20 wrote:
| 'friendly word'.
| syspec wrote:
| I think it's a little more than that.
|
| If I recall correctly the parents used by ASML are owned by
| the US military so the US is part owner of the company -
| _joel wrote:
| The best way to get the UK government's attention is to write
| it on a birthday cake.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Why don't the ARM users form a consortium to own ARM?
| ginko wrote:
| Qualcomm did suggest that:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/14/qualcomm-offers-to-invest-
| in...
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