News Nvidia may be preparing to purchase Arm

I'm somewhat skeptical, it's just not clear why Nvidia would want ARM. Nvidia's biggest segments are HPC GPUs and gaming GPUs. It's biggest growth sector is autonomous vehicle SoCs.
Gaming GPUs are unrelated to ARM cores. HPC would only make sense as offering an ARM system host device, but for small volumes of sales it makes little sense to make their own, and has all the drawbacks of ARM in HPC (i.e. nobody wants it).
Their autonomous vehicle SoCs currently run on ARM host CPUs, but everyone in that space is moving to RISC-V due to the lack of a legacy codebase to support, so that would make more sense to direct (and cash) effort towards.
Their consumer ARM-based SoCs (Tegra) has basically winnowed down to supplying Nintendo with SoCs for the Switch, and is mostly a financial blip.
Even Mellanox would make more sense to move over to RISC-V if they wanted to splash out a few tens of billion to reduce licensing costs.
Owning ARM would be mostly useless for their main sectors, a potential albatross around their neck for their biggest growth sector, and other markets they use ARM licensed cores in would never justify the purchase price.

Unless they just have far too much money and want to outbid someone they dislike to Jensen can buy another leather jacket, I guess.

 

Who do they have to outbid though?

Other ARM customers like Samsung, Apple etc? I doubt they would get regulatory approval.
Intel or AMD? The former wouldn't get regulatory approval, the latter doesn't have the cash.

So unless Amazon or MS throw in a rogue bid Nvidia may have surprisingly little competition (thus making ARM a bargain).

 

Not sure the vaunted £55billion is a bargain when the 2 biggest customers Apple and Samsung use custom silicon based on ARM designs

ARM has always just sold its designs that’s how it makes money, Nvidia will not want to sell the tech to others so how would Nvidia make it profitable some pretty big unanswered questions

think it would be terrible for mobile phone space under nvidia.

dunno about regulatory approval but Apple and Samsung would be no better than Nvidia.

ARM been neutral is it’s biggest benefit and has helped push the mobile Soc forward

 

Owning the thousands of patents ARM holds may well be good value for Nvidia, even if regulatory bodies would likely require Nvidia to keep selling licenses in a similar fashion to what ARM is currently doing.

 

...and it's happened.

Sold at $40bn, which is a nice $8bn profit for Softbank, and nVidia are committing to keeping ARM in Cambridge, with a push into AI as well. It does raise interesting questions around ARM selling into territories like China, now that it's a US company.

Watch this space, I guess.

 

There is a lot of disquiet about this and pressure for the governement to intervene, even from the Cummings. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54142567

 

Begs the question what Dom expects Boris to do about a Japanese company, with headquarters in San Jose, Shengzen and Tokyo as well as Cambridge, that is being bought out by an American company.

As for Nvidia, this make a lot of sense, it's a way into the server market and they don't have to pay any more royalties. I'm sure Apple's planned move to Arm for laptops was a factor too, lot of potential income there both from licensing and efficient integration with Nvidia GPUs going forward.

 

Demand a leather jacket and a padded brown envelope.

 

Correct, still needs regulatory approval and they could impose conditions rather than outright approving / blocking.

 

It's much further than that, it's the agreement of terms. Nvidia want to buy and ARM want to sell, and they have agreed how much and how they envisage it taking place. National regulators can step in but otherwise that's it.

 

Its at least a year from completion, National Regulators in both the UK and USA will look at this deal. Could easily be september october next year before this gets completion approval. This will take some doing to get approval. ARM Sells alot of its designs to China, USA Currently blocks alot of Technology sales to China. Nvidia been an american company are forced to follow this.

The current expected Approval time is 1 year +

 

As I understand it, if you want the jacket you have to beat Jensen in single combat. I don't rate Boris or Dom's chances.

 

You cannot kill that which does not live.

 

Dom is not a Dark Judge.

Unless he's the little known fifth horseman Judge Bulls##t.

 

If the UK had wanted to stop ARM ending up in the hands of random foreign companies it needed to have stopped the softbank takeover. On the plus point Nvidia is a rich company, they will probably expand the uk presence not shrink it. Companies work in the uk because we have such good engineers, and ARM is based in Cambridge so it can grab some of the best graduates. Nvidia isn't stupid, they'll be wanting to take full advantage of that.