SoftBank might be close to finding a buyer for ARM, and it won’t surprise you who the bidder might be. Wall Street Journal sources say SoftBank is close to a deal to sell ARM Holdings to NVIDIA for “more than” $40 billion. The two have reportedly been in exclusive talks for several weeks, and an agreement is near enough that they could finalize the sale by early next week.
I’ve seen some suggest that this will cause trouble for Apple, but that’s pretty unlikely. Because Apple was one of the companies that originally founded ARM Holdings, they have a perpetual license to the ARM instruction set.
Nvidia could cut Apple off from access to ARM’s reference designs, but the impact this would have would be limited, because Apple’s CPU designs have been mostly-bespoke for a few years at this point, plus they have the talent required to fill any gaps on their own.
Arm Holdings isn’t the origin of the ARM architecture, though. It’s what became of Acorn (*not Acron) after their home PC division fizzled out in the early '90s, by which point they were already up to ARMv5. At best Apple will only have a perpetual license for up to ARMv8, and even that’s dubious since their ownership of the project has been minimal for some time now (under 19% by turn of the century, 0% now).
Not that anyone would really notice if mobile device manufacturers sat on ARMv8 until the end of time. The glacial level of development they’ve shown to be publicly acceptable over the last decade means they could stop entirely and people would still buy it.
Historically, NVidia hasn’t had a good run of licensing, either. PhysX (the hardware processing side) is able to be licensed but hasn’t been. G-Sync can be licensed but hasn’t been. I believe even 3D Vision had a licensing portion as well, but it never was and now never will be. Then there’s all the APIs which have been made based on the AMD equivalents, despite the NVidia versions being first to market. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re difficult to deal with or just too expensive, but either way it’s not a good sign.
Will be interesting to see what ramifications this has. I suspect the next 2 years (the likely duration of any grace/transition period) will be very much duck-in-a-pond for the tech industry - everything is going to look fine on the surface, but there’s going to be a frenzy underneath trying desperately to find an alternative.
Yeah, in other threads I’ve written about how bad Nvidia is when it comes to playing nice with others.
A number of people across the net seem to be pointing to RISC-V as the go-to alternative, but I doubt it’s that simple… especially when it comes to mobile device CPUs, where power budget is incredibly restrictive with very little wiggle room.
The market cap of Nvidia has skyrocketed over the past few years and they are taking advantage of that. They are paying more than half the deal in NVDA shares.
The EU more than likely would kill that. Even the most politically corrupt U.S. Justice Dept. in recent history couldn’t ignore the antitrust implications of an Intel-ARM deal.
Any architecture can be made to sip electricity. It’s just whether it’s useful in such a restricted state - though that arguably has a lot to do with the absolutely woeful state of optimization in software these days. I can’t say that I really know enough about RISC-V to know whether it could be made to work or not, but as a native RISC chip it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
I’d be a little curious to see a MIPS uprising from this. With appropriate command ordering you can extract a huge amount of grunt from those chips. Though I guess that feeds back to said woeful software again, so maybe that’s just a missed opportunity.
Who knows? Maybe we’ll come full circle in all this, and wind up with an Apple computer running a Motorolla processor again. A 64-bit derivative of the 68K could be quite something (I only rule out a 64-bit 6500 derivative as Commodore doesn’t really exist anymore).
Dunno what I’d think if it were Intel that made the bid. I mean almost no regulatory body in the world would allow it (give the owner of one of the dominant architectures ownership of perhaps its only real competitor? Yeah, not gonna happen), but they do have a decent track record with regards to licensing everything other than x86 (mostly interfaces, but still).
Nvidia is just going to throw some R&D money into the GPU (mali) and rack in more money. Intel would have no benefit from obtaining ARM aside from destroying it while trying to make x86 a thing on mobile devices again.
