Last week it came to light that SoftBank may be trying to sell chipset design firm ARM, and according to a new report from Bloomberg, Nvidia could be interested. Citing the usual “people with knowledge,” Nvidia has apparently approached ARM to court a deal with the Cambridge company.
Out of the various options we have, Nvidia might actually not be the worst option. Abusive companies like Apple and Google are clearly the worst possible option, and Intel and AMD already have enough sway over the market as it is. NVIDIA, while not exactly a cute puppy kitten of a company, isn’t so big and domineering that acquiring ARM would be a complete disaster for competition.
I would guess, NVIDIA buying ARM would make an interesting problem for Apple, given their long-standing beef..
numpti,
Haha, yeah. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where NVIDIA would outbid apple.
I can see nvidia just being interested in licensing it out. With apple, I’d worry there’s a bigger risk of them keeping technology to themselves and hindering it’s competitors in some way. Either way I wouldn’t have faith in either company making the situation better for FOSS & open hardware. They’re both very proprietary companies and would keep it that way.
“Haha, yeah. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where NVIDIA would outbid apple.”
Given the depth of the pockets… yes. But when you realize, that Apple is unable to bid here…
if Apple is interested, its best option is to form a group of friendly companies (or maybe not-hostile companies) to form a consorcium for that.
This site needs a like button!
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Umm… no it won’t. We are not talking about a couple having a fight here, there are contracts and licensing agreements in place. It’s like when back Apple had a beef with Samsung, while in the meantime Samsung was manufacturing Apple’s ARM chips, and fanboys from both sides theorized how Samsung could cut off Apple’s chip supply any moment. Of course, it didn’t happen.
You might be underestimating the pettiness of Nvidia.
It would be very interesting if Nvidia required Apple to start certifying their GPU drivers in order to keep licensing ARM to them. All that work to make OSX’s graphics department anti-competitive and Metal only would be flushed down the drain at once.
The funny fact is that when ARM was spun off from Acorn, in 1990, the new company was a joint-venture between Acorn, VLSI and… Apple!
Apple used the ARM chips in their Newton line.
Today, a joint venture between Apple, Samsung and TSMC would be a nice home for ARM, I think.
Apple has no reason to keep ARM Cortex designs as good as possible and to license them to 3rd parties.
I would like to see a group of companies to take care of ARM… but keep Apple out or keep Apple with as little influence as possible.
Agreed. Having Apple in the PowerPC consortium didn’t help the PowerPC at all. Apple bailed the moment it was convenient for them. In this case, I wouldn’t see Apple bailing, rather, they’d be more likely to drop the open/licensed parts and move to completely closed/Apple-only.
Usual Apple bashing… The PowerPC consortium was mainly Motorola and IBM and both proved to be unreliable as far as providing a full range a processors for general purpose computing.
I’ve been stuck with a PowerBook G4 for a while at the time and it was quite a relief when Apple switched to Intel.
The last mainstream users of PowerPC were the last gen consoles. Both Xbox 360 and PS3 used it, and later on the Wii U. The architecture was lacking, so the consoles too dropped it in the current gen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PowerPC-based_game_consoles
Currently even ARM is better, which is why Apple is doing the switch.
Apple has a reason to keep ARM from falling into the hands of a company that could use it maliciously against them, like Qualcomm, Nvidia, Google, or Intel.
The ARM ISA would be a strategic assets for Apple. Sometimes companies have to play defensively, and ARM could be used as leverage against Qualcomm for both Samsung and Apple.
That’s what I meant… I mentioned Samsung and TMSC too but here, as soon as you mention Apple, people loose it.
We’re in agreement. A Samsung, Apple, and TSMC, or Global Foundries, consortium would be a good place for ARM to land. Each of them would have reasons to keep the current ARM model.
So true. ROFL
Apple
Intel is surely interested and can outbid any other player but antitrust would probably prevent the deal from happening without severe restrictions.
A chip manufacturing plant could buy ARM and force all ARM chips to be manufactured at their plant or pay a licensing fee. I see a lot of businesses incentivized to switch their chip manufacturing, especially the smaller these businesses are, but the Samsungs and the Apples of the world won’t be affected because they can easily pay a premium.
> force all ARM chips to be manufactured at their plant or pay a licensing fee
What would regulators (US and/or EU) think of that?
US regulators would probably think they should tip off their friends to buy some stock, and they need to put in some calls to to the companies to extort some “gifts”.
EU regulators, I’m not sure what they would think. They seem to be focused on software.
Floating on the stock market is apparently also under consideration. Then we could all buy ARM. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/07/20/softbank-job-pledge-could-hit-plans-multi-billion-arm-sale/#:~:text=SoftBank%20is%20believed%20to%20be,under%20pressure%20to%20boost%20cash.&text=The%20undertaking%20would%20apply%20even%20if%20Arm%20were%20to%20change%20hands.
That would be good, but if someone shows up with bags of cash, would they say no?
Flatland_Spider,
Osnews should make an offer. Thom, tell David we’re buying ARM 🙂
That would be epic and hilarious. XD
“The new board of directors ARM is the OSNews commenterati.”
Apple is not going to buy ARM. More likely, they do to ARM what they did to Imagination Technologies.
What did they do to Imagination Technologies? They kind of disappeared after selling MIPS.
They’re still here. Apple did poach many engineers from Imagination Technologies at some point, the ones working on GPU. Eventually, Apple started again to take licenses from them even if they didn’t needed it anymore to avoid litigation.
Ah. Thanks!
I’d much rather they floated on the stock market, myself. The British government should never have allowed them to be sold in the first place; but on the other hand they’re selling everything else off. (Brexiters blame the EU for this: it’s actually the Tories’ fault.)
“The British government should never have allowed them to be sold in the first place; ”
Why? There is little reason to block it (until it ends in China or -LOL- Russia.)
Because every single large company we ever had (those that didn’t go bust, anyway) has been sold off to foreign companies, at the behest of the government. Ever hear of BMW, Mercedes, Credit Suisse going into foreign ownership? No? Exactly.
NVIDIA has recently had a market cap greater than Intel. They’re just as domineering as Intel in the areas they can be. Their stance on open source has historically been pretty bad compared to both AMD and Intel.
It feels like a tactical bid, designed to make sure Apple pays a fair price and doesn’t get away with more corporate murder!
Art of War stuff, making sure your opposition pay a high price for an advantage.
I have no doubt they’re serious.
Nvidia desperately needs a CPU. Without a CPU, they are relegated to being an accessory vendor at the whims of whoever controls the platform, and they’re still salty about Intel pulling their chipset license.
With their recent Mellanox acquisition, Nvidia also has plans to build their own AI and compute boxes, which are, mostly, network attached GPUs. For this to work, they need a CPU for house keeping tasks, and the ARM ISA fits this scenario nicely.
Next, they would have leverage against Apple and Qualcomm, as well as the rest of the ARM ecosystem.
Flatland_Spider,
Reminds me of this..
http://www.osnews.com/story/21078/nvidia-and-x86-not-if-but-when/
http://www.osnews.com/story/22314/nvidia-ceases-all-chipset-development-blames-intel/
But the thing is nvidia has already built custom ARM cores in much the same way apple is doing.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10596/hot-chips-2016-nvidia-discloses-tegra-parker-details
Neither company needs to own ARM in order to build cores with that ISA. They may have business reasons for acquiring ARM, but arguably neither apple nor nvidia technically need to own ARM to benefit from it’s capabilities so long as they trust the relative neutrality of the company holding it. Both nvidia and apple are already willing licensees and obviously apple is using it for upcoming product lines. However there is a lot of uncertainly should it fall into the hands of a new player. Let’s say (just for the sake of argument) that oracle bought ARM…this would be highly disruptive to everyone else. I think an ARM bidding war could unfold, not so much because many companies really wanting/needing to own ARM, but to keep it out of the hands of a ruthless competitor where things could go south quickly.
I wanted to add that going down the RISC-V path may make more sense to nvidia in that it’s cheaper than licensing (or buying) ARM. Not only this, they’re already using RISC-V cores internally.
https://syncedreview.com/2019/10/10/is-nvidia-doubling-down-on-risc-v/
Of course users see no benefit from the open ISA whatsoever given the way nvidia locks these down to proprietary firmware 🙁 . Nevertheless, from nvidia’s perspective the need to buy ARM is much less given that they have options like RISC-V.
I think apple and android manufacturers will be inclined to bid more for ARM simply because they are more solidly invested in ARM with potentially much more to loose than nvidia.
All this Appletalk brings back memories of this irony:
https://youtu.be/VtvjbmoDx-I