Nvidia promises British authorities it won’t strong Arm rivals after proposed merger The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published Nvidia and Arm's responses to its renewed probing of the proposed takeover of Arm by Nvidia. Unsurprisingly, Nvidia rejects that it would block access to Arm's intellectual property from competitors, and the pair claim that the alternative scenario of Arm spun-off …
With the corrupt clowns we currently have in charge, all Nvidia needs to do is grease the right palms and the deal will go through without a hitch.
For all that the Conservative party has a reputation for fiscal prudence and business friendly policy, never forget that their first duty is to fill their pockets and get their grubby snouts in the trough.
You want evidence? Look at the bastions of British Industry. Look at when they got sold - and, critically, to whom. You can be absolutely sure that the Tories have no interest in the greater good - and if you doubt what I say then perhaps I could interest you in a bridge in our capital city? I have the paperwork right here - all you need to do is transfer the funds into my account. In advance, of course.
Tell you what, you list the top tier companies that Labour sold and I’ll list the ones that the Tories sold and I guarantee that my list will be longer. That isn’t to say that Labour didn’t sell off either, but the Tories a) sold off more and b) were more inclined to sell outside the protection of Europe (and then c) evict us from Europe)
So yes, Labour were sadly not above graffitiing on the walls of our metaphorical house. The Conversatives smashed the furniture and then burned the house down.
Neither the Labour party, nor the Conservative party sold any "top tier" companies. They have history starting in the 1980s of privatising utilities and other businesses that had been nationalised, but these "top tiers" you refer to are private companies or with publicly listed stock available and trade themselves only with governments looking over their shoulders.
Absolutely correct. And I was very sloppy in my use of language. I hope it was clear though that was I meant was that they didn’t ensure these companies were sufficiently protected against hostile takeover, and they made no effort to block sales which weren’t in the national interest.
Nevertheless, thumbs up for pointing out my poor use of language.
They did not "sell" them.
All these companies either pimped themselves out or were subject to hostile takeovers.
I most cases the pressure was to deliver "shareholder value" because in this country we are incapable of taking a long-term view that investments are longer than a few days.
Where things failed was that when the MC investigated, they invariably caved in or the Government (Trade & Industry Secretary) was utterly incompetent in realising that the deal was bad:
for British Interests.
British jobs.
Long-term strategic planning.
Cadbury
Cobham
Arm
The list goes on
Then you have the likes of GKN (a highly successful company) being forced by shareholders to split themselves up so that said shareholders can syphon money out.
"the Conservative party has a reputation for fiscal prudence"
Presumably Boris Johnson told you that. He never lies.
The national debt was around £1T when that useless twat Brown left Downing Street. This was after the bank bail-out. The national debit is now sitting at £2.5T or theresabouts. Inflation's at levels not seen since the 1980s. Johnson's clown parade has also pissed away zillions of public money to their cronies for overpriced and sometimes defective PPE. And paid Deloittes - well known for their expertise in containing pandemics - over a grand a day for call centre droids who had fuck all to do.
Prudence?
wouldnt be so bad but those thousand a day call centre droids were all in India, not even employing British workers. But that sort of decision is made by civil servants, they HATE the UK and are the people behind the duff decisions by BOTH Labour and Conservative governments.
Your problem is that you haven't completed the outsourcing properly.
Outsource the MPs to India.
The new MPs in India will of course think it's a good idea to outsource jobs to a foreign country where enough people speak something that passes as english, say, the UK.
And Voila! (outsource your vocabulary to France) you have your jobs back.
Dear UK Regulators:
Wanna know what will happen to ARM if you allow NVIDIA to gobble it? Look no further than what happened to Sun Microsystems when Oracle gobbled it. That's the model.
If that's what you're aiming for, go right ahead and bless this corporate marriage. If not, well, you know what to do.
Microsoft purchased 5 Cambridge companies the year they bought STNC. We were the last to be closed 2 years later. This is a common approach particularly from US companies, buy up the competition, extract the IP and the most important people and close the rest down. If Nvidia takes ARM then the whole Cambridge site will be shut within 5 years. It is the same as when we allowed BMW to buy Rover. The same is on the cards for Rolls Royce (its now just a BMW body with BMW running gear and BMW computers and a plank of wood nailed in by a Brit... the plank of wood will shortly be German and put in by a German and then the only thing about a Roller that is a Roller will be the name
If the regulators want to know how Nvidia operate they just need to look at the past two decades of Nvidia selling GPUs to consumers, they have bought up competing companies and done very little with those technologies in order to control & manipulate the graphics market.
Much in the same way that other big-tech giants (google, facebook, et al) have bought out competing platforms & technology - not to push technology forward nor to give consumers more choice - but to ensure they remain on top of the pile and their vast revenue streams are protected - protected because they eliminated all of their competition and the regulators sat back and watched them do it.
For generation after generation of graphics cards Nvidia have raised MSRP prices for very little performance gains, more recently they have started pushing software gimmicks in leau of advancement in graphics technology - you just need to view their CES presentations to see that, there's been very little advancement on the hardware front year after year.
Their latest upcoming GPU release, the RTX 3080 12GB does not even come with an MSRP, this is a deliberate strategic move by Nvidia to use the current sustained trend of middlemen and scalpers to push prices of consumer graphics cards skywards which will result in an "unofficial MSRP".
This will have the effect of making Nvidia look justified when it's next series, the 40x0 series, will come to market with 4080 GPU SKUs having an MSRP starting at over $1000 - giving middelment & scalpers the scope to further push consumer prices up far above the massively inflated prices they are at right now.
We're fast heading towards a place where mid-range graphics cards, which is what the x080 sku's are & are worth no more than $400-$500 in real hardware costs, come to market with MSRPs of more than 2x-3x the actual value of the hardware.
For the CMA & other regulators to assume that Nvidia will not use these same strategic tactics to control the entire Arm ecosystem by steering the Arm IP in a direction which Nvidia wants and not what Arm's licensees request & require as well as massively driving up licensing costs while doing so - increases which Nvidia will shoehorn in after this merger goes through and a practice which they have historically done throughout their history as a company - is putting blind faith in a company that time after time very publicly demonstrates that it is only interested in controlling and manipulating the technology sector to feed its own comporate greed, not for the advancement of technology in itself and certainly not to the benefit of the licensees nor the end-user consumers of products created with Arm IP.
I still don't understand why nvida actually want to *buy* ARM. They already have the option of licensing and using any of ARMs designs, including the ability to negotiate to modify and extend them. They already have in house silicon design capabilities. A group of academics and uni students designed RISC-V and it's fully open and published ffs. Designing a new RISC architecture would be a piece of pants for them. So what, *exactly* is the benefit they get from *owning* ARM? Cui bono?
Nvidia wants to corner the market.
The shift to ARM is obvious, and most portable devices seem to be going towards ARM.
The GPU market is essentially owned by Nvidia, at least mid market upwards except consoles, that is owned by AMD on value, but Nvidia is behind the switch (it essentially is an Nvidia design).
Whoever owns arm looks like will be in control of the the computer market in the future.. that is why they want to own it.
They want to buy ARM because ARM makes a lot of money and if they can buy ARM they can close ARM and take the money themselves. Americans are not and have never been anything but greedy. They didnt help the UK in WW1 and WW2 to be helpful but rather because we would pay the most and had the most money for them to take. They claim to hate empires yet they are the ones who took the empires money and live off it.
"Nvidia rejects that it would block access to Arm's intellectual property from competitors"
Are they willing to have that in a very, very binding contract? One that won't expire and will remain in force regardless of companies changing name or being sold and moved around?
I'm not even sure that's technically possible, but the point is - promises and reassurances are worthless. Even if they were made in good faith (yeah), ownership can change, circumstances can change. You can't make long-term policy on promises and reassurances.
This reasoning is based on the contention that there is little overlap between Arm and Nvidia, and therefore their respective businesses are complementary and relate to different areas of the semiconductor value chain.
If there is little overlap then how does the deal make any sense at all? Normally a merger / buyout / whatever needs to leverage shared resources for the value of the new company to be greater than each separately and according to their own view that cannot be achieved.
More snake oil, methinks.
How is NVidia ownership any different to SoftBank ownership in this regard. Potty. The CMA is perhaps, just trying to make itself still seem relevant in my opinion.
There are ample examples of their failings (by design, by limiting their power) already out there to know this is essentially just bureaucracy for the sake of it.
Let them buy it and get it back into the hands of an outfit that will do something with it.
You want to license the latest power Arm core? Well it's only available with this GPU core license. Want to license this medium performance coe, it's bundled, you need to license this AI IP too. You will have to license stuff you don't want or need which also means as you paid for Nvidia gpu IP you won't license a Qualcomm GPU block. Nvidia turnover goes up, competitors goes down.
It seems Nvidia and Arm are not best pleased with the situation, and warned that while they are tied up dealing with regulators, Arm's competitors are not just sitting still but also expanding their offerings and exploiting the uncertainty surrounding Arm's future.
Er, who are they trying to kid?
First rule of any merger of this magnitude is that you keep conducting business as if the merger won't happen, in case it doesn't.
And I'm sure that it's not ARM's engineers and product developers who are dealing with the regulators, so they ought to be able to carry on as usual.
With the latest 15 extensions ratified, the RISC-V construct is now at the point of maturity where everything needed to build processors at all levels is available.
The whole industry (from Intel and Apple down) is scrutinising the ISA closely at the moment to see if, in reality, it can do all that they need it to do. Given that the RISC-V Foundation membership grew by 133% in 2021 : the impression given is that they think it can. This is a body blow to Arm.
Obviously there's still a lot of work to be done in bringing APU processors up to the latest ARM offerings, and also in porting software, but China in particular - thanks to POTUS45 - seems keen to do it.
Arm is also correct in thinking that a public share offering will diminish them : they know that ARM is not worth anywhere near US$40B. They've also seen, during their recent time at Softbank, that the returns won't make investors happy. Maybe Qualcomm's idea of Interested Parties - MediaTek, Samsung, Apple et al - clubbing together to maintain Arm is a better solution. I don't know.
ARM should be considered strategically important for the UK. They should not just produce IP designs but also be making the chips used in UK military and government machines and projects.
As a temporary measure the company should be taken back by HMG - it should never have been allowed to be sold. It should NOT under ANY circumstances EVER be allowed to merge with ANYTHING from USA (I would rather it merged with Russia!) The USA government has shafted us once yet again over Steel and Aluminium tariffs and we should tell the yanks and everything to do with them to sod off and never darken our doors for any reason ever again!
We need our own chip fabrication, mother board and computer makers (Raspberry Pi is a good start, only a start, we once led the world!) and we need it strategically RIGHT NOW. We cant have the yanks spying on us and controlling everything we do. Hell we should restart Symbian as well so we have an operating system and applications not under US control as well.
Arm's been an international concern from its inception!
- Hermann Hauser's Austrian,
- RISC was an idea nicked from universities in the States, and
- Apple put in US$3M when Acorn became Arm (VLSI is an American company).
The talent pool working on/with ARM are among the best tech minds of the generation from around the globe.
The ARM ISA is not strategically important to the UK. Nor is it a matter of national security, as has been argued, so far as I can see.
I agree with you on one thing though - the UK ought to be expanding its fabricating facilities... and not selling off those we have, as has recently happened.
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