Nvidia Disarmed?
Are The Register's headline writers taking the day off? Certainly they could have come up with something more entertaining.
Nvidia Disarmed!
Nvidia prepares to battle competition unarmed.
Nvidia losing ground in Arm's race.
More?
Nvidia reportedly prepares for un-Arm'd combat with rivals: $40bn takeover may be abandoned
Nvidia is quietly preparing to give up on the purchase of Arm, according to Bloomberg, after repeatedly butting heads with competition regulators amid a wave of opposition from the tech industry. A report by the newswire states Nvidia privately told its partners it does not expect the Arm transaction to close. The report also …
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Tuesday 25th January 2022 21:39 GMT diodesign
Re: Nvidia Disarmed?
Thanks. Just a bit busy with other things right now and didn't want to hold up the article while trying to think of something clever.
To reveal what's behind the curtain, we were having a debate over whether Nvidia's statement was a denial or not. We decided it wasn't a denial – it was Nv putting on the best spin it could publicly – and that was what drove the headline, getting that right, not making a pun.
When -- sorry, if -- the deal collapses we'll do Nvidia loses Arm's race or something like that.
I might have to steal disarmed for something like RISC-V or x86 diss-Arms for the next round of benchmark claims.
C.
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Wednesday 26th January 2022 18:24 GMT John Brown (no body)
An independan, debt laden, ARM?
"Furthermore, the two argued that Softbank spinning out Arm as a standalone company, as opposed to allowing Nvidia to absorb Arm, would result in it lacking the resources to compete against rivals such as Intel."
Considering ARM is a profit centre for Softbank, and managed nicely before that buy-out, why would spinning it out as an independent business mean they would be under-resourced? How much debt are Softbank thinking of saddling a newly independent ARM with? It all sounds as though Plan `B` is a scorched earth policy.
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Thursday 27th January 2022 01:33 GMT Henry Wertz 1
I don't think this'll hurt too badly
I don't think this'll hurt too badly. Don't get me wrong, I think NVidia ARM merger would have been good for both, they both have excellent engineers that could have done even more working together.
But, they both have excellent engineers seperately too; ARM is making plenty of money and I don't think they're cash constrained from doing what they want; NVidia isn't either, they'll have to keep paying for an ARM license but the $40 billion they're not spending buying ARM will buy many years of licenses. ARM licensees are pretty much free to do what they want ARM-wise, using ARM designs "off-the-shelf", modifying these ARM designs, or designing some ARM-compatible chip totally from scratch.
Apple's developed the M1, NVidia I'm sure NVidia can also make a nice high-speed ARM, the existing NVidia ARM stuff is already no slouch. I had a Acer Chromebook with a Tegra K1 and it was no slouch; 22 hour battery life.. 12 if I ran video encodes on it. It'd run ffmpeg to do some h.264 encoding and that NEON instruction set would get it running at a good 2-3x the performance of my (admittedly elderly) Core i5-750 (and this was using an older "ARMv7" 32-bit ARM, not 64-bit ARM8 which is a fair bit faster at number crunching. It was pretty cool, I used Chrubuntu to get Ubuntu on it, held back the X packages and kernel (because it had a binary NVidia driver) and ugraded to more-current Ubuntu version, and I had an up-to-date Ubuntu with full Nvidia drivers, even CUDA worked on it, 192 cores. It ran about dead even with a GTX650 while using about 5 watts of power (max ed out CPU cores & GPU altogether was about 10 watts) Unfortuantely since it was like $190 it was definitely "built to spec", after about 2 years the battery, touchpad, power connector, and keyboard all started acting up within a matter of weeks of each other. Oh well, back to a normal notebook with a few hours battery life.
