[HN Gopher] SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO
___________________________________________________________________
SoftBank's Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO
Author : gaius_baltar
Score : 466 points
Date : 2022-02-08 02:18 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| herunan wrote:
| Hopefully listing in the LSE. It sorely needs hardware stocks.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Softbank would be stupid to do that though.
| blondie9x wrote:
| This is hilarious. It shows why buyouts are so broken and hurt
| shareholders over time. ARMH was public. It got bought out then
| tried to get sold out and is now back to where it started at a
| lower share price and capitalization.
| olliej wrote:
| This sounds super dumb - but given their acquisition was blocked,
| would Nvidia be stopped from simply buying the majority of shares
| at IPO?
|
| To be clear I'm not suggesting this will happen or not, I'm just
| curious if it would be allowed?
| isatty wrote:
| It will be regulated.
| hollerith wrote:
| Most very big mergers consist of one company buying all the
| shares of a publically-traded company, so it is likely that the
| regulators have the power to stop those kinds of mergers though
| I cannot think of an example.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| That would be considered a "cute move" and something like that
| would put Nvidia and some investment bankers in hot water.
|
| Even if they bought a controlling amount of shares in public
| markets that would be subject to regulation.
| chriszioutas wrote:
| if they IPO can Nvidia buy a ton of shares and indirectly buy
| Arm?
| rwmj wrote:
| Not easily. Trying to gain a controlling stake in a public
| company triggers regulatory involvement.
|
| I'm still unclear why Nvidia would want to control Arm. If they
| wanted an architecture they could extend as they wished, they
| can use RISC-V (which they are already doing in a small way).
| ridgered4 wrote:
| A lot of people are of the opinion they wanted to put the
| squeeze to everyone using ARM, but based on reading that
| doesn't really seem super feasible to me.
|
| I think nvidia is worried about being shut out of the x86
| space so there's nowhere to sell their products. So they had
| a long term play to guide ARM development as an alternative
| platform. I could see that platform being useful as a hedge,
| but also giving nvidia a better way of competing in consoles
| and if they were really successful maybe eventually turning
| Intel/AMDs x86 advantage into a weakness.
|
| Back when Intel killed off all third party motherboard
| chipsets nvidia won a lawsuit against Intel where they forced
| Intel to ensure a pcie bus for GPUs on all their platforms.
| That provision expired a few years ago. If nvidia is smart
| (and I believe they are) they've never let go of that worry
| that APUs might shove them out of the market. Their best bet
| is to remain so much better than the competition they cannot
| be ignored, but it would be wise to have a backup plan.
| justin66 wrote:
| > I'm still unclear why Nvidia would want to control Arm.
|
| Nvidia have some really good high performance Arm cores that
| they've developed and sold (Denver, Carmel). Continuing to
| invest in that area makes some sense for Nvidia today, but it
| would make a _lot_ of sense if the products they 're paying
| to develop were official Arm products sold through the Arm IP
| sales channel. In other words, it would increase Nvidia's
| return on investment on work they're already doing.
|
| (on the other hand, the amount they would have ended up
| paying for Arm might be fully justified by the value of the
| company but it was really, really high)
| klelatti wrote:
| Good. Never a good outcome for the industry for Arm to be owned
| by Nvidia - and regulators have learned by now that undertakings
| in these circumstances have little value.
|
| Sorry for Simon Segars who must have had a tough job essentially
| implementing Son's ideas. And those ideas seem to have been
| pretty poor - Arm China debacle, focus on IoT and selling to
| Nvidia have all clearly harmed Arm's prospects.
|
| It's clear by now that selling CPUs is a mature market but that
| Arm has room to grow and there is still lots of money to be made
| in hardware if you innovate - eg in accelerated computing. It's
| also true both that Arm's model works and that it has more
| competition than ever from RISC-V.
|
| A lot still to play for in my view and I think that the IPO price
| will reflect that.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Why will ARM succeed where MIPS faded into obscurity? (Well,
| relative obscurity. I see they are still used in media devices
| and cheap routers.)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_Technologies
| Kliment wrote:
| ARM has already succeeded. There is no "will" here. Most
| microcontrollers in the world are ARM. Most application
| processors in the world are ARM. It spans from the cheapest to
| the highest-performing parts. Nearly every smartphone in the
| world is ARM.
| justin66 wrote:
| In the embedded arena, Arm (the instruction set) would appear
| to be pretty replaceable. Arm and MIPS competed for the same
| business, Arm and RISC-V can do the same. There is nothing
| magical about any of them.
|
| Arm (the corporation) can make some money for themselves by
| coming up with increasingly cool Arm cores to sell (a mission
| Nvidia could have aided immediately and with high impact,
| but... nevermind) but the instruction set itself is not
| especially important anymore. There's a lot less path-
| dependency for companies in the embedded arena than there is
| among, for example, desktop computer companies.
| chasil wrote:
| AArch64 is very, very late to the game, and has a lot to
| prove (beyond mobile).
|
| The older architectures were much earlier (MIPS64 1991,
| SPARC64 1995, Itanium 2001, AMD64 2003, AArch64 2011).
|
| Yes, AArch64 runs the top supercomputer, and there is
| enthusiasm; don't mistake this for market share.
| daemonhunter wrote:
| ARM has been here before. I owned stock in Arm, before it sold.
| arcticbull wrote:
| well, it's by far the most common CPU architecture in the
| world.
| a-dub wrote:
| my thoughts exactly.
| snvzz wrote:
| >(Well, relative obscurity. I see they are still used in media
| devices and cheap routers.)
|
| It's actually gone; MIPS owners have abandoned MIPS to focus on
| RISC-V.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Kind of a shame because MIPS is one of the more approachable
| ISAs if you want to learn assembly
| snvzz wrote:
| Once you actually look, you'll likely be surprised by how
| much RISC-V resembles MIPS.
| panick21_ wrote:
| RISC-V was designed to to be a teaching ISP. A minimal
| RISC-V is not so different from MISP. I don't think you
| lose much.
| jason0597 wrote:
| > RISC-V was designed to to be a teaching ISP
|
| Do you have a source for this? RISC-V always seemed like
| it was a production ISA from the get-go
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "RISC-V is a new instruction set architecture (ISA)
| designed to support computer architecture research and
| education."
|
| "Provide a realistic but open ISA that captures important
| details of commercial generalpurpose ISA designs and that
| is suitable for direct hardware implementation."
|
| "Be simple to subset for educational purposes and to
| reduce complexity of bringing up new implementations."
|
| https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2011/EECS-20
| 11-...
|
| "Yunsup Lee, Krste Asanovi'c, David Patterson, and I
| conceived RISC-V in the summer of 2010 as an ISA for
| research and education at Berkeley. Two of our research
| ventures, RAMP Gold [92] and Maven [60], had just wound
| down. These projects were based around the SPARC ISA and
| a lightly modified MIPS ISA, respectively, and we sought
| to unify behind a single architecture for the next round
| of projects."
|
| https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2016/EECS-20
| 16-...
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I can't remember if I heard it in a Jim Keller interview
| or somewhere else, but I think students also helped
| initially design the ISA for RISC-V also.
| vxNsr wrote:
| I remember reading this somewhere a few years ago as
| well. RSIC-V was the "this is an educational ISA, but
| we're gonna see how far we can take it"
| snvzz wrote:
| It is an educational isa that just so happens to have the
| highest code density among 64bit architectures.
|
| There's been a few changes since its inception in academy
| and the ratified standard unprivileged spec[0].
|
| [0] https://riscv.org/technical/specifications/
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| what are you talking about? ARM is every where used by all the
| tech companies.
|
| ARM is on mobile, data center and desktop/laptop.
| zinekeller wrote:
| While it's indeed good to have a healthy skepticism towards
| these things, there's a major difference between the two: a)
| MIPS has been acquired too many times by a company that can
| lock others out (SGI is definitely the Nvidia of today outside
| of consumer stuff), and b) MIPS, while have been present in
| game consoles and workstations, didn't really have the
| visibility ARM has today. They didn't have any consumer devices
| labelled with "MIPS chipset inside!", even though it was
| present in game consoles.
| chasil wrote:
| MIPS had a few architectural eccentricities, like branch delay
| slots, that were tuned to the original design to make it fast.
|
| These eccentricities eventually became a liability.
|
| https://www.jwhitham.org/2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-hav...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Why will ARM succeed where MIPS faded into obscurity?
|
| Because for the mass consumer market needing decent compute
| power, there is only ARM and x86-64 left, everything else has
| gone downhill in actual usage - and ARM is way easier to
| implement with a lot more vendors available than the x86-64
| world which is basically Intel vs AMD.
|
| The only competition that remains is Loongson for Chinese
| government purposes, but no one outside of China and maybe
| Russia will touch that stuff voluntarily.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| What about OpenPOWER? It's held its own in the supercomputer
| race and I don't think IBM is going to stop using it anytime
| soon.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The POWER architecture family, since the Apple migration to
| x86 many years ago, is only relevant for supercomputers and
| mainframes which is why I didn't include it in the list.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Russia has it's own CPU, Elbrus, which is slow, features x86
| emulation and VLIW architecture (i think).
|
| It's meant to be used in areas of critical infra and national
| security, every major nation that is not joint with US at the
| hip is thinking or planning chip independance.
|
| Otherwise your economy could be rouined because Donald Trimp
| 2 had too much cocaine in the morning and tweeted something.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Arm was one of the CISCiest of the RISC processors at a happy
| medium in instruction complexity that gave them all the
| simplicity of regular sized instructions while still getting
| the job done in fewer instructions than a more ideological RISC
| ISA.
|
| Some in depth look at various features here:
|
| https://userpages.umbc.edu/~vijay/mashey.on.risc.html
|
| Also, getting the job done with fewer instructions meant
| requiring less RAM in embedded roles where it thrived before
| entering the market from below in classic disruptive innovation
| style, the same way that x86 entered the server market. The
| other RISCs were mostly high end workstation or server chips
| suffering from low volumes. I actually ported some software
| from an SGI MIPS box to x86/Linux once. It was a nice system
| and I see why people liked it but it just couldn't keep up.
| drumhead wrote:
| If SoftBank want to maximize their return then they'd probably do
| best to list ARM in the US. There's no way they'd get the crazy
| valuations you seen on NASDAQ on the LSE. It's why so many UK
| tech companies IPO in New York. They don't seem to get
| particularly excited about tech in London.
| ccity88 wrote:
| That's because a lot of these ""tech"" companies are just other
| business models in disguise. My especially favourite are the
| unsustainable business model food delivery apps like Deliveroo
| and JustEat, or the retail apps that are classed as tech for
| some reason like online consumer brands such as Victorian
| Plumbing and whisky seller Artisanal Spirits. It's clear to me
| that IPO's are no longer about long term equity, and more about
| short term gambling. This is especially true when you have both
| US and UK markets actively trying to attract more retail
| investment, just to swindle the public out of more money. Until
| we see a radical shift in the way we think about and measure
| the performance of companies, IPO's and equity markets will
| continue to be a wild ride.
| martinald wrote:
| JustEat isn't unsustainable. They are profitable (pretty
| wildly so until they started offering their own delivery
| riders to grow to outlets which don't have drivers -- which
| has started hitting margins).
|
| Deliveroo much less sustainable.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Soooo back on the LSE or?
|
| It was such a hot stock in 2014-15. Softbank kinda bought it at
| the peak. Still, Apple has proven ARM on the desktop is
| phenomenal, and Ampere has done the same in the datacenter. Both
| have swiftly made compiler support accelerate dramatically. I
| would love for my next desktop to be arm-based, and it would be
| great if it didn't NEED to be a mac. Broad adoption of ARM would
| be a huge win for sustainability. I'm bullish on their business,
| even if their business model isn't vertically scalable.
|
| I think that RISC V also has a bright future, but its still a bit
| far out before its a viable competitor. Still there have been
| some things that look really promising such as what is coming out
| of SiFive:
|
| https://www.sifive.com/press/sifive-raises-risc-v-performanc...
|
| And Intel just announced a $1B fund for companies building on
| their Open Foundry RISC-V alliance.
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-1b-fund-risc-v
|
| Big things are happening for small instruction sets... watch this
| space.
| adrian_b wrote:
| It was said that Softbank wants to launch the IPO on NASDAQ, so
| it seems that it will not go back to LSE.
| tjoff wrote:
| The thing that stands out about ARM is that the user has less
| control of the hardware. The manufacturers try and succeed in
| keeping an extremely closed ecosystem.
|
| Why would you want that? The Intel+AMD duopoly seems like
| nirvana compared to the Ampere and M1.
|
| In fact, Ampere and M1 are a hint of the most dystopian future
| of computing I can imagine.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Uh... M1 (at least when Mac-fused) isn't actually locked-
| down. You _do_ have to jump through a few hoops to boot
| modified kernels[0], but it 's a reasonable level of security
| for a chip primarily intended to go into laptops. There's an
| ongoing effort to reverse-engineer the M1 and port Linux to
| it[1], which has actually gone really well.
|
| There's also plenty of ARM hardware out there that really
| doesn't bother with lockdowns. Raspberry Pi, for example,
| will happily boot whatever you put on the SD card[2]. There's
| also plenty of other dev boards and chips that are similarly
| not locked-down. The reason why people think of ARM as "more
| locked-down" is because it's more often used in locked-down
| hardware, but there's no architectural requirement for it to
| be this way.
|
| The _real_ big problem with ARM is that every chip is very
| different from one another. SoC designers have a habit of
| reassigning addresses and IDs on every new chip, with no
| thought towards backwards compatibility. So even if an ARM
| chip has no technical protection against third-party
| operating systems, any Linux kernel you build is unlikely to
| boot unless the SoC vendor has bothered to upstream support
| for it. Ironically, Apple is one of the few ARM vendors that
| actually does maintain backwards compatibility where
| feasible.
|
| [0] The first admin account is granted possession of a local
| signing key that lets that user sign kernels. This means that
| you need to be able to log into that account under macOS in
| order to install Linux - evil maids need not apply.
|
| [1] Legend has it that if you say "M1" three times in a
| HackerNews comment, you'll summon the primary developer of
| Asahi Linux.
|
| [2] You _do_ have to provide a GPU boot blob; no clue if
| there 's a project to reimplement that.
| floatboth wrote:
| > no clue if there's a project to reimplement that
|
| There was! And it even booted Linux in some capacity:
| https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware
|
| > every chip is very different from one another
|
| Eh, the usual embedded SoCs are not _that_ different from
| each other -- ARM GIC, ARM timer, lots of Synopsys
| Designware crap for SDMMC /XHCI/PCIe/etc.
|
| For many SoCs it's totally feasible to make standards-
| compliant firmware, e.g. for the Rockchip RK3566 there is
| https://github.com/jaredmcneill/quartz64_uefi
|
| And SoCs from the networking world (Marvell, NXP) are
| typically supported by upstream EDK2.
| perfopt wrote:
| This has nothing to do with ARM. Unlike the PC there is no
| standard for system architecture (including boards). ARM
| based designers like Qualcomm, NVIDIA etc can choose to have
| their own board and system architecture. For example, they
| can boot of any memory location or lock the user out of using
| an exception level like EL3/EL2 etc. That is why the
| ecosystem looks closed. Nothing stops a SoC designer from
| giving complete access to hardware.
|
| BTW - any SoC designer that uses RISC-V can do the same.
| tjoff wrote:
| ... and as long as that remains true it is the most user
| hostile general purpose platforms we've come up with.
|
| It should not be celebrated. Or we will fix the mistake
| that is the PC forever.
| lizknope wrote:
| There are standards like the Arm Server Base System
| Architecture but companies don't have to follow it. Most of
| the ARM servers are custom things for big datacenters. As
| you said the smaller systems like phones and other embedded
| systems have their own boot systems and memory layout etc.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectu
| r...
|
| https://developer.arm.com/documentation/den0029/latest
| floatboth wrote:
| In the server space, there is no good reason to do weird
| unusual things - even e.g. the "custom" AWS hardware is
| as standards-compliant as possible (if you look at the
| ACPI tables on an a1.metal instance, you'll only find an
| AMZNxxxx device for the PCIe host controller, and that's
| only because Synopsys Designware IP sucks^W has a stupid
| hardware bug related to filtering that requires a little
| workaround quirk)
| [deleted]
| andrepd wrote:
| Can you elaborate? I don't understand what you mean.
| klelatti wrote:
| Any architecture that forces something like the Intel
| Management Engine on users is closer to dystopia than
| nirvana.
| als0 wrote:
| Absolutely. Whether it's ARM-based or RISC-V, nothing will
| stop high-end SoC vendors from developing closed hardware
| blocks or firmware, especially if they have customers from
| the DRM space (CA vendors).
| als0 wrote:
| > In fact, Ampere and M1 are a hint of the most dystopian
| future of computing I can imagine.
|
| OK I'll bite. What aspect of Ampere is locked down? They are
| nothing like the bad closed-source hacks that we see in small
| development boards.
| tjoff wrote:
| I apologize. I confused Ampere with Amazon's Graviton.
| floatboth wrote:
| AWS offers Graviton instances in a bare-metal way too, so
| you can see for yourself what the SoC offers. It's quite
| clean, there is a Designware PCIe filtering quirk (same
| as on e.g. the Marvell Armada8k) but other than that it's
| SBSA-style UEFI+ACPI. Very standard system.
|
| In terms of firmware openness, yeah, you don't get the
| firmware source, but you don't get to touch the machines
| physically either so you wouldn't have a chance to run a
| custom build anyway :D
|
| (While Ampere Altras are supported by upstream EDK2, have
| fun)
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Softbank would be stupid to list on the LSE.
| sekh60 wrote:
| Good, we need more players, not less.
| odiroot wrote:
| *fewer.
|
| Sorry had to do it.
| lunfard000 wrote:
| I didn't like much this but having ARM in the hands of
| financial institution which doesn't have any motivation to
| invest in the technology doesn't seem any better (and probably
| doesnt understand/doesnt care about it). In the other hand,
| Nvidia have a good track record creating good products.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Well money speaks, who would own them? The ones actually are
| willing to pay the price.
|
| It is not other people's say unfortunately.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Nvidia have a good track record creating good products.
|
| And a bad track record of preventing interoperability and
| cross-vendor standardization, to lock customers in.
| shmerl wrote:
| Nvidia also has a long track record of anti-competitive
| behavior. So it's a good thing they didn't get ARM.
| chasil wrote:
| There is nothing to prevent NVidia from buying stock. A lot
| of stock.
| shmerl wrote:
| Shouldn't be nothing, otherwise anti-trust has some major
| hole.
| snvzz wrote:
| >So it's a good thing they didn't get ARM.
|
| It doesn't matter, as the damage is done.
|
| Once the industry caught a whiff of NVIDIA's intent to
| purchase ARM, they looked for alternatives. That's RISC-V.
|
| Today, it's been years and the RISC-V efforts within the
| industry have advanced considerably. These won't be dropped
| now, irrespective of ARM's fate.
| [deleted]
| p1necone wrote:
| NVidia has a track record of creating good products, but all
| proprietary and with closed source firmware/drivers. And lots
| of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more
| money from different market segments.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to
| extract more money from different market segments.
|
| This is the cultural difference between ARM and Nvidia.
|
| ARM does care enough about their IP that you'll need to pay
| them for ARM's effort to develop their IP, but beyond that
| they will not restrict you unless it'll put ARM into legal
| trouble (basically export restrictions). Hey, you could get
| everything now with a one-time license payment if you are
| willing to do that. It's not FSF open, but it's certainly
| better than a lot of hardware companies.
|
| Nvidia is trying to extract everything into each pipeline.
| You want to use their hardware? You have to agree to only
| use this to precise conditions that is purely for market
| segmentation, which conflicts with ARM's culture.
| Compounding this with the fact that almost all acquisitions
| done by Nvidia that was more open was closed down (try
| talking to Nvidia about Mellanox), if the ARM acquisition
| proceeded, it'll be a bad day for everyone else.
| lunfard00 wrote:
| That is good for Samsung/Qualcomm/Mediatek/Apple, but
| let's be honest, it is a failure as a business. Despite
| of being used on pretty much 100% of all smartphones'
| SoC, they barely make any money. Also, their designs are
| lagging behind, M1 and probably Nuvia are example of
| that.
| dijit wrote:
| I think their designs are meant to be lagging, M1 isn't
| "just better" it's a lot more about media encoding and
| packing more types of cores together, which while
| innovative is not what ARM should be doing.
|
| ARM makes prototype designs that you can extend, M1 is an
| absolute success of that model.
|
| Regardless: you say they've failed as a business, your
| metric is how much they earn from being nearly
| everywhere.
|
| I would pointedly disagree: they're everywhere, that's
| success, they're everywhere and profitable. There's
| absolutely no need to rent seek... this is unsustainable
| capitalist thinking.
|
| They're able to innovate and turn a profit with their
| "modest" income, why do you need them to do more than
| that? How do you know they would do better with more
| money?
|
| Intel (yes, apple to oranges) has many orders of
| magnitude more money, but most of it goes into
| bureaucracies.
|
| See also: Microsoft, Oracle
| zinekeller wrote:
| In support of this accurate comment, I'll repeat this
| assertion: Not all people are wealth maniacs.
| arwineap wrote:
| I agree with your comment
|
| Do you think that once they IPO pressure from their
| stockholders will cause rent seeking behavior? Even if
| they sold to nvidia frankly.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| A: "we grew to billions of dollars without ripping off
| our customers"
|
| B: "it is a failure as a business. If you employed
| underhand tactics you could be even bigger!"
|
| This is the phylosophy that gives us DRM on cars, 100
| page lisence agreement with TVs, and fraud on wallstreet.
| klelatti wrote:
| > but let's be honest, it is a failure as a business.
|
| Obviously not true, but I can see how some might think
| this if their main comparators are companies that get to
| $1trn valuations in 30 years. Not every company can or
| should be a FAANG.
| p1necone wrote:
| Imo the poor state of the GPU market competition-wise is
| the only way NVidia is able to get away with this,
| otherwise competitors would just eat their lunch by doing
| exactly the same thing without the arbitrary market
| segmentation.
| lmm wrote:
| NVidia are legitimately good at what they do, it's not
| like Oracle where all the money comes from milking the
| licensing arrangements.
| zinekeller wrote:
| I'd definitely agree on that though, Nvidia is really
| good on what they're doing, just disappointed that they
| don't view the open-source community as a positive.
|
| F*** Oracle definitely, they can't even bother to have a
| proper SystemD service on systems which uses SystemD,
| relying on scripts that are definitely not redeeming
| them.
| dnautics wrote:
| > And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to
| extract more money from different market segments.
|
| To be fair, AMD does super annoying lock in/binning things
| too, though not with software locking.
|
| For example, there was a Radeon that would have been a
| crazy awesome server rack mounted GPU for Deep learning 4U
| blades. You couldn't put it in a server because it was
| mounted on a chassis that was 4mm too large for PCI spec.
|
| (Btw I hate hate hate Nvidia so this is not pointless
| whataboutism)
| paulmd wrote:
| AMD is also moving towards proprietary interconnects for
| their add-on cards that provide higher performance links
| than their competitors are allowed to use. And they won't
| license them to their competitors of course - it's a "set
| bonus" if you buy all AMD. It's funny because people were
| panicking about Intel doing exactly that, and when AMD
| does it, crickets.
|
| They also have moved to locking their CPUs to the
| motherboards, to restrict second-hand sales of surplus
| CPUs/etc. So far it's only locked to the brand, so you
| can put it in any Dell system but _only_ a dell system,
| but it 's still sufficient to cause a huge amount of
| headaches for the surplus sector. I was looking at some
| cheap Epyc 7402Ps on ebay until I saw... "locked to dell,
| only runs on Dell". Welp. And the other cheap listing, is
| that one locked too? Who knows, and that's the point AMD
| is going for, they just have to inject enough uncertainty
| to change consumer behavior. Most people aren't going to
| be willing to trace the provenance of a used CPU, they
| will just pay 20% more for a new one. A limited number
| will be sold as complete systems, but as the market
| shrinks and people stop considering secondhand purchases,
| eventually they will just be thrown in the trash. Mission
| accomplished.
|
| And that's coming for consumer CPUs too. It's already
| here for AMD's "ryzen pro" desktop line, it won't be long
| until it hits walmart prebuilts too.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > Nvidia have a good track record creating good products.
|
| What incentive would Nvidia have to develop new ARM features
| that would assist competitors in competing with them?
|
| The Fujitsu's A64FX Processor for example somewhat competes
| with Nvidia datacenter GPUs. What incentive would Nvidia have
| to continue to develop the Arm Scalable Vector Extension?
|
| The only good thing from this sale would be the pivot to
| RISC-V.
| paulmd wrote:
| > What incentive would Nvidia have to develop new ARM
| features that would assist competitors in competing with
| them?
|
| > The Fujitsu's A64FX Processor for example somewhat
| competes with Nvidia datacenter GPUs. What incentive would
| Nvidia have to continue to develop the Arm Scalable Vector
| Extension?
|
| "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
|
| the more R&D that goes into the ARM ecosystem, the tougher
| things get for x86. At the end of the day, all that R&D
| spending is making NVIDIA's position stronger, it's a force
| multiplier for their own efforts.
|
| I fundamentally don't understand why anyone would think the
| ARM acquisition was about anything other than making Jensen
| kingmaker over one of the two most important processor IPs
| in the world - and he gains absolutely nothing by becoming
| king and then slaying all his subjects. That would be an
| amazingly shortsighted decision from one of the most far-
| sighted tech CEOs in the business.
|
| Selling some more Tegras is peanuts in comparison and that
| bump would never last in the long term. The money is in
| Qualcomm and Fujitsu and IBM's R&D budgets working in
| synergy with your own, and in the ability to leverage the
| ARM licensing model to push CUDA into the last places it
| hasn't reached.
|
| The fact that NVIDIA was even making this offer at all
| pretty much means they were looking at loosening up their
| IP licensing IMO. As a black box, sure, but I don't see a
| world in which NVIDIA would buy ARM and either not license
| GeForce as the graphics IP, or would choose not to license
| ARM at all ("selling a few more Tegras is not worth $40b").
| If you accept those two givens, then NVIDIA would have had
| to provide GeForce IP as a black-box SIP license.
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| The A64FX has way worse performance per watt than an AMD
| EPYC and an A100. The A64FX's density per U is higher, so
| you can get a lot more cores in the same datacenter, even
| if the TFLOPS/watt is far worse.
|
| For example, if you look at the TOP500, #1 (A64FX) gets
| about 14.78 TFLOP/watt, #5 (EPYC/A100) gets 27.37
| TFLOP/watt. Most of the A100 based solutions are similar
| performance per watt. Nvidia is already beating ARM in
| power efficiency. This looks closer to the 3dfx acquisition
| from Nvidia's prospective.
| lunfard000 wrote:
| Money? like Samsung selling their chips to Apple. Nvidia
| have a lot of proprietary stuff which allows them to get
| away even with inferior hardware. Nvidia will prob lose the
| AI datacenter market anyways, customs asics will just use
| RISC-V if Nvidia try to stop them.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Nvidia doesn't care about secondary money. They're all
| about integrating stuff and denying others to do so.
|
| Nvidia is a castle because of the moats they've built.
| Not because they're leaps and bounds ahead in terms of
| silicon and technical wizardry. They shunned OpenCL,
| they'll probably shun Vulkan for GPGPU and make sure that
| people are locked to CUDA and its ecosystem. They have no
| intention to play fair.
|
| We're going to see how Mellanox will evolve under their
| command.
| lunfard000 wrote:
| wasn't OpenCL a mess even on AMD cards and isnt it almost
| deprecated?* And Nvidia's OpenGL drivers on windows are
| way better than AMD's. I dont like Nvidia especially
| after all the error 43 bullshit, but they are competent.
| Now ARM is going public, wont that make things even
| worse?
|
| [0]:https://www.reddit.com/r/realAMD/comments/qujwas/amd_
| drops_o...
| paulmd wrote:
| > They shunned OpenCL, they'll probably shun Vulkan for
| GPGPU
|
| this comment is factually untrue and anyone can check it
| for themselves.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#Conformant_products
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan#Intel,_Nvidia_and_AM
| D
|
| it would be absolutely insane not to support either of
| those features. An absolute shit-ton of games use Vulkan
| these days, there is zero chance of that being deprecated
| in any timespan not measured in decades. Everyone is
| still supporting OpenGL after all, and that's like what,
| an early 90s API?
|
| there is a larger point to be made here about some of the
| reflexively negative responses people have when the
| N-word is brought up. There are certainly criticisms you
| can make of NVIDIA, but people have this intense and
| reflexively negative emotional response that tends to
| slide these discussions into flamewar territory.
|
| I know I'm about to hear about how Linus gave them the
| finger (cause he's a totally balanced and wholesome
| person), but providing a closed-source linux driver and
| not supporting wayland (which I think they did eventually
| anyway?) aren't the end of the world like people make
| them out to be. Pick the product that fits your needs, if
| not move on, you don't need to become emotionally
| attached and you can keep your positions fact-based.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > this comment is factually untrue and anyone can check
| it for themselves.
|
| I agree that it's my mistake, however there was a gap
| between this support periods and levels, and I've been
| burned by nVidia's own driver on an nVidia 800 series
| card. It's not out of spite or prejudice. I stand
| corrected, but my experience also stands. Also nVidia's
| practices for treating technologies they don't like is
| still valid.
|
| Also, being compatible doesn't mean that these
| technologies are first class citizens on the
| driver/hardware level, and they may not be allowed to use
| the card up to its full potential.
|
| > it would be absolutely insane not to support either of
| those features. An absolute shit-ton of games use Vulkan
| these days, there is zero chance of that being deprecated
| in any timespan not measured in decades. Everyone is
| still supporting OpenGL after all, and that's like what,
| an early 90s API?
|
| There's support and there's support. I'm not talking
| about games and graphics stuff. I was doing some research
| about nVidia's "Vulkan Compute" support, and seen this:
|
| "Vulkan compute on AMD and Intel might be okay but we
| already know of ways Nvidia puts the clamp on Vulkan
| compute (doesn't make use of multiple DMAs for transfer)
| and given their history with OpenCL and the vested
| interest they have in developers preferring CUDA, they're
| really not to be trusted." [0][1]
|
| The guy writing seems to know what he's talking about
| (reading about the history gives a lot of nice low level
| details about how these things work), and this is what I
| was exactly saying about "Ditching Vulkan Compute in
| favor of CUDA, like OpenCL". "Yeah, it's supported, but
| it might not be fast, sorry."
|
| > there is a larger point to be made here about some of
| the reflexively negative responses people have when the
| N-word is brought up. There are certainly criticisms you
| can make of NVIDIA, but people have this intense and
| reflexively negative emotional response that tends to
| slide these discussions into flamewar territory.
|
| I'm personally no fan of flamewars. I also don't like to
| disseminate wrong information knowingly (see above).
| Also, I work in a HPC center where we use nVidia
| hardware, and personally develop scientific software. So,
| I'm not distant to either tiers of nVidia hardware. So,
| maybe not having prejudice about people one's replying to
| the first time is a good thing, no?
|
| > I know I'm about to hear about how Linus gave them the
| finger (cause he's a totally balanced and wholesome
| person)...
|
| No, you're not.
|
| TL;DR: You can't write multi-vendor, GPU acceleration
| code which uses every card to its highest potential, even
| if there's standards. You need to write at least two
| copies of the code, one being CUDA. Why? nVidia doesn't
| like other technologies to work as fast on their cards.
| That's it.
|
| [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/vulkan/comments/jwhnfe/comm
| ent/gcq5...
|
| [1]: https://www.reddit.com/user/mb862/
| soapdog wrote:
| Be aware that Apple is a co-founder of ARM and probably has
| some perpetual license to the IP. They don't need ARM at
| all at this point.
| na85 wrote:
| >ARM to IPO
|
| I'll be looking to pick up some shares as a long-term investment.
| I think ARM is one of the best things to happen to computing, and
| anything that threatens the x86 monoculture/hegemony is a good
| thing in my view.
| HHC-Hunter wrote:
| Honestly at this point, any big tech IPO is just a license to
| print money.
| nly wrote:
| Might not be that way when they go public a year from now
| odiroot wrote:
| Didn't work that well for Cloudflare, Github, Coinbase.
| urmish wrote:
| Can you elaborate? All three seem to have done well.
| odiroot wrote:
| My bad. I meant Gitlab.
|
| Cloudflare reached 212 in November. Now it's down to 109.
|
| Gitlab reached 125 in November. Now down to 73.
|
| Coinbase was at 342 in November. Now it's 203.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| The printer will start to run out of paper in a few months.
|
| The companies that have their own invoice printer will "win",
| the others will suffer.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| It's been months for years
| baq wrote:
| pay attention. it's already started.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| This time is based on inflation and the Fed increasing
| borrowing rates. Money managers already started to move
| their positions to stocks that fare well when things cool
| off.
| boramalper wrote:
| > x86 monoculture/hegemony
|
| You mean the PC _standard_?
|
| I love ARM and the power-efficient mobile devices it enabled in
| the past two decades. That being said, I am deeply concerned
| with the lack of coherent hardware standards in ARM devices
| causing fragmentation and necessitate custom kernels, ROMs, and
| firmware.
|
| If it weren't for PC, Linux might have died long ago.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Well, ARM has SBSA standard, and it seems to work well.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Coupd anyone explain how this works, are we any closer to
| the dream of being able to boot generic Ubuntu image on a
| random ARM device like you can with x86?
| fredoralive wrote:
| It's a standard specification for ARM server hardware /
| memory maps / firmware / etc, so operating systems should
| be interchangeable on it. Doesn't have a specifically
| consumer orientated equivalent though.
|
| Its a bit like the way you need more than an x86 CPU, you
| need an "IBM PC Compatible" system[1] with various buses
| and peripherals in the right memory locations, BIOS/UEFI
| firmware etc. for generic PC OSes to work. SBSA
| standardises something like an equivalent of an "IBM PC"
| for ARM Servers.
|
| [1] Or whatever you would call it nowadays, as legacy
| BIOS booting is fading away modern systems might not
| count as that.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| >x86 monoculture/hegemony
|
| There are more ARM cores in the world by multiple orders of
| magnitudes at this point. ARM is the bully now, not Intel
| anymore.
| ksec wrote:
| It sort of make sense for Nvidia's shareholders. The initial
| offering for ARM was only worth $38.5bn, which was already
| expensive due to SoftBank initial purchase price and not wanting
| for a loss. But at Nvidia's peak this deal was worth " _$87bn_ ".
| For a company that makes less than $2B in revenue and at best
| ~$300M in Operating Income. Remember this isn't something you can
| buy and milk the crap out of other market players. "Not a very
| British way of doing business" is A Direct Quote from ARM. (
| Edit: Because of perceptual licensing agreement, for those
| unaware of how ARM business model works )
|
| It didn't make sense how ARM was worth $22bn in 2016 on LSE, that
| has a PE100+ when I cant see how it could double its Net profit
| in the next 10 years, with a _saner_ valuation of P /E 50. It
| make even less sense to me when Softbank bought it for $32bn.
| Didn't make any sense when Nvidia want it for $38.5bn, and later
| at $50bn+.
|
| Now we are back to square one, how many investors, in the open
| market are willing to buy ARM's stock at a valuation of, let say
| the same $32bn as Softbank initially paid? Roughly P/E 100,
| assuming they managed to grow ARM business from 2018 at ~$220M
| operating income to $300M in 2021. I much rather bet on Intel if
| I had the money.
|
| And of course many on HN will think ARM is worthless because the
| future is going to be the Riscy Silver Bullet.
|
| Disclosures: I do not currently hold any stocks or Mutual Funds,
| Indexes and other financial instrument.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Your disclosure intrigues me. What do you own?
| turminal wrote:
| By buying ARM the owner gets control over an architecture that
| many describe as "the future of computing". That's much more
| valuable than whatever money ARM makes.
| lrem wrote:
| And if that control becomes too tight, RISC-V takes it place.
| pm90 wrote:
| Let's be real. ARM got a chance because it excelled in a
| very specific use case: low power. Unless RISC-V
| differentiates itself in a significant way, it won't
| replace ARM.
| klelatti wrote:
| RISC-V seems to me to have two major opportunities.
|
| - Where a free ISA allows innovation and experimentation
| in a way that Arm would not permit.
|
| - Where companies can shave cents off mass market
| products due to lower licensing fees.
|
| Will RISC-V replace Arm in your smartphone though - seems
| like a big ask at the moment.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Google maintains two parallel Android platforms right
| now, so the idea of porting everything over to a third is
| not _too_ far off. There's a lot of effort in getting JIT
| up-to-speed on RISC, but most everything else is a
| recompile away.
| monocasa wrote:
| And JIT can come in later. But definition it's making
| runtime decisions on code generation, so being supported
| by optional extensions isn't the end of the world.
| klelatti wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember Intel throwing billions at
| getting x86 into smartphones.
|
| Just because there is a port available doesn't mean the
| hardware and ecosystem will follow.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Whether it'll make it into a phone is a whole other
| matter, but there has been at least one RISC-V port of
| AOSP:
|
| https://www.xda-developers.com/android-risc-v-port/
| chasil wrote:
| ARM also addressed code density with Thumb, which
| required licensing Super-H IP.
|
| Then AArch64 was designed very late, but seems sufficient
| to have (currently) taken the prize for the top
| supercomputing architecture.
|
| There is architectural flexibility here, in addition to
| low power.
| user_7832 wrote:
| You seem to be knowledgeable about this, so I wanted to
| ask - is ARM more efficient (perf/watt) than Risk-V? (I
| know there are lots of factors like frequencies/voltages
| etc but keeping everything else constant)
| chasil wrote:
| That is really a loaded question.
|
| ARM bigLITTLE exists to address different efficiencies
| that are exploited in different runtime states. Is big
| better than LITTLE? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
|
| If there is no definitive answer within the heterogenous
| cores of a single ARM implementation, then how can it be
| compared to RISC-V?
| user_7832 wrote:
| Ok, I'll try again.
|
| For the same sized single-core chip (x mm squared),
| running at the same voltage and same clock speed, on the
| same manufacturing process node, is there a (significant)
| difference between ARM and Risk-V?
|
| (I'm assuming that core size, voltages and frequencies
| are the biggest differences between the big and LITTLE
| cores. And yes of course this is a funky theoretical
| question so a theoretical answer is perfectly fine :)
| chasil wrote:
| The answer (for now) appears to be no. Also consider that
| ARM will not stand still.
|
| "According to SiFive, it is working on the design of a
| new processor that will be 50% more powerful, and that it
| will be able to surpass the Cortex-A78 of ARM."
|
| https://techunwrapped.com/risc-v-starts-to-put-
| pressure-16-c...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29418153
| floatboth wrote:
| The ISA doesn't have _that_ much influence on efficiency
| (other than, like, x86 's insane-length encoding
| requiring spending more power on decoding).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| "About like ARM but without licensing fees and not
| controlled by ARM (the company)" could easily be a
| sufficient differentiator, especially if ARM the company
| starts acting out.
| belter wrote:
| You analysis is right on, and I agree with it. I predict
| however, the IPO will be an enormous success. Predict a
| valuation in the $40bn to $45bn with tops of $50bn....lets
| revisit this thread then ;-)
|
| Those facts will:
|
| - Disprove once more that story of the market efficiency/price
| discovery bullshit,
|
| will also confirm that:
|
| - Benjamin Graham, Value Investing and Warren Buffet strategies
| were made for other times. The times before we allowed that
| Central Banks hijack our income streams and personal wealth.
|
| Disclosure: As I write this, I also do not currently hold any
| stocks, Mutual Funds, Indexes and other financial instruments.
| Did in the past.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| The longer I'm in the market the more I realize George Soros
| was completely correct with his theories on reflexivity.
|
| > Reflexivity theory states that investors don't base their
| decisions on reality, but rather on their perceptions of
| reality instead.
|
| Meme stocks, Covid crash, Tesla stock, the SP500 for the last
| decade, NFTs. None of it is priced correctly because humans
| are at heart greedy, fearful, irrational. I think the trick
| is to figure out how to use that to make money.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| There's quite a bit of academic literature on the long term
| overvaluation and underperformance of "growth" and
| especially "small cap growth" stocks, sometimes explained
| by their popularity as pseudo lottery tickets. Over almost
| all rolling 25 year periods across the past century,
| "value" stocks (the X% of the market highest in current
| earnings, cash flow, etc.) outperform the broader market
| including these growth stocks. Search "the black hole of
| investing."
| boppo1 wrote:
| I think you're right about this IPO, but we could be heading
| into a very different paradigm with the rate hikes coming.
| justin66 wrote:
| > I much rather bet on Intel if I had the money.
|
| The FTC objecting to Nvidia and ARM's deal on an antitrust
| basis [0] makes Arm toxic to Intel and AMD.
|
| [0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-
| releases/2021/12/ftc-s...
| jsiepkes wrote:
| If Activision/Blizzard is worth $65bn to Microsoft for it's IP
| then $84bn is still a steal for ARM?
| prox wrote:
| But that was a good investment for its long term
| Gamepass/Xbox plan. Or are you saying Microsoft can buy it?
| ignoramous wrote:
| Provided the ARM juggernaut is expected to streamroll Intel's
| business in the coming decade, this acquisition does make
| sense for Intel... this could be their Facebook+WhatsApp
| moment.
| raywu wrote:
| If Nvidia gets torpedoed by regulators, it's hard to see
| how Intel stands a chance
| xattt wrote:
| Intel has significant experience in managing cross-
| license agreements (see x86, x64).
|
| This is getting into fantasy chip designer territory, but
| what are the chances that Intel makes a hybrid x86-ARM
| chip?
| brokencode wrote:
| If Nvidia was blocked from acquiring ARM, then I certainly
| think that Intel would be blocked as well. Plus, Intel does
| not need to actually acquire ARM to start making ARM
| processors. For example, Apple has done just fine licensing
| ARM IP just like everybody else.
| detaro wrote:
| Intel indeed already is a large ARM licensee (and for a
| while even was the largest one, funnily enough)
| rswail wrote:
| To be clear, Apple is not licensing ARM IP "just like
| everybody else". They have a very different relationship,
| being a founding shareholder, and then acquiring an
| "Architecture License" from ARM after also acquiring PA
| Semi according to Wikipedia.
|
| So Apple Silicon is not the same as someone else
| licensing ARM IP.
| brokencode wrote:
| Source? According to Wikipedia, quite a few companies
| have an architectural license with ARM, including Intel
| and AMD. Maybe Apple gets a discount?
|
| Apple may have been a founding member, but they don't own
| ARM, and I'm assuming that ARM still wants to make a
| profit off of its licenses to Apple.
| please-reread wrote:
| "perceptual licensing agreement" ? Could you clarify in what
| sense the agreement is "perceptual"?
| missedthecue wrote:
| pretty certain he means perpetual
| Nokinside wrote:
| As I understand it the value for Nvidia came from adding Nvidia
| GPU IP into the products that AMD sells to customers.
|
| Nvidia would have expanded the market from their own products
| to licenses.
| actuator wrote:
| Have their profitability prospects taken a hit because of
| whatever happened at ARM China?
| ksec wrote:
| We dont know because Softbank no longer breaks out those
| number in 2018/2019. But they do give some insight into the
| level of growth so we could extrapolate from previous year or
| quarters.
|
| And generally speaking Softbank ( and ARM ) refuse to comment
| on anything about ARM China.
|
| But that is a good point, it is a potential risk or at least
| need to be mindful in its valuation.
| klelatti wrote:
| FWIW Arm still files accounts in the UK (apparently for the
| Group).
|
| https://find-and-update.company-
| information.service.gov.uk/c...
|
| Latest is 2020/21. Profits down to PS7m due to higher R&D
| and other expenses.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Intel have been ARM licensees and made ARM chips before
| (StrongARM which they acquired, XScale which they developed).
|
| They've always managed to display ambivalence about it. We
| should be glad they never owned ARM and hopefully never will;
| they'd have killed it with indifference.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| If you don't mind me asking, where do you keep your wealth
| then? Property? Commodities?
| [deleted]
| ZetaZero wrote:
| Disclosures: I've closely followed Nvidia for 15+ years, and
| own stock.
|
| I feel Jensen and Nvidia still, very strongly, wanted to do the
| deal. The deal increased in value to $87bn only because NVDA's
| stock price increased that much. The real costs to Nvidia did
| not increase.
|
| ARM is a legitimate competitor to x86, which Nvidia wanted to
| control.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The real cost to Nvidia is $87bn. Value is denominated in
| dollars, not nvidia stock.
| ZetaZero wrote:
| If the value is denominated in dollars, why did the
| acquisition price go up from 40B to $87B as the price of
| the stock rose?
|
| From the source:
|
| https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-
| for... "The number of NVIDIA shares to be issued at closing
| is 44.3 million" [this is the pre-split amount]
| [deleted]
| colinmhayes wrote:
| If I agree to sell you my house in 10 years, and ten
| years later the house is worth 10x as much, but every
| other house is only worth twice as much did the value of
| the deal change?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >The deal increased in value to $87bn only because NVDA's
| stock price increased that much.
|
| I get what you're saying, but in practice, NVDA was
| essentially issuing x shares to buy ARM. They could do the
| same thing, sell them, and keep the cash. The rising stock
| price very much did raise the "real" cost to NVDA, it just
| wasn't a simple cash charge.
|
| Put alternatively, NVDA basically said to ARM "you're worth
| x% of our company." While that may be true at one date, a
| deal struck at the new market cap would be unlikely to come
| to the same conclusion.
| ZetaZero wrote:
| Yeah, NVDA could sell the shares on the market, and buy
| with cash. In practice, selling that many shares tends to
| cause downward pressure on the stock price. But it is an
| option.
|
| That said, Nvidia was still trying hard to make the deal
| work, even at that price. Jensen strongly believed the deal
| would be worth many multiples of the acquisition cost.
| wbl wrote:
| ARM licenses are mostly for complete cores and associated IP
| blocks that work on your process. No reason they can't make
| RISC-V ones.
| ant6n wrote:
| But Intel has a P/E of 9.91, they must be teetering on the
| brink of bankruptcy!
| Wronnay wrote:
| It's really funny how the market thinks that Intel isn't in
| the game anymore.
|
| They may not be as energy efficient as M1 or ARM chips but
| they certainly show that they are still a competition and
| invest a lot of money to improve their performance.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| The thing is, the market can be right without knowing why
| it is right.
|
| The market thinks that in some fixed, relatively near point
| in the future we will look back at now and say "Intel was
| already hosed, it just didn't know it".
|
| It may be that the market is currently only expressing
| interest in the hopes of others that this particular future
| will come to pass, but that is the only way it will.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| But they really haven't. We've not seen hide nor hair of
| the new process, only iterative improvements on the current
| process, and the attempt at big.LITTLE x86-style doesn't
| seem to have worked out terribly well.
|
| ARM has taken out the low-power market that Atom and
| Pentium classes were aiming at. AMD APUs have long been a
| favorite of mid-power devices like gaming consoles and are
| now a desktop enthusiast favorite as well. The i5/i7 class
| is outmatched in every metric ($/FLOP, W/$, and W/FLOP) by
| the Ryzen series. IBM and Azure placed their big chip
| refresh orders with AMD as well, so the hyperscaler market
| is in danger. The only place Xeons are still superior is
| the scientific and high computing space, and Threadripper
| is making inroads there as well.
|
| Intel still has great sales from existing cashflows and OEM
| agreements, but if you were buying a computer in 2022, why
| choose Intel? Why would its customers? I think they're
| going to have to come up with something new and soon.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > The i5/i7 class is outmatched in every metric ($/FLOP,
| W/$, and W/FLOP) by the Ryzen series.
|
| This isn't really true though. Alder lake performance is
| better than Ryzen 5x at pretty much all price points.
| Alder lake's electricity usage is rough, but desktop
| users don't care. Now ryzen is a year behind intel, and
| who knows how their next offering will fare, but saying
| they've outmatched intel in every metric just isn't true.
| paulmd wrote:
| > and are now a desktop enthusiast favorite as well. The
| i5/i7 class is outmatched in every metric ($/FLOP, W/$,
| and W/FLOP) by the Ryzen series.
|
| maybe a couple years ago, at this point Intel is
| dominating the gaming market, competing in the
| productivity market despite having fewer cores (i.e. more
| potent cores), are at least matching Zen3 efficiency
| (except i9, but you said i5/i7) if not beating
| (particularly at lower power budgets due to infinity
| fabric overhead). Ryzen has absolutely lost favor with
| the enthusiast market due to the significant price
| increases (in some segments, a 50% increase over last
| generation) and the refusal to chop prices to remain
| competitive with intel (justified with "but they can make
| more money selling Epyc", which is great for them but it
| doesn't make their products competitive for me as a
| consumer either).
|
| And AMD has _completely_ abandoned the value market... i3
| 12100F is listed for $110 at Best Buy (iGPU version is
| $140), and Intel is in the process of rolling out
| Celerons for even cheaper rigs (will be nice for HTPC
| with that iGPU). AMD 's cheapest processor has a $300
| MSRP and they won't budge on pricing at all given their
| focus on the server market.
|
| go look at a tech enthusiast forum and nobody is
| recommending Ryzen anymore. It's overpriced, it no longer
| has a performance or efficiency advantage (in fact it's
| rather flopped the other way), and AMD would rather
| address the server market instead.
|
| this has really shifted in the last 6 months since Alder
| Lake launched, but really there was a significant niche
| for recommending 10-series as a budget option given the
| significant price advantage over AMD. The thing that
| changed with Alder Lake is that Intel moved back into the
| performance lead (and matched efficiency) and prices
| remained the same - leaving them both better and cheaper
| than AMD. Thing have changed, people don't recommend AMD
| anymore unless you have a very specific need (like you're
| buying a 5950X).
|
| Also APUs in particular are rather a flop on desktop. AMD
| didn't even bother releasing a 7nm APU to the consumer
| market until... September last year? Up until then it was
| all 12nm quad-core garbage - and that's GloFo 12nm, so
| more like Intel 22nm. On top of that, the APUs also had
| reduced IPC compared to the CPUs of their equivalent
| architecture (due to less cache). All of the hype around
| Ryzen was around the non-APU enthusiast chips with no
| onboard graphics, the APUs were never popular in the
| desktop segment.
|
| The APUs are nice if you are building a SFF rig with no
| discrete GPU... but they have a lot of compromises -
| reduced IPC, PCIe 3.0, and up until September they didn't
| have any that weren't limited to PCIe 3.0x8 (5000G series
| moves this to 3.0x16). They have no HDMI 2.1 support, no
| HDMI VRR support, no AV1 support, and the worst hardware
| encoder (i.e. Teams videoconferencing quality/etc) on the
| market. If you really want a gaming-focused SFF rig with
| iGPU only, they are the best available, but they were
| never _popular_ , and AMD never really pushed them the
| way they did the enthusiast chips.
|
| (HEDT is another segment that's been abandoned... AMD
| still has not released Zen3 processors, it's been 16
| months now, and who knows whether AMD will try the same
| "release it for pro but not for consumer" crap again like
| they did with the APUs.)
| samwillis wrote:
| Wanted to see where your brilliant phrase "Riscy Silver Bullet"
| was from so had a google, I think you are trying to start a
| trend ;-)
|
| > ksec 67 days ago
|
| > The unwritten rule of HN:
|
| > You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy
| Silver Bullet.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29422032
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Those RISC-V supporters are so annoying. They never seem to
| understand the difference between an open-source _instruction
| set_ , versus an open-source _chip_ which anyone can
| synthesize, versus closed-source drivers for an open-source
| instruction set which contains closed-source additional
| instructions.
|
| RISC-V literally has no "openness" advantage over ARM other
| than that there's no licensing fee. Apple could make a RISC-V
| chip and use it in their iPhones and it would be just as
| locked down as their ARM chips.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yeah as a rust user and believer even I cringe at some rust
| crusaders, I've seen the same for RISC V as well :(
| miloignis wrote:
| One is required for the other, though - you're not going to
| get any good open hardware for a closed ISA, and RISC-V and
| OpenPOWER seem to be the two shots we've got. We
| practically need an open ISA to succeed as a prerequisite
| for open hardware to do the same.
| klelatti wrote:
| If by open hardware you mean open source chip then yes
| but I'm not sure that 1. that's a big advantage for users
| or 2. going to happen at the leading edge of CPU design
| where most of us actually do our computing. It takes real
| money to design and test a high performance CPU and (even
| for RISC-V) an open source ISA does not mean an open
| source chip.
| sylware wrote:
| This is weird, when you think that RISC-V is getting more
| momentum everyday, even with open source CPUs, why 100bn in ARM??
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Good. Though it is a shame they couldn't have done this _before_
| Softbank acquired them.
| benreesman wrote:
| My memory might fail me, but I think the compiler wizards were
| building all the core FB stuff on aarch64 back in like 2014-2015
| or something.
|
| Someone saw further down the road than I did.
| taffronaut wrote:
| Your memory is good. The bug to port FB's HipHopVM to aarch64
| was raised in 2013[1]
|
| [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/linaro-aarch64/+bug/1099824
| InTheArena wrote:
| Does anyone believe that this IPO has value, when ARM china has
| already been stolen and Apple has a perpetual technology license?
| chasil wrote:
| If ARM debuts all future designs under 10nm, then ARM China is
| out of the game (for now), unless they want to try to backport
| to 14. Some useful contract language will also forbid access to
| ARM's customers.
|
| ARM processors are also in many, many things besides Apple
| products.
| ekianjo wrote:
| So now after the IPO, Nvidia can buy a controlling part in ARM or
| do a hostile takeover.
| gpderetta wrote:
| it would still need to be approved by regulators.
| ykl wrote:
| Buying a controlling stake in ARM or a hostile takeover would
| still trigger the same regulatory vetting that caused the deal
| to be called off in the first place.
| judge2020 wrote:
| JoachimS wrote:
| 1.25 BUSD to keep their ARM license. Pretty sweet deal there
| Nvidia...
| rocketChair wrote:
| Thank god for that.
| snissn wrote:
| i only read stories of softbank failures.. are they ok?
| JoachimS wrote:
| From a pure business perspective, their record looks bad, and
| may be hard to understand. This article about Softbank may be
| worth reading.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-21/explainin...
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > before March 2023.
|
| Why does it take so long? I would be pretty surprised if they
| aren't already operating with audited GAAP financials, etc etc.
| Or is the extended date a hedge against market conditions, to
| avoid having to announce a delay.
| hikingsimulator wrote:
| An IPO takes a really long time to initiate, draft, and
| conclude -- from legal due diligences, to investment banking
| drafts or market scouting, and securing early buyers.
| Investment banks kind of bid on the right to do the IPO for
| instance, each offering their own kind of package for ARM to go
| with.
|
| M&A departments in New York or London must have been (or still
| be) pulling all-nighters.
| coob wrote:
| Is it an IPO if they've already previously been public?
| mise_en_place wrote:
| Yes, that doesn't change anything. Many companies have been
| taken private that were public, and then went public again.
| Your choice for going public is either an SPAC or an IPO/DPO.
| Slartie wrote:
| Maybe we should call it a Secondary Public Offering then.
| iam-TJ wrote:
| I was just writing something similar after some research when
| I found this existing thread. Maybe we should refer to these
| public-private-public carousels as PEPOs (Private Equity
| Public Offering) ? :P
|
| Pedantic nit: not quite an IPO (Initial Public Offering) in
| its true sense since the original ARM Holdings was already a
| _public_ limited company (PLC) before Softbank bought it from
| its shareholders in 2016. The trading entity and group parent
| is Arm Ltd, a private limited company formed in 1990 [0].
|
| There is however a currently dormant Arm Holdings Ltd [1]
| incorporated in 2018 which may be converted to a public
| company so it would be the first time this legal entity has
| been publicly listed.
|
| [0] https://find-and-update.company-
| information.service.gov.uk/c...
|
| [1] https://find-and-update.company-
| information.service.gov.uk/c...
| kitd wrote:
| YAPO? "Yet another public offering"
| qeternity wrote:
| HWGA - here we go again
| parenthesis wrote:
| Stock market flotation.
| NetBeck wrote:
| "Returning to the market" were similar headlines when Dell went
| public again.[0][1][2]
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dell-ipo-idUSKCN1OR14E
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/dell-returns-to-public-
| equity-m...
|
| [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18159305/dell-stock-
| mark...
| anshumankmr wrote:
| I think there is a term for this: Follow-on Public offering
| (FPO
| samwillis wrote:
| Hopefully it will end back on the LSE, there was much lamenting
| here in the UK when SoftBank acquired them. They are one of the
| UKs biggest tech success, one of our few "unicorns". For them to
| be be back on the LSE it would be a good signal of strength in UK
| tech.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if there is some lobbying going on behind
| the scenes from the UK government to try and ensure it happens.
| Some strategic tax brakes or regional investment.
|
| With the governments (somewhat controversial) investment in
| OneWeb last year they have shown they have a uk tech strategy.
| Although I think that was Dominic Cummings doing and he's well
| out of the picture.
| nly wrote:
| The UK gov is keen for Revolut (another SoftBank investment) to
| IPO in London as well, but it looks like they're trying to
| court Americans so they can make a bigger splash there.
| jakey_bakey wrote:
| Absolutely no chance Revolut lists in London. They're super
| globally-focused and the founder wouldn't take the loss.
|
| Starling bank on the other hand, is a great prospect. It's
| still founder-controlled, UK-focused, and would be able to
| join the FTSE 250/100 quite easily where the S&P is beyond
| its reach.
| actuator wrote:
| Why would LSE listing be a loss? Would capital that moves
| in the US markets have any problem coming to the UK one if
| they see a good prospect?
| robbiep wrote:
| This is a bit of a take on the current dynamics -
| https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/01/29/britains-
| newly-...
| flipbrad wrote:
| Does it matter where it IPOs?
| nly wrote:
| It's a Brexit anxiety thing. If a big boy like ARM goes
| public in London the PM can wave the flag on TV and say we're
| world class.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| It is important with or without brexit.
| rwmj wrote:
| The most important thing is where are the jobs. Where it
| lists is of minor concern, except for people desperate
| for "Brexit wins".
| LightG wrote:
| Yep, but it's no guarantee ARM will list on the LSE
| considering recent UK EV maker Arrival crossed the pond for
| a decent IPO.
| OJFord wrote:
| For governments, exchanges, indices, certain investors, and
| economies yes.
| jayflux wrote:
| Companies like to IPO where there's high volume, and LSE
| doesn't have much compared to US exchanges. Sadly it's a
| chicken + egg problem because LSE is left with older, more
| legacy UK companies, making it less attractive for modern
| tech companies to list in.
|
| The LSE could really do with this as a boost and to break the
| cycle. But this will IPO in the US.
| marticode wrote:
| Not only liquidity but valuation for tech companies are
| typically better in the US for some reason.
| kmlx wrote:
| > one of our few "unicorns"
|
| "There are currently 37 private $1b+ businesses headquartered
| in the UK--a further 14 have exited, whilst 2 are no longer
| active
|
| 13 UK companies became unicorns in H1 2021--the largest
| concentration of new unicorns to date"
|
| from: https://www.beauhurst.com/research/unicorn-companies/
| modernpink wrote:
| A lot of these seem to be consumer retail, e-commerce or
| housing related which says a lot about the UK economic
| landscape. Hardly the kind of company ARM would want to be
| swimming amongst.
| samwillis wrote:
| True and really it's not a Unicorn as it's been public
| before.
|
| You inspired me to have a look at how many "Unicorns" are in
| the US for comparison. Depending on source it's between about
| 400-480 in the US. So about 12x as many with about 4.8x the
| population.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Or about 12x as many with 11x GDP.
| flerchin wrote:
| It's not clear to me, and I'm sure folks here would know. It
| seems possible that the ARM IPO could end up raising quite a bit
| less than the Nvidia deal. Couldn't Nvidia buy a majority of ARM
| shares on the open market, at a discount, with no regulatory
| oversight?
| klelatti wrote:
| No. At a certain level of ownership (less than 50%) they would
| be forced to make a full bid and the regulators would step in
| again and block.
| inerte wrote:
| I think it's interesting how selling Arm to Nvidia or going IPO
| are _wildly_ different and I think SoftBank doesn't mind what
| happens to the company as long as they get their return. I mean,
| at the end of the day financiers will finance but if you're Arm
| employee this must be a pretty wild ride.
| BluSyn wrote:
| SoftBank is desperate for capital due to recent bad bets. ARM
| is one of the most valuable assets they have. As for ARM
| itself, this probably isn't the best path forward, and neither
| option would even be considered if it weren't for SoftBank's
| current predicament.
| jakey_bakey wrote:
| It's weird, according to the FT they only want the capital to
| finance share buybacks. So, basically, they want to prop up
| their share price.
| dannyw wrote:
| yes, that is the core premise of a company.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I didn't see that article, but that seems to be a two-step
| process for SoftBank to sell their shares on the open
| market without spoiling the market by public ally divesting
| themselves of shares. They sell new shares, then use the
| money that generates to buy a percentage of SoftBanks
| shares.
| selimnairb wrote:
| This is why financial engineering and ultimately all
| Money-Money transactions are ultimately nihilistic and
| boring. Who cares how much money you have if you aren't
| doing new/innovative/interesting things?
| perfopt wrote:
| You are right. They want to buy back shares. But it is also
| true that some of their bets like Didi and Wework did not
| do well. Also, they have money invested in China which
| seems stuck (just like many others I suppose).
| rubatuga wrote:
| People thought blocking this acquisition will result in more
| competition overall. Unfortunately, letting the stock market
| control ARMs actions will still lead to anti-competitive
| actions harming you as a customer. Not sure if blocking the
| merger will be overall better.
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