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by dippersauce
2110 days ago
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It simply wouldn’t make sense for NVidia to maliciously impose upon ARM after acquisition, as many of the commenters are concerned. I’m not saying they won’t, but because the present situation would limit any efforts to do so long enough that it would be futile.Consider the perpetual license agreements ARM holds with companies like Apple. These companies are best positioned to resist meddling with ARM. As an example Apple will forever have access to the ARM ISA, so NVidia can’t simply stop them from using existing designs. The processors Apple uses are all custom designs anyway. If future designs were purposely kneecapped, they could just improve their currently licensed designs until a suitable alternative is produced. Hindering future processor designs won’t hurt the biggest players in the short term, and in the long term it will only drive them to the competition. NVidia could take the approach of slowly drifting new designs to greater integration with their own GPUs in such a way that alternatives would be displaced - either by favor of NVidia GPUs or by the difficulty in using alternatives. This would be obvious though, and would again drive their users away. NVidia hasn’t had great success like they have had with GPUs in any other market. I see this as an opportunity to diversify and secure their future, and they want to take it. |
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- Will Nvidia sell you a license to A78 to enable you to continue to compete with Tegra or are you stuck on A77? - If you can't get a license to A78 where do you turn? RISC-V? Possibly but will you still have a business by the time a competitive RISC-V design emerges from somewhere?
The point is that Nvidia might play fair but the temptation to hinder those who compete directly with its own SoCs - where it will make a lot more money - will be great, and who will stop them if they do?