It wouldn't have been good if any of the people who could actually afford to buy ARM did so.
Would you rather have TSMC in control of ARM? Maybe have access to new architectures bundled with a mandate that you have to build them on TSMC's processes?
How about Samsung? All of the fab ownership concerns of TSMC plus they also make basically any tech product you care to name, so all the integration concerns of NVIDIA.
Consider one of NVidia's rivals: AMD, who uses an ARM chip in their EPYC line of chips as a security co-processor. Does anyone expect NVidia to "play fair" with such a rival?
ARM as an independent company, has been profoundly "neutral", allowing many companies to benefit from the ARM instruction set. It has been run very well: slightly profitable and an incremental value to all parties involved (be you Apple's iPhone, NVidia's Tegra (aka Nintendo Switch chip), AMD's EPYC, Qualcomm's Snapdragon, numerous hard drive companies, etc. etc.). All in all, ARM's reach has been because of its well-made business decisions that have been fair to all parties involved.
NVidia, despite all their technical achievements, is known to play hardball from a business perspective. I don't think anyone expects NVidia to remain "neutral" or "fair".
> Consider one of NVidia's rivals: AMD, who uses an ARM chip in their EPYC line of chips as a security co-processor. Does anyone expect NVidia to "play fair" with such a rival?
Yes, absolutely.
NVIDIA's not going to burn the ARM ecosystem to the ground. They just paid $40 billion for it. And they only had $11b of cash on hand, they really overpaid for it (because SoftBank desperately needed a big win to cover for their other recent losses).
Now: will everybody (including AMD) probably be paying more for their ARM IP from now on? Yes.
When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems for $7.4 Billion, did you expect Oracle to burn Solaris to the ground, and turn their back on MySQL's open source philosophy? Then sue Google for billions of dollars over the Java / Android thing?
Or more recently, when Facebook bought Oculus for $2 Billion, did you expect Facebook to betraying the customer's trust and start pushing Facebook logins?
The Oculus / Facebook login thin just happened weeks ago. Companies betraying the promises they made to their core audience is like... bread-and-butter at this point (and seems to almost always happen after an acquisition play). We know Facebook's modus operandi, and even if its worse for Oculus, we know that Facebook will do what Facebook does.
Similarly, we know NVidia's modus operandi. NVidia is trying to make a datacenter play and create a vertical company for high-end supercomputers. Such a strategy means that NVidia will NOT play nice with their rivals: Intel or AMD. (And the Mellanox acquisition is just icing on the cake now).
NVidia will absolutely leverage ARM to gain dominance in the datacenter. That's the entire point of this purchase.
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There's a story about scorpions and swimming with one on your back. I'm sure you've heard of it before. Just because its necessary for the scorpion's survival doesn't mean it is safe to trust the scorpion.
I'm not at all surprised they killed Solaris. Given that Oracle was pretty much the only software that ran on Solaris (or that there might be a good reason to run on Solaris), maybe it was just a big support headache. As for MySQL? Not surprised at all. They pretty much just bought a brand name, maybe just to spite red hat.
>When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems for $7.4 Billion, did you expect Oracle
Yes, yes, and yes. This is Oracle we're talking about. Of course they'll invest more in lawyers than tech. The only reason they still invest in Java is the lawsuit potential. If only Google had the smarts to buy Sun instead...
As for NVidia, their play probably is integration and datacenters. At the moment, going after other ARM licencees will hinder NVidia more than help (they're going after x86, no time to waste on bad PR and legal issues with small time ARM datacenter licencees; Qualcomm and Apple are in a different segment altogether). Of course, we can't guarantee it stays that way.
> Or more recently, when Facebook bought Oculus for $2 Billion, did you expect Facebook to betraying the customer's trust and start pushing Facebook logins?
yes? I mean that felt eminently possible from the get-go.
An independent ARM that did not manufacture processors was the best outcome for everyone in the industry.
ARM being owned by an organisation deeply embedded in processor design and manufacturing, will now be licensing designs to competitors, as well as getting a lot of intel on its competitors.
ARM supercomputers were poised to take on Nvidia. Now its all one and the same.
As others have said, this will do wonders for RISC-V.
Conversely, Nvidia has done a solid job of advancing GPU performance even in the face of weak competition, and with their additional resources, ARM performance may advance even faster, and provide the first competition in decades to x86 in servers and desktops.
The tech may have advanced due to the insatiable hunger of machine learning, but the weak competition has meant pricing has not decreased as much as it should have or could have, only enough to move more GPUs. (nvidia biggest competitor are the GPUs they manufactured two years earlier).
Yes really. Performance that is cleverly hampered by RAM (and driver licensing) on the low end from an ML perspective. The only reason they can do this is because of lack of competition. The performance of 3000 series cards could be dramatically improved for large models at a modest increase in price if RAM was doubled.
It really is possible to be critical of a monopoly without disparaging the product itself. It is when a true competitor arises that we see the monopolist's true capabilities (see Intel and AMD).
Would you rather have TSMC in control of ARM? Maybe have access to new architectures bundled with a mandate that you have to build them on TSMC's processes?
How about Samsung? All of the fab ownership concerns of TSMC plus they also make basically any tech product you care to name, so all the integration concerns of NVIDIA.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Key-Apple-suppli...
Microsoft? Oracle? None of the companies who could have afforded to pay what Son wanted for Softbank were any better than NVIDIA.
There are a lot of good things that will come out of this as well. NVIDIA is a vibrant company compared to a lot of the others.