[dragontamer]

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".

[paulmd]

> 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.

[dragontamer]

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.

--------

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.

[RantyDave]

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.

[yyyk]

>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.

[rtpg]

> 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.

[whatshisface]

Why does SoftBank's desperation make NVIDIA pay too much?