[dcow]

Well if the original creator of this thread had replied in-thread to my other comment, then I wouldn't have felt the need to engage in two different spots. I agree it's annoying.

Anyway I can't help but feel the argument is pretty loose on demonstrating that Nvidia would be in a position to harm the market in a substantial way. Usually the law is enforced reactively to punish bad/unwanted behavior. We preemptively prevent mergers that would result in no real competition existing in a market, in other words: a monopoly. We do that because it's bad for consumers. You can echo the FTC's statements about how having leverage over other market participants might be harmful all you want, but the reality is that they don't explain how Nvidia owning ARM creates a monopoly (is akin to something like Intel owning ARM) and then how that is inherently bad for fundamentally bad for consumers. Nvidia owning arm looks like savvy business at best and at worst annoying and disruptive to some people who put most of their eggs in the ARM basket. I see how it could in theory have an effect on some competition to have this type of vertical integration happen, but is that substantial to the point of Nvidia being a monopoly on microprocessors and consumers left abused and holding the bag? That's quite the claim.

AMD competes with Intel and Intel is similarly vertically integrated. AMD even makes graphics cards after merging with ATI and that didn't kill any markets or harm consumers, if anything AMD graphics has become more competitive. Intel is entering the graphics card space. Personally I'd love to see another player in the processor space. Right now it's Intel and AMD and now Apple. Why wouldn't an Nvidia N2 ARM SOC that competes with the Apple M1 be a good thing? IDK I see potential consumer benefits to Nvidia being able to run with ARM. I can't help but feel like we're straining here under the guise of "big tech is big and bad let's punish them all".

Anyway probably at the end of the utility of going back an forth on wether the merger substantially lessens competition to the point of causing consumer harm. We'll see what the courts decide.

[eganist]

I mean, ARM is basically the only game in town when it comes to mobile chips. Combine that with nvidia's graphics technologies and now you've got basically the entire market for XR devices (I reject the use of 'metaverse' in this context) cornered.

It's one case out of many where suddenly a defacto market leader emerges with almost no room for other entrants, whereas at least without the merger device makers can source silicon from arm licensors as well as from AMD, NVDA, and INTC (soon-ish) for solid graphics components.