Rumor: NVIDIA is interested in purchasing ARM (updated)
Nvidia is said to be interested in obtaining chip designer Arm. That is what sources involved in this say to financial news agency Bloomberg. Last week it was revealed that SoftBank, the current owner of Arm, would be considering a sale.
Nvidia has, according to Bloomberg sources, approached Arm in recent weeks about a possible acquisition. According to the sources, other bidders could emerge, but details are not yet known. Four years ago ARM was acquired by Softbank for a sum of 29 billion euros, and since then the value raised. Nvidia may have the means to acquire ARM after having recently been listed higher than Intel, but whether Nvidia's interest will eventually lead to a deal with SoftBank remains to be seen. Should it come to this, it would be the largest takeover in the history of the chip industry. A takeover of Arm will be watched by numerous authorities as many companies depend on its technology. An acquisition of Arm by Nvidia will mean a shift in the market and increase Nvidia's chances of growing in different markets.
Updated: Bloomberg now reports that NVIDIA is in advanced talks:
-- Bloomberg --
Nvidia Corp. is in advanced talks to acquire Arm Ltd., the chip designer that SoftBank Group Corp. bought for $32 billion four years ago, according to people familiar with the matter.
The two parties aim to reach a deal in the next few weeks, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Nvidia is the only suitor in concrete discussions with SoftBank, according to the people.
A deal for Arm could be the largest ever in the semiconductor industry, which has been consolidating in recent years as companies seek to diversify and add scale. Cambridge, England-based Arm’s technology underpins chips in products including Apple Inc. devices and connected appliances.
No final decisions have been made, and the negotiations could drag on longer or fall apart, the people said. SoftBank may gauge interest from other suitors if it can’t reach an agreement with Nvidia, the people said. Representatives for Nvidia, SoftBank and Arm declined to comment.
Any deal with Nvidia, which is a customer of Arm, would likely trigger regulatory scrutiny as well as a wave of opposition from other users of the company’s technology. Other Arm clients could demand assurances that a new owner would continue providing equal access to Arm’s instruction set. Such concerns resulted in SoftBank, a neutral company, buying Arm the last time it was for sale.
A deal for Arm could become the biggest-ever acquisition in the chip industry, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Arm is owned by SoftBank and its $100 billion Vision Fund. The Japanese group bought Arm, which at the time was the U.K.’s largest listed technology company, for about $32 billion in 2016.
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Senior Member
Posts: 5872
Joined: 2004-01-28
Nvidia needs to develop APUs or be left behind by AMD and Intel.
This could happen.
I think it would be interesting if Nvidia and Intel had some kind of partnership to make custom APUs. I think from a business point of view it would make sense, that way both companies would get a jab at AMD.
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At times i look for "if" there 's any button//or some kinda for "Dislike"

............ need to think {OUT OF THE BOX}....
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I just remembered that with the current political climate between the US and China, Europe should buy ARM in order to have their own CPU maker and to be independent of the US and China regarding CPUs and their sorrouding infrastructure.
Europe should block any attempt of purchase from any company from the US or from China.
Unfortunetly this type of thinking is too much for the "geniuses" in Brussels that are more interested in wasting time with superflous stuff...
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Posts: 767
Joined: 2016-10-04
Nvidia needs to develop APUs or be left behind by AMD and Intel.
This could happen.
Nvidia can develop an MCM APU using ARM as we speak nothing stopping it. Intel, AMD and several others are making ARM CPUs as we speak for various uses from phones to laptops to servers.
As for Nvidia, is the worst company with a horrible track record on buying IPs and tech companies.
Lets not forget bought 3dfx just to kill the much better competitor, while bought Ageia to kill independent physX cards also removing support of the Ageia cards pretty quickly to the annoyance of their owners.
Lets not forget this.
Nvidia is been worse anti-consumer company than Intel and has the track record to prove so.
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I am really not sure why Nvidia thinks they need to own ARM. I know they are pushing HPC in some different directions so maybe this is part of that. What I mean by that is they are in the midst of porting CUDA to work on ARM CPUs and that could be huge for HPC. It would mean there is no need to transfer data between a co-processor and the CPU any more. Performance levels could take a significant leap. As we already know, ARM-based chips have been made with eighty cores on them and four-way symmetric multithreading. Imagine that kind of density in a multi-chip module, AMD-style. They could have literally hundreds of cores in a single module, if not thousands. That could make incredibly powerful supercomputers. I suspect this is where they want to go with ARM.