Rumour has it Nvidia if they were pushing for buyout would be a cash and stock based purchase using their >100% rally in their share price in the last year. I agree Nvidia buying ARM would kill a lot of the innovation and creativity we are currently seeing, but might push RISC-V forwards in development and use if so. In other news, Microsoft shows interest in buying tik tok........

Khronikos:

Nvidia is not going to be left behind regardless lol. The GPU market has very little to do with the CPU market overall. APUs for the consoles are also sold at lower profit margins. They don't "need" to do anything of the sort atm to maintain their GPU leads. Their brand is incredibly strong. Anything can change obviously, but as of now Nvidia is still a top choice for GPU for many reasons too numerous to list.

Nvidia would never get into the console market again. First of all both companies do not want to touch NVidia ever again after 360 & PS3 debacles. Also MS will need x86 APU for the DXR/DX12-13 to build it's ecosystem across PC & console. It doesn't want to get it splintered again with different APIs and porting.

Nvidia wants ARM and will get it. arm architecture is a lot better than x64 or x86 ARM is made in such a way multi cpu systems can functions easy on the other hand this crap we use now limits us with serial processing pipe line processing ARM= Advanced RISC Machine which means that it uses RISC Arm's ability to share workloads across high- and low-performance CPU cores is a boon for energy efficiency. If they do get ARM be a new cpu player in town.

ARM and x86 are ISAs not architectures. And internally all modern x86 CPUs use RISC microcode implementation since 2 and a half decades (intel P6?). They starting using RISC microcode inside 6 years before GPUs did (with Shader Model 1.4, before they used CISC for shaders). Using x86 as ISA is a big-win for Intel, AMD & co, it allows running the binaries without almost no compatibility issues (some very minor issues may apply but are left to compilers and OS kernel-driver teams), there are no performance penalties on the x86 to micro-code translations and that allows custom optimization on every architecture without breaking things.

Nvidia already has an ARM cpu which is their own core design (Project Denver), so I don't expect anything to change from that aspect. I can see Nvidia expanding on their own capability to create systems using their own GPU's and CPU's, much like Apple plans to do. From the software angle Cuda is already available for use on ARM for AI and HPC applications. During the 4 year period SoftBank owned ARMS revenues rose from 1.2 billion to 1.9 billion, so it should not be too much of a stretch for Nvidia to buy ARMS.

So why does Nvidia want ARM so bad ? for them to get into the phone market ? They will be in everything.

Martin5000:

So why does Nvidia want ARM so bad ? for them to get into the phone market ? They will be in everything.

Servers It essentially fast tracts them to compete with AMD/Intel in super computing contracts they are currently losing out on. They have some experience with ARM in Denver but it's a farcry from what's required in the server CPU space. ARM has a ton of really good engineering talent and already has a functioning design/engineer team in place. It's way faster to just buy it then build your own.

H83:

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...

I very much doubt that something as basic as this flies over the heads of EU overlords. Why would EU want to bet their houses during schizo moment US/China are going through. Let them deal with it.

i dont like this move at all, a consolidation of technology and interdependent software designs on a single entity. Why not bail out of this as a win situation heh ARM?

Martin5000:

So why does Nvidia want ARM so bad ? for them to get into the phone market ? They will be in everything.

My gut feeling is both for servers and small robots for streamlining industry. I also wonder if this is a move to control ARM so that it doesn't undercut its GPU server market where they can artificially maintain prices. Recently lots of custom silicon coming out claiming to deliver similar AI performance to Nvidia GPU setup at significantly less money, like the new A64FX

I think Nvidia waited a bit too long tbh. I said years ago they should've bought them. The benefit for me is that at some point in the near future we're going to see Win10 Arm apps and when the big corps get on-board it's going to change the way I'm able to use Win10 forever. Download options for x86, OSX and ARM is not just a possibility, it's going to become reality.

Fediuld:

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.

Not quite... 3DFX was dead 'because' of Nvidia and it's aggressive product cycle... Nvidia came in a bought up the IP after it was dead as a dodo... 😀 *and regarding 'Ageia' their secret sauce was more a 'formula/calculation' hence nvidia bundled it 'into' their 'software' 'to the delight' of its customers -- back then, did we really need another 'physical' component in a PC? CPU, GPU, North-bridge, South-Bridge, Soundblaster Card, Physx???

Fediuld:

Nvidia would never get into the console market again. First of all both companies do not want to touch NVidia ever again after 360 & PS3 debacles. Also MS will need x86 APU for the DXR/DX12-13 to build it's ecosystem across PC & console. It doesn't want to get it splintered again with different APIs and porting.

I wouldn't be so sure..., from my recollection Microsoft still own the 'golden share' of Nvidia.. which boils down to "If anybody tries to buy Nvidia, Microsoft just need to match the bid to take ownership" I like to think of it as an insurance policy for MS against Intel and it's old x86 'strongarm tactics'.... or going back to the MS and IBM era.., what's more important Hardware or Software? If Hardware, MS takes ownership of nvidia and is 'king of the hill' especially if nvidia own ARM IP at the time. *NOTE: the new Microsoft Surface Pro x (which is ARM based) already emulates 32-bit x86 for software... how hard it it for MS to give AMD a few dollars for the license to x86-64 that they created?

Stormyandcold:

I think Nvidia waited a bit too long tbh. I said years ago they should've bought them. The benefit for me is that at some point in the near future we're going to see Win10 Arm apps and when the big corps get on-board it's going to change the way I'm able to use Win10 forever. Download options for x86, OSX and ARM is not just a possibility, it's going to become reality.

Surface Pro X running on ARM already runs 32-bit x86 software... native ARM apps would be better but 'people and corporations' are set in their ways, so we need little hops towards utopia.. 😀

The question now is whether this will be good for ARM or the opportunity for risc-v to grow.

Except that RISC-V is not compatible with ARM ISAs, it's a different ISA

Yes its different, but it is open and anyone can use it. It would be a very important change like switching in windows from x86 to arm. For mobiles it would also be a major jump but from then on we would be using an open cpu architecture.

schmidtbag:

If they follow through on this, I'm not sure how I feel about it. On one hand, Nvidia will do a better job - their engineers are good and they have the money to speed up the development of ARM (I just hope they don't ruin ARM's efficiency). ARM's Mali graphics are crap and should Nvidia ditch those graphics for their own, that will make ARM much more accessible for tinkerers and hobbyists who want to run more than just Android or a headless system. Nvidia might also make ARM servers more appealing, and, their software developers will make good SDKs and APIs, as they always do. On the other hand, Nvidia is greedy and pushy. They could make ARM inaccessible to many of the current licensees (especially Qualcomm) and add a bunch of proprietary nonsense to the architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if the price of all ARM chips goes up, especially since their main competitors (MIPS and RISC-V) are already really far behind.

There are lots of funny comments, I understand that many like to see the tech industry in a overly romanticized way but things aren't so simple to be divided in good and evil, it's more like different shade of gray and there are also wolfs in sheep's clothing... It's interesting you are worried for Qualcomm when they was them that have been fined for anti-competitive practices for selling SoC bundled with modems at artificially low prices to push emerging competition (NVIDIA and modem made by Intel to name the biggest) out of the market... Anyway, I would really like to know what kind of "proprietary nonsense" NVIDIA would plan to add to an already proprietary ISA (yes, ARM ISA is proprietary), maybe some proprietary extension?... 🙄 You probably don't know but NVIDIA is one of the main RISC-V supporter and the first to use it in a high performance mass produced product (Volta, Turing and I think even Pascal use RISC-V for GPU internal controller)

Ne1l:

This would allow Nvidia to put the hooks in place to easily integrate Infiniband and their latest GPU architecture via a SOC ala PS5 / Series X.. they just need to create/use some universal backplane (www.opencompute.org?) and future 'system' upgrades could be like swapping out a GPU or sliding out a node from a BladeCenter.

Why they would need to use InfiniBand which is an internode (to connect computers) communication protocol when they have NVLink that is a intranode (to connect processors) protocol?

H83:

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...

It's not completely clear but I think that when you write Europe you mean the Union, ARM is a UK company so the EU can't do much

UK is still in EU and there is still no deal at all so, or they will wait UK will leave EU, or they will have to deal with EU.

Fediuld:

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.

You seems a bit confused... Intel doesn't have any ARM processor and AMD never really entered the market with it's 2014 (ARM A57) Opteron, both companies are careful not to undermine the kindergarten that is x86 for them. Please let us see this horrible track record, NVIDIA bought what remained of 3DFX after it gone bankrupt (and most of their IP was already gone to pay debt), they bought Ageia after Intel acquired Havok to halt the development of GPU acceleration (which worked on both AMD and NVIDIA) and AMD was interested to do the same. Waiting on a track record with real stuff, not rumor or biased memories...

Fediuld:

Nvidia would never get into the console market again. First of all both companies do not want to touch NVidia ever again after 360 & PS3 debacles

Why? what debacles? They are in the NINTENDO Switch and the X360 had an AMD's GPU, the real reason AMD won in both consoles is that they offered prices so low to be virtually unprofitable for them with the purpose of pushing NVIDIA out of that market (which is a nice one since there is no competition at all), consider that despite the PS4 alone sold more than 100M unit they almost gone bankrupt and they had to sell their headquarter building to survive...

moo100times:

I agree Nvidia buying ARM would kill a lot of the innovation and creativity we are currently seeing, but might push RISC-V forwards in development and use if so.

o_O Yea, they clearly killed innovation and creativity... proof is that AMD is 2 years ahead in technology and they have the performance leadership 🙄 NVIDIA in the meantime is one of the main RISC-V supporter and use it on any GPU from Volta and up, they offer RT and AI acceleration in their product and support the latest DX and Vulkan API since 2018, not to mention their GPU are even slightly more power efficient even if they are made on a slightly improved 16nm process while the competition have a full node advantage with 7nm... Yea, I totally agree, it really look a company that kill innovation and creativity...

Martin5000:

So why does Nvidia want ARM so bad ? They will be in everything.

Denial:

Servers

This. They'll be able to supply a big part of supercomputers then.

Stefem:

o_O Yea, they clearly killed innovation and creativity... proof is that AMD is 2 years ahead in technology and they have the performance leadership 🙄 NVIDIA in the meantime is one of the main RISC-V supporter and use it on any GPU from Volta and up, they offer RT and AI acceleration in their product and support the latest DX and Vulkan API since 2018, not to mention their GPU are even slightly more power efficient even if they are made on a slightly improved 16nm process while the competition have a full node advantage with 7nm... Yea, I totally agree, it really look a company that kill innovation and creativity...

ARM isn't open source, RISC-V is. ARM going under Nvidia's control is like to be more tightly controlled than ARM simply licensing it to everyone, and that probably still will be less than RISC-V ISA's being available as open source. Thus, ARM being under tight control will probably stifle innovation using this tech. Looking at Nvidia's business tactics, they are aggressive in trying to control and manage their market, and make it difficult for contenders to enter with a variety of proprietary layers and cost barriers. I imagine they would do the same with ARM, particularly as one of Softbank's rumoured reasons for selling may be related to profit from ARM - estimated 1.9 Billion USD last financial year up from 1.2 Billion in 2016, while Nvidia have tripled theirs in the same time frame. Not sure what AMD has to do with your or this argument.