It sort of make sense for Nvidia's shareholders. The initial offering for ARM was only worth $38.5bn, which was already expensive due to SoftBank initial purchase price and not wanting for a loss. But at Nvidia's peak this deal was worth "$87bn". For a company that makes less than $2B in revenue and at best ~$300M in Operating Income. Remember this isn't something you can buy and milk the crap out of other market players. "Not a very British way of doing business" is A Direct Quote from ARM. ( Edit: Because of perceptual licensing agreement, for those unaware of how ARM business model works )
It didn't make sense how ARM was worth $22bn in 2016 on LSE, that has a PE100+ when I cant see how it could double its Net profit in the next 10 years, with a saner valuation of P/E 50. It make even less sense to me when Softbank bought it for $32bn. Didn't make any sense when Nvidia want it for $38.5bn, and later at $50bn+.
Now we are back to square one, how many investors, in the open market are willing to buy ARM's stock at a valuation of, let say the same $32bn as Softbank initially paid? Roughly P/E 100, assuming they managed to grow ARM business from 2018 at ~$220M operating income to $300M in 2021. I much rather bet on Intel if I had the money.
And of course many on HN will think ARM is worthless because the future is going to be the Riscy Silver Bullet.
Disclosures: I do not currently hold any stocks or Mutual Funds, Indexes and other financial instrument.
Those RISC-V supporters are so annoying. They never seem to understand the difference between an open-source instruction set, versus an open-source chip which anyone can synthesize, versus closed-source drivers for an open-source instruction set which contains closed-source additional instructions.
RISC-V literally has no "openness" advantage over ARM other than that there's no licensing fee. Apple could make a RISC-V chip and use it in their iPhones and it would be just as locked down as their ARM chips.
One is required for the other, though - you're not going to get any good open hardware for a closed ISA, and RISC-V and OpenPOWER seem to be the two shots we've got.
We practically need an open ISA to succeed as a prerequisite for open hardware to do the same.
If by open hardware you mean open source chip then yes but I’m not sure that 1. that’s a big advantage for users or 2. going to happen at the leading edge of CPU design where most of us actually do our computing. It takes real money to design and test a high performance CPU and (even for RISC-V) an open source ISA does not mean an open source chip.
Disclosures: I've closely followed Nvidia for 15+ years, and own stock.
I feel Jensen and Nvidia still, very strongly, wanted to do the deal. The deal increased in value to $87bn only because NVDA's stock price increased that much. The real costs to Nvidia did not increase.
ARM is a legitimate competitor to x86, which Nvidia wanted to control.
>The deal increased in value to $87bn only because NVDA’s stock price increased that much.
I get what you’re saying, but in practice, NVDA was essentially issuing x shares to buy ARM. They could do the same thing, sell them, and keep the cash. The rising stock price very much did raise the “real” cost to NVDA, it just wasn’t a simple cash charge.
Put alternatively, NVDA basically said to ARM “you’re worth x% of our company.” While that may be true at one date, a deal struck at the new market cap would be unlikely to come to the same conclusion.
Yeah, NVDA could sell the shares on the market, and buy with cash. In practice, selling that many shares tends to cause downward pressure on the stock price. But it is an option.
That said, Nvidia was still trying hard to make the deal work, even at that price. Jensen strongly believed the deal would be worth many multiples of the acquisition cost.
Yeah, without going too much into ad hominem, Jensen has been rewarded for not giving AF about what the markets think and focusing on R&D-heavy innovation (seriously listen him talk about how short-sighted the market is being about GPUs in 2012-2014).
The counterpoint ofc being (with Facebook/Meta being a great example), just because a CEO was once a visionary doesn't mean they are infallible.
If I agree to sell you my house in 10 years, and ten years later the house is worth 10x as much, but every other house is only worth twice as much did the value of the deal change?
You analysis is right on, and I agree with it. I predict however, the IPO will be an enormous success. Predict a valuation in the $40bn to $45bn with tops of $50bn....lets revisit this thread then ;-)
Those facts will:
- Disprove once more that story of the
market efficiency/price discovery bullshit,
will also confirm that:
- Benjamin Graham, Value Investing and Warren Buffet strategies were
made for other times. The times before we allowed that Central Banks
hijack our income streams and personal wealth.
Disclosure: As I write this, I also do not currently hold any stocks, Mutual Funds, Indexes and other financial instruments. Did in the past.
The longer I’m in the market the more I realize George Soros was completely correct with his theories on reflexivity.
> Reflexivity theory states that investors don't base their decisions on reality, but rather on their perceptions of reality instead.
Meme stocks, Covid crash, Tesla stock, the SP500 for the last decade, NFTs. None of it is priced correctly because humans are at heart greedy, fearful, irrational. I think the trick is to figure out how to use that to make money.
There's quite a bit of academic literature on the long term overvaluation and underperformance of "growth" and especially "small cap growth" stocks, sometimes explained by their popularity as pseudo lottery tickets. Over almost all rolling 25 year periods across the past century, "value" stocks (the X% of the market highest in current earnings, cash flow, etc.) outperform the broader market including these growth stocks. Search "the black hole of investing."
I am a little bit more optimistic now knowing they are going to US for its IPO instead of LSE. Which tends to host crazy valuation with much more volume and investor willing to bet on technologies. Still, not entirely convinced it could do $40bn+. I actually think there are enormous opportunity for GPU, but they dont seems to be interested.
I also sort of disagree with Value investing as a bygone era. It is just I have yet to see any one who does value investing actually understand anything about Tech. Because it is not something simple enough like Coca Cola or McDonald, so they are much harder to evaluate.
But Yes, it will be fun to revisit this thread then. :)
By buying ARM the owner gets control over an architecture that many describe as "the future of computing". That's much more valuable than whatever money ARM makes.
Let’s be real. ARM got a chance because it excelled in a very specific use case: low power. Unless RISC-V differentiates itself in a significant way, it won’t replace ARM.
> RISC-V seems to me to have two major opportunities.
> - Where a free ISA allows innovation and experimentation in a way that Arm would not permit.
I would say that the two major innovations of RISC-V are:
- Composability.
- Extensibility (that also fosters experimentation).
Each ARM version X.Y comes with a license and with a condition: «thou shalt taketh either everything or nothing»; RISC-V has neither a license nor strings attached and is «thou may useth only what thou needeth». Anyone who does not need SIMD or the vector processing can do away with them in the silicon. It saves the die size[0] and costs. This is the composability aspect.
Extensions planned out and/or reserved for future use (e.g. 128-bit extension of RISC-V), and the ability to add custom instructions to experiment with (and possible contribute to the RISC-V forum). This is the extensibility aspect.
Other existing open ISA (MIPS, POWER SuperH J-2? – unsure on the status of the last one) do not offer composability and extensibility capabilities, which leads me to reason that it is the major innovation(s) of RISC-V.
[0] Albeit it is somewhat fraught with the danger of creating a highly fragmented RISC-V CPU market where the software has to accommodate every possible permutation of RISC-V extensions and inject an emulation layer for extensions missing in the die.
Google maintains two parallel Android platforms right now, so the idea of porting everything over to a third is not _too_ far off. There's a lot of effort in getting JIT up-to-speed on RISC, but most everything else is a recompile away.
And JIT can come in later. But definition it's making runtime decisions on code generation, so being supported by optional extensions isn't the end of the world.
You seem to be knowledgeable about this, so I wanted to ask - is ARM more efficient (perf/watt) than Risk-V? (I know there are lots of factors like frequencies/voltages etc but keeping everything else constant)
ARM bigLITTLE exists to address different efficiencies that are exploited in different runtime states. Is big better than LITTLE? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
If there is no definitive answer within the heterogenous cores of a single ARM implementation, then how can it be compared to RISC-V?
For the same sized single-core chip (x mm squared), running at the same voltage and same clock speed, on the same manufacturing process node, is there a (significant) difference between ARM and Risk-V?
(I'm assuming that core size, voltages and frequencies are the biggest differences between the big and LITTLE cores. And yes of course this is a funky theoretical question so a theoretical answer is perfectly fine :)
> For the same sized single-core chip (x mm squared), running at the same voltage and same clock speed, on the same manufacturing process node, is there a (significant) difference between ARM and Risk-V?
Very many. And they are at the CPU implementation level.
The instruction decoding buffer depth, the register file size, the implementation of the out of order execution, the TLB depth, the data bus width, separate hardware assist engines etc are amongst many other conscious and decisive design decisions that can differentiate separate designs. Even at the same (citing verbatim) «voltage and same clock speed, on the same manufacturing process node» the performance can vary wildy.
The M1 CPU family is a very wide implementation in nearly every aspect, with a very large L1 cache (both, I and D, caches), reasonably large L2 cache, a (reportedly) 380 register wide register file, 512-bit wide data bus (in the M1 Max) plus extras, hence why it outperforms competing ARM64 designs running at similar voltages and frequencies. The same is true for POWER CPU's (i.e. compare POWER9 vs POWER10 designs) – POWER10 is 2.6x faster than POWER9 despite running at similar frequencies – due to a substantial design overhaul.
Holistic system design matters, not the ISA alone.
The answer (for now) appears to be no. Also consider that ARM will not stand still.
"According to SiFive, it is working on the design of a new processor that will be 50% more powerful, and that it will be able to surpass the Cortex-A78 of ARM."
Which is the problem often with these sort of discussion. ARM of what ( You didn't state its version ) ? RISC-V of what? The ISA in itself? Or the actual implementation in itself. If it is implementation, which implementation? And by difference, what sort of difference, what kind of performance are you specifically looking at? Or you just want a GB5 result? ( One could argue there are compiler differences in GB5 results )
The only undisputed truth would be RISC-V at its bare minimum has smaller instruction than any ARM variation currently on the market. But then its competitor should have been something like Arc, and not ARM.
"About like ARM but without licensing fees and not controlled by ARM (the company)" could easily be a sufficient differentiator, especially if ARM the company starts acting out.
Intel have been ARM licensees and made ARM chips before (StrongARM which they acquired, XScale which they developed).
They've always managed to display ambivalence about it. We should be glad they never owned ARM and hopefully never will; they'd have killed it with indifference.
It's really funny how the market thinks that Intel isn't in the game anymore.
They may not be as energy efficient as M1 or ARM chips but they certainly show that they are still a competition and invest a lot of money to improve their performance.
But they really haven't. We've not seen hide nor hair of the new process, only iterative improvements on the current process, and the attempt at big.LITTLE x86-style doesn't seem to have worked out terribly well.
ARM has taken out the low-power market that Atom and Pentium classes were aiming at. AMD APUs have long been a favorite of mid-power devices like gaming consoles and are now a desktop enthusiast favorite as well. The i5/i7 class is outmatched in every metric ($/FLOP, W/$, and W/FLOP) by the Ryzen series. IBM and Azure placed their big chip refresh orders with AMD as well, so the hyperscaler market is in danger. The only place Xeons are still superior is the scientific and high computing space, and Threadripper is making inroads there as well.
Intel still has great sales from existing cashflows and OEM agreements, but if you were buying a computer in 2022, why choose Intel? Why would its customers? I think they're going to have to come up with something new and soon.
> The i5/i7 class is outmatched in every metric ($/FLOP, W/$, and W/FLOP) by the Ryzen series.
This isn't really true though. Alder lake performance is better than Ryzen 5x at pretty much all price points. Alder lake's electricity usage is rough, but desktop users don't care. Now ryzen is a year behind intel, and who knows how their next offering will fare, but saying they've outmatched intel in every metric just isn't true.
Because Intel is / will no longer be a x86 / Chip company only anymore. They are pivoting to Foundry. Just like Andrew Grove pivoted Intel from DRAM to microprocessor.
I expect them to be at least $400bn to $600bn market cap by the end of 2030. Which is 2x or 3x of today's price.
Not exactly super high growth, but if you are a money manager with too much cash ( which is often the case today ) it is not a bad investment.
> and are now a desktop enthusiast favorite as well. The i5/i7 class is outmatched in every metric ($/FLOP, W/$, and W/FLOP) by the Ryzen series.
maybe a couple years ago, at this point Intel is dominating the gaming market, competing in the productivity market despite having fewer cores (i.e. more potent cores), are at least matching Zen3 efficiency (except i9, but you said i5/i7) if not beating (particularly at lower power budgets due to infinity fabric overhead). Ryzen has absolutely lost favor with the enthusiast market due to the significant price increases (in some segments, a 50% increase over last generation) and the refusal to chop prices to remain competitive with intel (justified with "but they can make more money selling Epyc", which is great for them but it doesn't make their products competitive for me as a consumer either).
And AMD has completely abandoned the value market... i3 12100F is listed for $110 at Best Buy (iGPU version is $140), and Intel is in the process of rolling out Celerons for even cheaper rigs (will be nice for HTPC with that iGPU). AMD's cheapest processor has a $300 MSRP and they won't budge on pricing at all given their focus on the server market.
go look at a tech enthusiast forum and nobody is recommending Ryzen anymore. It's overpriced, it no longer has a performance or efficiency advantage (in fact it's rather flopped the other way), and AMD would rather address the server market instead.
this has really shifted in the last 6 months since Alder Lake launched, but really there was a significant niche for recommending 10-series as a budget option given the significant price advantage over AMD. The thing that changed with Alder Lake is that Intel moved back into the performance lead (and matched efficiency) and prices remained the same - leaving them both better and cheaper than AMD. Thing have changed, people don't recommend AMD anymore unless you have a very specific need (like you're buying a 5950X).
Also APUs in particular are rather a flop on desktop. AMD didn't even bother releasing a 7nm APU to the consumer market until... September last year? Up until then it was all 12nm quad-core garbage - and that's GloFo 12nm, so more like Intel 22nm. On top of that, the APUs also had reduced IPC compared to the CPUs of their equivalent architecture (due to less cache). All of the hype around Ryzen was around the non-APU enthusiast chips with no onboard graphics, the APUs were never popular in the desktop segment.
The APUs are nice if you are building a SFF rig with no discrete GPU... but they have a lot of compromises - reduced IPC, PCIe 3.0, and up until September they didn't have any that weren't limited to PCIe 3.0x8 (5000G series moves this to 3.0x16). They have no HDMI 2.1 support, no HDMI VRR support, no AV1 support, and the worst hardware encoder (i.e. Teams videoconferencing quality/etc) on the market. If you really want a gaming-focused SFF rig with iGPU only, they are the best available, but they were never popular, and AMD never really pushed them the way they did the enthusiast chips.
(HEDT is another segment that's been abandoned... AMD still has not released Zen3 processors, it's been 16 months now, and who knows whether AMD will try the same "release it for pro but not for consumer" crap again like they did with the APUs.)
The thing is, the market can be right without knowing why it is right.
The market thinks that in some fixed, relatively near point in the future we will look back at now and say "Intel was already hosed, it just didn't know it".
It may be that the market is currently only expressing interest in the hopes of others that this particular future will come to pass, but that is the only way it will.
Right but the key difference is that post-recovery AMD is fabless, because they spun off their fab business.
AMD's stock can jump like this, because its value is based more closely on its designs.
Intel is not taking that approach. One amazing chip design isn't going to massively change their fortunes, and they are heavily sunk in x86, which is not the chip series the market is most interested in.
One meaningful path forward for Intel is to split in two, precisely so that the x86 design business can be liberated by being fabless, and the fab businesses can get on with making unsexy larger-process chips for everyone in America who needs them.
When AMD was at 2$, the story was that their chips designs are shit, slow, overheating etc. And since they had just flogged off their foundry they didn´t have access to any useful process, thus the chips were more slow and hot and power hungry. They also tons of debt, and basically no assets, and no way to compete - while Intel had the best chip designs and the best foundries.
We dont know because Softbank no longer breaks out those number in 2018/2019. But they do give some insight into the level of growth so we could extrapolate from previous year or quarters.
And generally speaking Softbank ( and ARM ) refuse to comment on anything about ARM China.
But that is a good point, it is a potential risk or at least need to be mindful in its valuation.
Provided the ARM juggernaut is expected to streamroll Intel's business in the coming decade, this acquisition does make sense for Intel... this could be their Facebook+WhatsApp moment.
If Nvidia was blocked from acquiring ARM, then I certainly think that Intel would be blocked as well. Plus, Intel does not need to actually acquire ARM to start making ARM processors. For example, Apple has done just fine licensing ARM IP just like everybody else.
To be clear, Apple is not licensing ARM IP "just like everybody else". They have a very different relationship, being a founding shareholder, and then acquiring an "Architecture License" from ARM after also acquiring PA Semi according to Wikipedia.
So Apple Silicon is not the same as someone else licensing ARM IP.
It was such a hot stock in 2014-15. Softbank kinda bought it at the peak. Still, Apple has proven ARM on the desktop is phenomenal, and Ampere has done the same in the datacenter. Both have swiftly made compiler support accelerate dramatically. I would love for my next desktop to be arm-based, and it would be great if it didn’t NEED to be a mac. Broad adoption of ARM would be a huge win for sustainability. I’m bullish on their business, even if their business model isn’t vertically scalable.
I think that RISC V also has a bright future, but its still a bit far out before its a viable competitor. Still there have been some things that look really promising such as what is coming out of SiFive:
The thing that stands out about ARM is that the user has less control of the hardware. The manufacturers try and succeed in keeping an extremely closed ecosystem.
Why would you want that? The Intel+AMD duopoly seems like nirvana compared to the Ampere and M1.
In fact, Ampere and M1 are a hint of the most dystopian future of computing I can imagine.
Uh... M1 (at least when Mac-fused) isn't actually locked-down. You do have to jump through a few hoops to boot modified kernels[0], but it's a reasonable level of security for a chip primarily intended to go into laptops. There's an ongoing effort to reverse-engineer the M1 and port Linux to it[1], which has actually gone really well.
There's also plenty of ARM hardware out there that really doesn't bother with lockdowns. Raspberry Pi, for example, will happily boot whatever you put on the SD card[2]. There's also plenty of other dev boards and chips that are similarly not locked-down. The reason why people think of ARM as "more locked-down" is because it's more often used in locked-down hardware, but there's no architectural requirement for it to be this way.
The real big problem with ARM is that every chip is very different from one another. SoC designers have a habit of reassigning addresses and IDs on every new chip, with no thought towards backwards compatibility. So even if an ARM chip has no technical protection against third-party operating systems, any Linux kernel you build is unlikely to boot unless the SoC vendor has bothered to upstream support for it. Ironically, Apple is one of the few ARM vendors that actually does maintain backwards compatibility where feasible.
[0] The first admin account is granted possession of a local signing key that lets that user sign kernels. This means that you need to be able to log into that account under macOS in order to install Linux - evil maids need not apply.
[1] Legend has it that if you say "M1" three times in a HackerNews comment, you'll summon the primary developer of Asahi Linux.
[2] You do have to provide a GPU boot blob; no clue if there's a project to reimplement that.
Are there several different manufacturers of motherboards for it?
There isn't even an ecosystem to talk about. The fascination about the M1 is quite disturbing. Unless you want to be locked into the apple store it has no value whatsoever. The energy put into running Linux on it is really impressive. But from a broad perspective nothing positive can ever come out of it.
It's a laptop chip. You can run linux and non-app store applications on it. If you don't want to use it - fine - but others are getting a lot of value out of it.
This has nothing to do with ARM. Unlike the PC there is no standard for system architecture (including boards). ARM based designers like Qualcomm, NVIDIA etc can choose to have their own board and system architecture. For example, they can boot of any memory location or lock the user out of using an exception level like EL3/EL2 etc. That is why the ecosystem looks closed. Nothing stops a SoC designer from giving complete access to hardware.
BTW - any SoC designer that uses RISC-V can do the same.
There are standards like the Arm Server Base System Architecture but companies don't have to follow it. Most of the ARM servers are custom things for big datacenters. As you said the smaller systems like phones and other embedded systems have their own boot systems and memory layout etc.
In the server space, there is no good reason to do weird unusual things → even e.g. the "custom" AWS hardware is as standards-compliant as possible (if you look at the ACPI tables on an a1.metal instance, you'll only find an AMZNxxxx device for the PCIe host controller, and that's only because Synopsys Designware IP sucks^W has a stupid hardware bug related to filtering that requires a little workaround quirk)
Absolutely. Whether it's ARM-based or RISC-V, nothing will stop high-end SoC vendors from developing closed hardware blocks or firmware, especially if they have customers from the DRM space (CA vendors).
AWS offers Graviton instances in a bare-metal way too, so you can see for yourself what the SoC offers. It's quite clean, there is a Designware PCIe filtering quirk (same as on e.g. the Marvell Armada8k) but other than that it's SBSA-style UEFI+ACPI. Very standard system.
In terms of firmware openness, yeah, you don't get the firmware source, but you don't get to touch the machines physically either so you wouldn't have a chance to run a custom build anyway :D
(While Ampere Altras are supported by upstream EDK2, have fun)
I did just say that "you don't get to touch the machines physically either".
What does being able to buy them have to do with.. anything?
The concept of renting a VM is not new. The introduction of processors that a VM hosting company designs exclusively for use on that service is, and the comments in the thread above seem to imply a fear of this causing some kind of lock-in or whatever. What I'm saying is, this is completely unfounded fear. Graviton instances are very much standard machines and you can run the exact same OS images on there as you can on an Altra or a HoneyComb LX2K or a MACCHIATObin. (Yeah, the OS needs a driver for Amazon's network card, but mainline Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD have that.)
Nothing becomes any more closed if you switch the ISA of the CPU used in your VPS to aarch64. The only closed ecosystem here is AWS itself, but what takes power away from you is using non-EC2 services like DynamoDB.
In fact the Arm ecosystem is way more open, because there are SoCs that can run completely blob-free firmware (e.g. from Marvell), which is just not happening with any modern Intel/AMD system.
Good. Never a good outcome for the industry for Arm to be owned by Nvidia - and regulators have learned by now that undertakings in these circumstances have little value.
Sorry for Simon Segars who must have had a tough job essentially implementing Son's ideas. And those ideas seem to have been pretty poor - Arm China debacle, focus on IoT and selling to Nvidia have all clearly harmed Arm's prospects.
It's clear by now that selling CPUs is a mature market but that Arm has room to grow and there is still lots of money to be made in hardware if you innovate - eg in accelerated computing. It's also true both that Arm's model works and that it has more competition than ever from RISC-V.
A lot still to play for in my view and I think that the IPO price will reflect that.
Hopefully it will end back on the LSE, there was much lamenting here in the UK when SoftBank acquired them. They are one of the UKs biggest tech success, one of our few “unicorns”. For them to be be back on the LSE it would be a good signal of strength in UK tech.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some lobbying going on behind the scenes from the UK government to try and ensure it happens. Some strategic tax brakes or regional investment.
With the governments (somewhat controversial) investment in OneWeb last year they have shown they have a uk tech strategy. Although I think that was Dominic Cummings doing and he’s well out of the picture.
True and really it’s not a Unicorn as it’s been public before.
You inspired me to have a look at how many “Unicorns” are in the US for comparison. Depending on source it’s between about 400-480 in the US. So about 12x as many with about 4.8x the population.
A lot of these seem to be consumer retail, e-commerce or housing related which says a lot about the UK economic landscape. Hardly the kind of company ARM would want to be swimming amongst.
The UK gov is keen for Revolut (another SoftBank investment) to IPO in London as well, but it looks like they're trying to court Americans so they can make a bigger splash there.
Absolutely no chance Revolut lists in London. They're super globally-focused and the founder wouldn't take the loss.
Starling bank on the other hand, is a great prospect. It's still founder-controlled, UK-focused, and would be able to join the FTSE 250/100 quite easily where the S&P is beyond its reach.
Companies like to IPO where there’s high volume, and LSE doesn’t have much compared to US exchanges. Sadly it’s a chicken + egg problem because LSE is left with older, more legacy UK companies, making it less attractive for modern tech companies to list in.
The LSE could really do with this as a boost and to break the cycle. But this will IPO in the US.
I think it's interesting how selling Arm to Nvidia or going IPO are _wildly_ different and I think SoftBank doesn't mind what happens to the company as long as they get their return. I mean, at the end of the day financiers will finance but if you're Arm employee this must be a pretty wild ride.
SoftBank is desperate for capital due to recent bad bets. ARM is one of the most valuable assets they have. As for ARM itself, this probably isn't the best path forward, and neither option would even be considered if it weren't for SoftBank's current predicament.
I didn't see that article, but that seems to be a two-step process for SoftBank to sell their shares on the open market without spoiling the market by public ally divesting themselves of shares. They sell new shares, then use the money that generates to buy a percentage of SoftBanks shares.
This is why financial engineering and ultimately all Money-Money transactions are ultimately nihilistic and boring. Who cares how much money you have if you aren’t doing new/innovative/interesting things?
You are right. They want to buy back shares. But it is also true that some of their bets like Didi and Wework did not do well. Also, they have money invested in China which seems stuck (just like many others I suppose).
People thought blocking this acquisition will result in more competition overall. Unfortunately, letting the stock market control ARMs actions will still lead to anti-competitive actions harming you as a customer. Not sure if blocking the merger will be overall better.
If SoftBank want to maximize their return then they'd probably do best to list ARM in the US. There's no way they'd get the crazy valuations you seen on NASDAQ on the LSE. It's why so many UK tech companies IPO in New York. They don't seem to get particularly excited about tech in London.
That's because a lot of these ""tech"" companies are just other business models in disguise. My especially favourite are the unsustainable business model food delivery apps like Deliveroo and JustEat, or the retail apps that are classed as tech for some reason like online consumer brands such as Victorian Plumbing and whisky seller Artisanal Spirits.
It's clear to me that IPO's are no longer about long term equity, and more about short term gambling. This is especially true when you have both US and UK markets actively trying to attract more retail investment, just to swindle the public out of more money. Until we see a radical shift in the way we think about and measure the performance of companies, IPO's and equity markets will continue to be a wild ride.
JustEat isn't unsustainable. They are profitable (pretty wildly so until they started offering their own delivery riders to grow to outlets which don't have drivers -- which has started hitting margins).
I didn't like much this but having ARM in the hands of financial institution which doesn't have any motivation to invest in the technology doesn't seem any better (and probably doesnt understand/doesnt care about it). In the other hand, Nvidia have a good track record creating good products.
> Nvidia have a good track record creating good products.
What incentive would Nvidia have to develop new ARM features that would assist competitors in competing with them?
The Fujitsu's A64FX Processor for example somewhat competes with Nvidia datacenter GPUs. What incentive would Nvidia have to continue to develop the Arm Scalable Vector Extension?
The only good thing from this sale would be the pivot to RISC-V.
Money? like Samsung selling their chips to Apple. Nvidia have a lot of proprietary stuff which allows them to get away even with inferior hardware. Nvidia will prob lose the AI datacenter market anyways, customs asics will just use RISC-V if Nvidia try to stop them.
Nvidia doesn't care about secondary money. They're all about integrating stuff and denying others to do so.
Nvidia is a castle because of the moats they've built. Not because they're leaps and bounds ahead in terms of silicon and technical wizardry. They shunned OpenCL, they'll probably shun Vulkan for GPGPU and make sure that people are locked to CUDA and its ecosystem. They have no intention to play fair.
We're going to see how Mellanox will evolve under their command.
wasn't OpenCL a mess even on AMD cards and isnt it almost deprecated?* And Nvidia's OpenGL drivers on windows are way better than AMD's. I dont like Nvidia especially after all the error 43 bullshit, but they are competent. Now ARM is going public, wont that make things even worse?
it would be absolutely insane not to support either of those features. An absolute shit-ton of games use Vulkan these days, there is zero chance of that being deprecated in any timespan not measured in decades. Everyone is still supporting OpenGL after all, and that's like what, an early 90s API?
there is a larger point to be made here about some of the reflexively negative responses people have when the N-word is brought up. There are certainly criticisms you can make of NVIDIA, but people have this intense and reflexively negative emotional response that tends to slide these discussions into flamewar territory.
I know I'm about to hear about how Linus gave them the finger (cause he's a totally balanced and wholesome person), but providing a closed-source linux driver and not supporting wayland (which I think they did eventually anyway?) aren't the end of the world like people make them out to be. Pick the product that fits your needs, if not move on, you don't need to become emotionally attached and you can keep your positions fact-based.
> this comment is factually untrue and anyone can check it for themselves.
I agree that it's my mistake, however there was a gap between this support periods and levels, and I've been burned by nVidia's own driver on an nVidia 800 series card. It's not out of spite or prejudice. I stand corrected, but my experience also stands. Also nVidia's practices for treating technologies they don't like is still valid.
Also, being compatible doesn't mean that these technologies are first class citizens on the driver/hardware level, and they may not be allowed to use the card up to its full potential.
> it would be absolutely insane not to support either of those features. An absolute shit-ton of games use Vulkan these days, there is zero chance of that being deprecated in any timespan not measured in decades. Everyone is still supporting OpenGL after all, and that's like what, an early 90s API?
There's support and there's support. I'm not talking about games and graphics stuff. I was doing some research about nVidia's "Vulkan Compute" support, and seen this:
"Vulkan compute on AMD and Intel might be okay but we already know of ways Nvidia puts the clamp on Vulkan compute (doesn't make use of multiple DMAs for transfer) and given their history with OpenCL and the vested interest they have in developers preferring CUDA, they're really not to be trusted." [0][1]
The guy writing seems to know what he's talking about (reading about the history gives a lot of nice low level details about how these things work), and this is what I was exactly saying about "Ditching Vulkan Compute in favor of CUDA, like OpenCL". "Yeah, it's supported, but it might not be fast, sorry."
> there is a larger point to be made here about some of the reflexively negative responses people have when the N-word is brought up. There are certainly criticisms you can make of NVIDIA, but people have this intense and reflexively negative emotional response that tends to slide these discussions into flamewar territory.
I'm personally no fan of flamewars. I also don't like to disseminate wrong information knowingly (see above). Also, I work in a HPC center where we use nVidia hardware, and personally develop scientific software. So, I'm not distant to either tiers of nVidia hardware. So, maybe not having prejudice about people one's replying to the first time is a good thing, no?
> I know I'm about to hear about how Linus gave them the finger (cause he's a totally balanced and wholesome person)...
No, you're not.
TL;DR: You can't write multi-vendor, GPU acceleration code which uses every card to its highest potential, even if there's standards. You need to write at least two copies of the code, one being CUDA. Why? nVidia doesn't like other technologies to work as fast on their cards. That's it.
> What incentive would Nvidia have to develop new ARM features that would assist competitors in competing with them?
> The Fujitsu's A64FX Processor for example somewhat competes with Nvidia datacenter GPUs. What incentive would Nvidia have to continue to develop the Arm Scalable Vector Extension?
"the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
the more R&D that goes into the ARM ecosystem, the tougher things get for x86. At the end of the day, all that R&D spending is making NVIDIA's position stronger, it's a force multiplier for their own efforts.
I fundamentally don't understand why anyone would think the ARM acquisition was about anything other than making Jensen kingmaker over one of the two most important processor IPs in the world - and he gains absolutely nothing by becoming king and then slaying all his subjects. That would be an amazingly shortsighted decision from one of the most far-sighted tech CEOs in the business.
Selling some more Tegras is peanuts in comparison and that bump would never last in the long term. The money is in Qualcomm and Fujitsu and IBM's R&D budgets working in synergy with your own, and in the ability to leverage the ARM licensing model to push CUDA into the last places it hasn't reached.
The fact that NVIDIA was even making this offer at all pretty much means they were looking at loosening up their IP licensing IMO. As a black box, sure, but I don't see a world in which NVIDIA would buy ARM and either not license GeForce as the graphics IP, or would choose not to license ARM at all ("selling a few more Tegras is not worth $40b"). If you accept those two givens, then NVIDIA would have had to provide GeForce IP as a black-box SIP license.
The A64FX has way worse performance per watt than an AMD EPYC and an A100. The A64FX's density per U is higher, so you can get a lot more cores in the same datacenter, even if the TFLOPS/watt is far worse.
For example, if you look at the TOP500, #1 (A64FX) gets about 14.78 TFLOP/watt, #5 (EPYC/A100) gets 27.37 TFLOP/watt. Most of the A100 based solutions are similar performance per watt. Nvidia is already beating ARM in power efficiency. This looks closer to the 3dfx acquisition from Nvidia's prospective.
NVidia has a track record of creating good products, but all proprietary and with closed source firmware/drivers. And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more money from different market segments.
> And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more money from different market segments.
This is the cultural difference between ARM and Nvidia.
ARM does care enough about their IP that you'll need to pay them for ARM's effort to develop their IP, but beyond that they will not restrict you unless it'll put ARM into legal trouble (basically export restrictions). Hey, you could get everything now with a one-time license payment if you are willing to do that. It's not FSF open, but it's certainly better than a lot of hardware companies.
Nvidia is trying to extract everything into each pipeline. You want to use their hardware? You have to agree to only use this to precise conditions that is purely for market segmentation, which conflicts with ARM's culture. Compounding this with the fact that almost all acquisitions done by Nvidia that was more open was closed down (try talking to Nvidia about Mellanox), if the ARM acquisition proceeded, it'll be a bad day for everyone else.
That is good for Samsung/Qualcomm/Mediatek/Apple, but let's be honest, it is a failure as a business. Despite of being used on pretty much 100% of all smartphones' SoC, they barely make any money. Also, their designs are lagging behind, M1 and probably Nuvia are example of that.
> but let's be honest, it is a failure as a business.
Obviously not true, but I can see how some might think this if their main comparators are companies that get to $1trn valuations in 30 years. Not every company can or should be a FAANG.
I think their designs are meant to be lagging, M1 isn't "just better" it's a lot more about media encoding and packing more types of cores together, which while innovative is not what ARM should be doing.
ARM makes prototype designs that you can extend, M1 is an absolute success of that model.
Regardless: you say they've failed as a business, your metric is how much they earn from being nearly everywhere.
I would pointedly disagree: they're everywhere, that's success, they're everywhere and profitable. There's absolutely no need to rent seek... this is unsustainable capitalist thinking.
They're able to innovate and turn a profit with their "modest" income, why do you need them to do more than that? How do you know they would do better with more money?
Intel (yes, apple to oranges) has many orders of magnitude more money, but most of it goes into bureaucracies.
Imo the poor state of the GPU market competition-wise is the only way NVidia is able to get away with this, otherwise competitors would just eat their lunch by doing exactly the same thing without the arbitrary market segmentation.
I'd definitely agree on that though, Nvidia is really good on what they're doing, just disappointed that they don't view the open-source community as a positive.
F*** Oracle definitely, they can't even bother to have a proper SystemD service on systems which uses SystemD, relying on scripts that are definitely not redeeming them.
> And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more money from different market segments.
To be fair, AMD does super annoying lock in/binning things too, though not with software locking.
For example, there was a Radeon that would have been a crazy awesome server rack mounted GPU for Deep learning 4U blades. You couldn't put it in a server because it was mounted on a chassis that was 4mm too large for PCI spec.
(Btw I hate hate hate Nvidia so this is not pointless whataboutism)
AMD is also moving towards proprietary interconnects for their add-on cards that provide higher performance links than their competitors are allowed to use. And they won't license them to their competitors of course - it's a "set bonus" if you buy all AMD. It's funny because people were panicking about Intel doing exactly that, and when AMD does it, crickets.
They also have moved to locking their CPUs to the motherboards, to restrict second-hand sales of surplus CPUs/etc. So far it's only locked to the brand, so you can put it in any Dell system but only a dell system, but it's still sufficient to cause a huge amount of headaches for the surplus sector. I was looking at some cheap Epyc 7402Ps on ebay until I saw... "locked to dell, only runs on Dell". Welp. And the other cheap listing, is that one locked too? Who knows, and that's the point AMD is going for, they just have to inject enough uncertainty to change consumer behavior. Most people aren't going to be willing to trace the provenance of a used CPU, they will just pay 20% more for a new one. A limited number will be sold as complete systems, but as the market shrinks and people stop considering secondhand purchases, eventually they will just be thrown in the trash. Mission accomplished.
And that's coming for consumer CPUs too. It's already here for AMD's "ryzen pro" desktop line, it won't be long until it hits walmart prebuilts too.
> Who knows, and that's the point AMD is going for, they just have to inject enough uncertainty to change consumer behavior.
That's not "the point". The purpose of the feature is legitimate, but you're right that the consequences suck hard for the second hand market.
The thing you're talking about is a security feature where the CPU would be locked to only boot when the firmware is signed by a particular signing key. If you're a high-value target such as a cloud vendor or a government / military, attacks on the firmware are a legitimate threat, and this ensures that the firmware cannot be silently tampered with. This is a big deal to them and that's the reason why AMD implemented this.
But yes, most people don't need or want this. It's entirely optional, it's supposed to be something the customer configures, but Lenovo turned it on by default. Pressure needs to be put on Lenovo to stop doing so.
If ARM debuts all future designs under 10nm, then ARM China is out of the game (for now), unless they want to try to backport to 14. Some useful contract language will also forbid access to ARM's customers.
ARM processors are also in many, many things besides Apple products.
This is hilarious. It shows why buyouts are so broken and hurt shareholders over time. ARMH was public. It got bought out then tried to get sold out and is now back to where it started at a lower share price and capitalization.
Most very big mergers consist of one company buying all the shares of a publically-traded company, so it is likely that the regulators have the power to stop those kinds of mergers though I cannot think of an example.
I'll be looking to pick up some shares as a long-term investment. I think ARM is one of the best things to happen to computing, and anything that threatens the x86 monoculture/hegemony is a good thing in my view.
I love ARM and the power-efficient mobile devices it enabled in the past two decades. That being said, I am deeply concerned with the lack of coherent hardware standards in ARM devices causing fragmentation and necessitate custom kernels, ROMs, and firmware.
If it weren't for PC, Linux might have died long ago.
Coupd anyone explain how this works, are we any closer to the dream of being able to boot generic Ubuntu image on a random ARM device like you can with x86?
It's a standard specification for ARM server hardware / memory maps / firmware / etc, so operating systems should be interchangeable on it. Doesn't have a specifically consumer orientated equivalent though.
Its a bit like the way you need more than an x86 CPU, you need an "IBM PC Compatible" system[1] with various buses and peripherals in the right memory locations, BIOS/UEFI firmware etc. for generic PC OSes to work. SBSA standardises something like an equivalent of an "IBM PC" for ARM Servers.
[1] Or whatever you would call it nowadays, as legacy BIOS booting is fading away modern systems might not count as that.
We aren't any closer, we are already there. Generic Ubuntu image already boots on all ARM SBSA devices, just like x86 PC. In fact, booting generic image on any device is explicitly a goal of SBSA standard.
This time is based on inflation and the Fed increasing borrowing rates. Money managers already started to move their positions to stocks that fare well when things cool off.
Yes, that doesn't change anything. Many companies have been taken private that were public, and then went public again. Your choice for going public is either an SPAC or an IPO/DPO.
I was just writing something similar after some research when I found this existing thread. Maybe we should refer to these public-private-public carousels as PEPOs (Private Equity Public Offering) ? :P
Pedantic nit: not quite an IPO (Initial Public Offering) in its true sense since the original ARM Holdings was already a public limited company (PLC) before Softbank bought it from its shareholders in 2016. The trading entity and group parent is Arm Ltd, a private limited company formed in 1990 [0].
There is however a currently dormant Arm Holdings Ltd [1] incorporated in 2018 which may be converted to a public company so it would be the first time this legal entity has been publicly listed.
ARM has already succeeded. There is no "will" here. Most microcontrollers in the world are ARM. Most application processors in the world are ARM. It spans from the cheapest to the highest-performing parts. Nearly every smartphone in the world is ARM.
In the embedded arena, Arm (the instruction set) would appear to be pretty replaceable. Arm and MIPS competed for the same business, Arm and RISC-V can do the same. There is nothing magical about any of them.
Arm (the corporation) can make some money for themselves by coming up with increasingly cool Arm cores to sell (a mission Nvidia could have aided immediately and with high impact, but... nevermind) but the instruction set itself is not especially important anymore. There's a lot less path-dependency for companies in the embedded arena than there is among, for example, desktop computer companies.
Arm was one of the CISCiest of the RISC processors at a happy medium in instruction complexity that gave them all the simplicity of regular sized instructions while still getting the job done in fewer instructions than a more ideological RISC ISA.
Also, getting the job done with fewer instructions meant requiring less RAM in embedded roles where it thrived before entering the market from below in classic disruptive innovation style, the same way that x86 entered the server market. The other RISCs were mostly high end workstation or server chips suffering from low volumes. I actually ported some software from an SGI MIPS box to x86/Linux once. It was a nice system and I see why people liked it but it just couldn't keep up.
>that gave them all the simplicity of regular sized instructions while still getting the job done in fewer instructions than a more ideological RISC ISA.
Thumb2 in 32bit ARM was competitive in code density.
AArch64 code density is abysmal, dramatically worse than RV64GC.
"RISC-V is a new instruction set architecture (ISA) designed to support computer architecture research and education."
"Provide a realistic but open ISA that captures important details of commercial generalpurpose ISA designs and that is suitable for direct hardware implementation."
"Be simple to subset for educational purposes and to reduce complexity of bringing up new
implementations."
"Yunsup Lee, Krste Asanovi´c, David Patterson,
and I conceived RISC-V in the summer of 2010 as an ISA for research and education at
Berkeley. Two of our research ventures, RAMP Gold [92] and Maven [60], had just wound
down. These projects were based around the SPARC ISA and a lightly modified MIPS
ISA, respectively, and we sought to unify behind a single architecture for the next round of
projects."
Its literally how it started. They wanted a modern ISA for their course. Then they did a '6 month project' to develop it. That turned out to be RISC-V. Then companies would literally just adopt it and be angry at them doing changes and such.
Then they realized that they need to push this more aggressively, establish a foundation and create a real standard.
You can listen to the 'State of the Union' talks from the early conferences if you want a source.
While it's indeed good to have a healthy skepticism towards these things, there's a major difference between the two: a) MIPS has been acquired too many times by a company that can lock others out (SGI is definitely the Nvidia of today outside of consumer stuff), and b) MIPS, while have been present in game consoles and workstations, didn't really have the visibility ARM has today. They didn't have any consumer devices labelled with "MIPS chipset inside!", even though it was present in game consoles.
> Why will ARM succeed where MIPS faded into obscurity?
Because for the mass consumer market needing decent compute power, there is only ARM and x86-64 left, everything else has gone downhill in actual usage - and ARM is way easier to implement with a lot more vendors available than the x86-64 world which is basically Intel vs AMD.
The only competition that remains is Loongson for Chinese government purposes, but no one outside of China and maybe Russia will touch that stuff voluntarily.
The POWER architecture family, since the Apple migration to x86 many years ago, is only relevant for supercomputers and mainframes which is why I didn't include it in the list.
Russia has it's own CPU, Elbrus, which is slow, features x86 emulation and VLIW architecture (i think).
It's meant to be used in areas of critical infra and national security, every major nation that is not joint with US at the hip is thinking or planning chip independance.
Otherwise your economy could be rouined because Donald Trimp 2 had too much cocaine in the morning and tweeted something.
It's not clear to me, and I'm sure folks here would know. It seems possible that the ARM IPO could end up raising quite a bit less than the Nvidia deal. Couldn't Nvidia buy a majority of ARM shares on the open market, at a discount, with no regulatory oversight?
Why does it take so long? I would be pretty surprised if they aren't already operating with audited GAAP financials, etc etc. Or is the extended date a hedge against market conditions, to avoid having to announce a delay.
An IPO takes a really long time to initiate, draft, and conclude -- from legal due diligences, to investment banking drafts or market scouting, and securing early buyers. Investment banks kind of bid on the right to do the IPO for instance, each offering their own kind of package for ARM to go with.
M&A departments in New York or London must have been (or still be) pulling all-nighters.
Buying a controlling stake in ARM or a hostile takeover would still trigger the same regulatory vetting that caused the deal to be called off in the first place.
Not easily. Trying to gain a controlling stake in a public company triggers regulatory involvement.
I'm still unclear why Nvidia would want to control Arm. If they wanted an architecture they could extend as they wished, they can use RISC-V (which they are already doing in a small way).
A lot of people are of the opinion they wanted to put the squeeze to everyone using ARM, but based on reading that doesn't really seem super feasible to me.
I think nvidia is worried about being shut out of the x86 space so there's nowhere to sell their products. So they had a long term play to guide ARM development as an alternative platform. I could see that platform being useful as a hedge, but also giving nvidia a better way of competing in consoles and if they were really successful maybe eventually turning Intel/AMDs x86 advantage into a weakness.
Back when Intel killed off all third party motherboard chipsets nvidia won a lawsuit against Intel where they forced Intel to ensure a pcie bus for GPUs on all their platforms. That provision expired a few years ago. If nvidia is smart (and I believe they are) they've never let go of that worry that APUs might shove them out of the market. Their best bet is to remain so much better than the competition they cannot be ignored, but it would be wise to have a backup plan.
> I'm still unclear why Nvidia would want to control Arm.
Nvidia have some really good high performance Arm cores that they've developed and sold (Denver, Carmel). Continuing to invest in that area makes some sense for Nvidia today, but it would make a lot of sense if the products they're paying to develop were official Arm products sold through the Arm IP sales channel. In other words, it would increase Nvidia's return on investment on work they're already doing.
(on the other hand, the amount they would have ended up paying for Arm might be fully justified by the value of the company but it was really, really high)
It didn't make sense how ARM was worth $22bn in 2016 on LSE, that has a PE100+ when I cant see how it could double its Net profit in the next 10 years, with a saner valuation of P/E 50. It make even less sense to me when Softbank bought it for $32bn. Didn't make any sense when Nvidia want it for $38.5bn, and later at $50bn+.
Now we are back to square one, how many investors, in the open market are willing to buy ARM's stock at a valuation of, let say the same $32bn as Softbank initially paid? Roughly P/E 100, assuming they managed to grow ARM business from 2018 at ~$220M operating income to $300M in 2021. I much rather bet on Intel if I had the money.
And of course many on HN will think ARM is worthless because the future is going to be the Riscy Silver Bullet.
Disclosures: I do not currently hold any stocks or Mutual Funds, Indexes and other financial instrument.