In all fairness, consider the market from Nvidia's perspective: they've spent a few decades being a stone's throw from Intel eating them. They started as one of many add-on card manufacturers and have turned into a dominant player by innovating, iterating, and being ruthless.
Some here might not remember how cutthroat the early-GPU days were. Nvidia survived.
Now, an opportunity to become a technical peer to Intel at the CPU level? To control their own destiny?
They'd be insane not to take this opportunity.
The biggest thing if you have been in prolonged vicious competition, is to Control Your Own Destiny and leave the basket of crabs behind
For Nvidia this is a MASSIVE win
Softbank are @#$@#$ idiots for selling ARM
Right when ARM is finally taking over the world
For what?
So they can fund the next bunch of charlatans - add more disasters like WeWork and Uber?
3dfx stumbled right as nVidia dropped the GeForce and blew everything away.
ATi became nVidia's whipping boy and Matrox just added the ability to drive more monitors.
I mean aside from not knowing if Matrox is still around, not much has changed from what I can see.
They spent a lot of time and money first building motherboard chipsets[1] with on-board GPUs for AMD CPUs only to have CMD buy ATI.
Then they started a program to build their own x86 CPU[2] which Intel sued them over[3]. There was a counter suite, and the EU settlement around the same time and Intel ended up paying NVidia $1.5B3[3] which was often read a win for NVidia. Of course in retrospect it gave Intel another 10 years of CPU domination.
So then NVidia announced they were building a desktop ARM processor[5]. That went pretty much nowhere. So then there was their mobile play (the Tegra)[6]. That was supposed to let them dominate mobile phones, and went just about as well as their launch partner phone (the Microsoft Kin). It has found use in robotics (the NVidia Jetson series) and cars (the Telsa model 3) though.
So they've lost a bunch of fights, and outside GPUs it really has been cut throat.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/828
[2] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/11570/nvidia_announces_x86_cp...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-intel-nvidia/intel-pays-n...
[4] https://www.anandtech.com/show/4122/intel-settles-with-nvidi...
[5] https://www.engadget.com/2011-01-05-nvidia-announces-project... arm-cpu-for-the-desktop.html
https://www.zdnet.com/article/nvidia-takes-aim-at-teslas-cus...
But it hasn't really seen the broad based success in mobiles they were hoping for, yet.
(By comparison, a midsize mobile company like Oppo sold 115M units in 2019)
Of course. The multi billion dollar market is just too small for more than one company. Nvidia is just biding it’s time on ~20% market share until it can put the finishing moves on the other 9 major vendors.
Perhaps the competition between 3DFX and ATi or Nvidia and AMD could be described as cutthroat but the other "competitiors" in the space couldn't even compete and eventually they all just pivoted into other things without anyone noticing or caring.
It's not unlike the x86 processor market. Companies like Via and Transmeta existed but they never were any serious competition to Intel or AMD.
PowerVR still exists and is seems successful in the mobile market (having provided Apple's GPUs until A10).
When did that ever happen?
Qualcomm used to license AMD's handheld GPUs (IP), then acquired that whole business unit from AMD. They've never used either Mali or PowerVR in any products that I know of.
Source: worked at PowerVR 2006-2007, then worked at AMD's handheld division including during the acquisition by Qualcomm, and stayed there until 2017.
David, you're entirely too qualified to be speaking about these things.
As it was, it seems they made the Microsoft/Internet and Microsoft/Mobile mistake and saw market evolution only as a threat to their existing portfolio, rather than as an opportunity.
I'm also not sure if you are suggesting NVIDIA made the same mistake as Microsoft regarding mobile, but them buying ARM is anything but that.
Them buying ARM is a way for them to offer a fully vertically integrated solution for the enterprise, pushing their existing initiatives such as NVDLA (https://github.com/nvdla/) being able to exert more control over the future of ARM architectures and designs for specific fields especially automotive as well as potentially getting their graphics and compute IP into billions of devices.
Anyone who thinks NVIDIA is buying ARM to simply trash it or to mess up with their competition is wrong, I'm not saying NVIDIA would necessarily be successful but most of the so called competitors that people are point at aren't their competitors at all.
NVIDIA is also buying a lot of talent with this acquisition, specifically the likes of ARM Austin which were responsible for the A76-78 cores.
NVIDIA + ARM + Mellanox has the potential to be a player on an unprecedented level for the hyperscaler and HPC markets, especially if the likes of Apple and Amazon (and to lesser extend Cloudflare etc.) do a lot of the heavy lifting for them. Apple going with ARM is probably the best thing NVIDIA could've asked for.
> They'd be insane not to take this opportunity.
It made financial sense for ARM's board to sell to SoftBank; it makes financial sense for SoftBank to sell to NVIDIA; it makes financial and strategic sense for NVIDIA to buy ARM; it makes financial and strategic sense for NVIDIA to radically change the way the ARM ecosystem works to benefit themselves.
And yet, the world will lose out massively by having the ARM ecosystem radically changed to benefit NVIDIA.
Capitalism certainly does a lot to create value for society as a whole, but this is just one of many examples of where capitalism also destroys value for society as a whole.
If NVIDIA treats ARM poorly, that benefits alternative ISAs and may ultimately undermine NVIDIAs investment. If NVIDIA treats ARM well, then that benefits the platform as a whole. The reality is going to be somewhere in the middle.
Market equilibrium does not imply maximum benefit for any one interest group. "Consumers" or "end-users" are often conflated with "society".
And while people may grouse about many things, chiefly paying a perceived Nvidia tax, I don't think anyone would accuse Nvidia of being strategically incompetent.
The more likely negative outcome seems to be that Nvidia would steer future ARM development so that their CPU+GPU solutions are more performant than anything anyone else can afford to produce.
Which seems like a negative... but far from the worst negative.
TBH, I think ARM's non-GPU business isn't interesting enough to Nvidia to screw with.
if that's the case, then the people who stand to lose from this _should_ be pushing the gov't to standardize and prevent fracturing of ecosystems from happening.
At least that's the theory of capitalism..
It was a crown jewel of a company, hard to imagine the French government letting it slide or the US government letting a intel be sold to a foreign company.
Well that’s the theory; nobody has actually been able to reproduce Silicon Valley except arguably in SF (it’s more like the valley grew a tentacle is the peninsula, though the distance is far enough that the culture is slightly different).
As far as Cambridge goes, I don’t see that this purchase makes any difference for those factors, except bragging rights in Whitehall.
I live in Silicon Peach.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Information_technolog...
Yes. Largest technology hub in Europe sits in Eindhoven (Veldhoven), Netherlands where you have a technical university, but the real anchor was Philips who were headquartered there. Eindhoven is home to ASML and Signify (formerly Philips Lighting) among others.
Shenzhen and Israel have been pretty successful.
Being able to say "we control the architecture in seventy trillion and counting devices" gets you a seat at the tech industry grown-ups' table (next to the US, China, Japan, Korea).
You mean something like GE buying off Alstom Énergie using corruption and government pressures ? Or the Chinese getting a piece of all our ports and nuclear tech ?
NVIDIA does design their own CPU cores.
As for the UK now realizing SoftBank's expensive 'pass the parcel game' with ARM since 2016, I'd say you only appreciate something until it is gone. [0][1] In terms of technology, the UK simply didn't know what they had.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54122692
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24362846