Re:SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
by dippersauce on Sunday September 13, 2020 @07:43AM
(#24460183)
Looking through the doomsayers in this thread, this is the result I believe to be most likely. If ARM goes belly up through gross mismanagement, then the laurels will be taken up by someone else. I think another aspect to consider is the perpetual license agreements ARM holds with several other businesses. I think this may muzzle Nvidia to some extent.
Re:SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B
by ethbr0 on Sunday September 13, 2020 @11:53AM
(#24461612)
ARM also has well-funded competition in many spaces in the form of Intel and AMD. And to a lesser extent in Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
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 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".