In reality it's not winning in the mobile SoC market and owning Arm will enable it to hinder its competitors.
What exactly would their end-game be if ARM were acquired by say... a Chinese firm who DID decide to end licensing terms. Then what?
The problem is that controlling its own destiny gives it control over all its competitors destinies too - and that's not good. I have nothing particularly against Nvidia btw - the same issue would apply for any major SoC designer buying Arm.
Technically superior, yes. But at a price point for even the high-end flagship phones? No. The Tegra are quite expensive.
https://www.droid-life.com/2015/11/17/nvidia-releases-the-sh...
You don't see Qualcomm out there making their own phones because they couldn't sell the chips they manufactured.
Based on... what? The only reason there wasn't an X1 tablet was because of the exclusive deal with Nintendo.
I don't see Qualcomm out there making phones because they make far more money extorting others. If they didn't have the ability to push their patent portfolio down the throats of anyone who wants to make a phone that can actually connect to a cellular network, they would absolutely be making their own handsets.
The fact that it's the same innards as an original Shield tablet, just rebranded and launched for a bargain basement price on what was supposed to be a flagship quality chip? A chip that didn't get any major users?
And can you cite this exclusive deal with Nintendo from somewhere other than a rumor site?
> I don't see Qualcomm out there making phones because they make far more money extorting others. If they didn't have the ability to push their patent portfolio down the throats of anyone who wants to make a phone that can actually connect to a cellular network, they would absolutely be making their own handsets.
Why would that stop Qualcomm? If they have so much pull and vertical integration is what you want to be doing, then why haven't they done that in addition to selling their chips to others? It makes sense for Samsung since they literally manufacture a great deal of the screens and other components anyway, and for Apple since they have the margins to pull it off. But it doesn't really make sense for anyone else except to dump extra inventory that you couldn't sell as glorified dev kits.
What? No they do not. All Tegra CPUs are pretty damn lousy compared to contemporary alternatives when fit inside cellphone power envelope.
I'm willing to bet this is entirely around controlling their own future, not changing the way ARM is licensed. With Intel at least acting like they're going to REALLY try to enter the GPU space at this point, Nvidia needed to acquire AMD or ARM to solidify their position. AMD was probably the preferred path but divesting of the GPU business would've been difficult if not impossible with all the embedded graphics chips they've put onto the market. Plus I would imagine the IP pollution potential would open them up to lawsuits from whoever acquired the GPU assets. And if Intel were to be the acquirer (seems like the most likely suitor) - they'd actually have to be seriously concerned about their GPU leadership.