It does not need to be. Softbank owning ARM is the status quo, the devil we know, and they have a track record of not running ARM availability/quality into the ground. They don't seem to have motivation to do so. Also, they are invested in telecommunications, so having healthy and strong ARM position for mobile devices is in their interest.

NVIDIA, on the other hand, is suspicious. It is in their interest to use and manipulate ARM to release/restrict products in such a way that will strengthen their already strong market position with accelerators, and push down its competitors like AMD and Intel.

Intel and AMD already have a monopoly on x86-x64, and both make GPUs and CPUs. Nvidia only makes GPUs.

They were terrible at the CPU game with their Tegra line. Not sure if that's still going on.

I'd rather Nvidia be kept away from Arm at all costs.

Or, they realized they're terrible and instead of trying to be terrible again they're trying to be not terrible this time by acquiring people that actually know what they're doing? A good ARM Tegra sounds like a product that would benefit the market and thus consumers.

Terrible enough to power one of the best selling consoles of all time despite its shortcomings.

Nvidia's Jetson series computers and their various SOCs (as seen in the Nintendo Switch (Nvidia Tegra), Tesla's cars, etc) are not just GPUs.

It is not possible for 2 competing companies to have a monopoly. Perhaps you suspect some sort of collusion between them? Seems unlikely given the kicking Intel have had the past few years.

AMD has barely beaten Intel’s Sandy bridge, finally. Not enough for me to buy one.

They don’t need to collude, they’ll “compete” by siting on their ass like Intel did, barely being better yet jacking up the price, only “Haswell” is renamed “Zen 3”.

Wait a second, isn't Ryzen 5xxx much faster in single thread than Sandy Bridge ever was? Isn't the available number of cores greater as well?

Zen 2 beats it for price to performance, and much faster? It’s not even twice as fast. Nothing has doubled for close to a decade, and no difference in most real world usage.

> Intel and AMD

> monopoly

Pick one?

AMD decides it wants to make something like the TX1. Do you think that could happen if Big N owned ARM? Would the M1 series have progressed as quickly knowing the bad blood between Apple and Nvidia? Softbank probably isn't the best management but its neutral.

If ARM is truly too important to the economy to be owned by a “selfish” business, shouldn't we just declare it public domain and move on? Why can’t Nvidia’s competitors who they’d try to abuse and squeeze go use some other ISA? Is ARM really that good, or is it just popular?

It's not about the economy, it's about competition and consumer harm from the lack of it.

As much as it's easy to forget, the free market is supposed to be a tool for the benefit of consumers (through both price and innovation), and while it's not very common, every once in a while the government actually looks at that as important and steps in.

It hasn’t been common recently, under Obama/Trump. The Biden Admin FTC seems like it’s serious about using antitrust laws to prevent the market from being too lopsided in favor of a few big players.

More like Bush II/Obama/Trump. The FTC has been neutered for a while, particularly when the rulings about decreased competition vs consumer choice were made in the mid-2000s.

The reason for competition law is to regulate the free market to ensure that consumer choice is not limited by the uncontrolled acquisition and merger of suppliers.

The merger of NVidia and ARM is inherently non-competitive unless NVidia accepted limitations/restrictions on their licensing freedom which they are not willing to propose or accept.

That's leaving aside the international and other ramifications of a company that is involved in the entire vertical of chip production and sale through to retail having control of the licensing of the most used ISA and other IPRs that are available to its competitors throughout that vertical.

A company doesn't need to be owned by the govenrment (which I assume is what you mean) for the government to guarantee it is free from being bought out by it's competitors. Whatsapp/Instagram were great examples of this - where the leader in a sector managed to buy its primary competition. As far as I understand it no one can credibly claim Instagram's growth has been prioritized relative to Facebook - why? Becuase Facebook prioritizes facebook.

This isn't a question of "will the economy collapse if X buys Y" it's a question of "Which will yeild the best outcome, Y being acquired by X or no". The exact definition of "best outcome" is where the entire battleground though.

It is quite difficult to see who actually could acquire ARM though - because of ARM's quite unique position, any of the potential acquirers are either customers (Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm) who would be vertically integrated to beat out competitors or direct competitors (AMD, Intel). I think almost the only people who could buy ARM at this point would be TSMC.

For the market to stay competitive, ARM must stay independent - we have enough oligopolies and monopolies already

Why does ARM need to be acquired by someone? If Softbank wants to unload it why can't they do an IPO?

Mostly because Jensen Huang was willing to pay a nice premium over what the market would otherwise offer. There are some cough synergies cough that Nvidia could have instrumented for higher profits, Jensen had a clear and enthusiastic vision about how to get there.

Softbank can still sell ARM to anyone including the public market, they just won't get as much money for them that way. Presumably.

Yes to both, if it’s not competitive they’ll use RISC-V or another architecture.

Changing architectures is no small thing regardless of how many times Apple has done it.

You’re right. I don’t even count the new M1 as an architecture change, they switched to mobile like how C2D came from pentium M, their software market in ARM was already mature and it would be significantly harder. At the same time, they made Rosetta and switched to x68 and ARM around the same time, only ARM won.

Why does ARM need to be owned by anyone? If they are profitable, then there's no need to participate in M&A except for polishing C level resumes.

Because Softbank made some really bad investments and needs money. (It made 12 billion loss with a 57 billion revenue last year)

I guess the other option is to list it on some stock exchange.

Exactly, last i checked the important part of free market was producing products consumers enjoy and generating revenue, not corporate scheming and strong-arming competitors