> ksec 67 days ago
> The unwritten rule of HN:
> You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From the source:
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for... "The number of NVIDIA shares to be issued at closing is 44.3 million" [this is the pre-split amount]
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.
> 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.
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. :)
- Where a free ISA allows innovation and experimentation in a way that Arm would not permit.
- Where companies can shave cents off mass market products due to lower licensing fees.
Will RISC-V replace Arm in your smartphone though - seems like a big ask at the moment.
> - 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.
Just because there is a port available doesn’t mean the hardware and ecosystem will follow.
Then AArch64 was designed very late, but seems sufficient to have (currently) taken the prize for the top supercomputing architecture.
There is architectural flexibility here, in addition to low power.
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 :)
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.
"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."
https://techunwrapped.com/risc-v-starts-to-put-pressure-16-c...
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.
The FTC objecting to Nvidia and ARM's deal on an antitrust basis [0] makes Arm toxic to Intel and AMD.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/12/ftc-s...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
But Intel seem to be resisting this.
We'll see what the story will be going forward.
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.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
Latest is 2020/21. Profits down to £7m due to higher R&D and other expenses.
This is getting into fantasy chip designer territory, but what are the chances that Intel makes a hybrid x86-ARM chip?
So Apple Silicon is not the same as someone else licensing ARM IP.
Apple may have been a founding member, but they don’t own ARM, and I’m assuming that ARM still wants to make a profit off of its licenses to Apple.
Nvidia would have expanded the market from their own products to licenses.
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.