So, SoftBank has found a buyer for ARM, and it’s graphics-card maker Nvidia <https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/14/nvida_arm_acquisition/>. The price is US$40 billion, including US$12 billion in cash. NVidia promises to maintain the open licensing model, and promises to “turbocharge” it with its own R&D resources. SoftBank makes a modest profit on the deal.
I wrote:
So, SoftBank has found a buyer for ARM, and it’s graphics-card maker Nvidia <https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/14/nvida_arm_acquisition/>.
One of the commenters on that article linked to this BBC report <https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54142567>, where a couple of ARM’s original co-founders raise some concerns about the deal. Hermann Hauser, in particular, says "If ARM becomes a US subsidiary of a US company, it falls under the CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] regulations..." which means the US Government gets to decide who can or can’t license the technology. Given the current tensions between the US and China, just for example, this kind of political throwing-of-weight-around could drive many major markets into the arms of more liberally-licensed competitors, like RISC-V.
Another report <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/after-40-billion-deal-nvidia-says-arm-will-keep-a-neutral-business-model/>: One potential problem with Nvidia running the world's most-popular chip designer is that Nvidia has a reputation for being hard to work with. If Nvidia wants to keep ARM running as it has in the past, the company will need to rebuild a few burned bridges. Linux is easily the most popular OS for ARM chips, both as mainline GNU/Linux and Android, but Nvidia has never gotten along well with the Linux community. Nvidia has been unwilling to open source its drivers, which makes Linux support difficult. As for a wholesale move to RISC-V: Spinning up a quality ecosystem of hardware, compilers, operating systems, and software is such a daunting task, though, that most vendors were happy paying ARM licensing fees. Maybe Nvidia's purchase will be the push companies needed, though.
And another one: "ARM Co-Founder Starts 'Save Arm' Campaign To Keep Independence Amid $40 Billion Nvidia Deal" -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/09/14/1933206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann