Nvidia has approached Softbank and is considering buying ARM Holdings

[uzzi38]

Will update with articles as they come out (they haven't yet but news is public). For now just a couple of Tweets:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1286003982079533056

https://twitter.com/x/status/1286004990327132161

This is a real significant move for Nvidia, having a huge role in ARM core designs could have major implementations down the line. Most importantly, it secures them a platform and ecosystem down the line.

Oh and I guess Nvidia becomes the defacto standard for GPU IP for mobile instead of Mali. That too.

EDIT: Bloomberg article here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ompany-arm-is-said-to-attract-nvidia-interest

 

[Roland00Address]

You're assuming Softbank can get anything like the $32 billion they paid. That's a pretty big price for a company with REVENUE of only $1.6 billion, and that already dominates licensable CPU cores to such an extent that future growth can't equal past growth (and free alternatives like RISC-V seriously limit their ability to collect much money in future low cost markets like IoT)

You are assuming the stock market is rational (whatever that word means.)

You can "craft" many stories simultaneously of how ARM is a growth business but also it will face more competition so it may be larger than today but lose market share. The future is uncertain many of the stories we tell can be true.

And depending on which stories the people who would buy ARM believes will determine the selling price of ARM. Or you can go IPO where ARM will be priced at $40 billion or higher, yet it may go higher than that or lower than that when the IPO actually happens.

 

[Doug S]

You are assuming the stock market is rational (whatever that word means.)

You can "craft" many stories simultaneously of how ARM is a growth business but also it will face more competition so it may be larger than today but lose market share. The future is uncertain many of the stories we tell can be true.

And depending on which stories the people who would buy ARM believes will determine the selling price of ARM. Or you can go IPO where ARM will be priced at $40 billion or higher, yet it may go higher than that or lower than that when the IPO actually happens.

This isn't a stock market transaction, it would be a private sale unless Softbank spins off ARM and takes it public.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

I didn't say that nVidia was the reason for the Switch's success - you said it was "mildly successful", I refuted the "mildly" part, not the why or how of its success.

And as someone who has repeatedly screamed at vendor support pages while waiting for the next Android update from companies that make millions, I can say that updates are not trivial - especially for me waiting quite some time to finally get dark mode from the Android 10 update.

Long time support matters to a customer not willing to get a new phone every year - especially now that the benefits of doing so are generally unnoticeable for basic operations.

On that note it's actually getting rather comical that they keep making new phones bigger and bigger each generation - it's not trivial to find a decent new phone that isn't enormous and difficult to fit in the pockets of normal people clothes.

How success is defined is 'relative' ...

Most users could care less that their smartphones won't get driver or OS updates anymore. It sure beats never seeing mobile network carrier support for a Tegra device ...

Nvidia is never going to succeed in the mobile space without wireless internet connectivity technology. I MIGHT contemplate getting a Tegra device IF it supported 5G NR which will likely be NEVER ...

Stranglehold?

What do no one else make LPDDRx modules or something?

That sounds like a price fixing situation more than any "stranglehold domination".

It seems like regulators aren't even trying to prevent it anymore, it basically killed the BDR drive by price fixing the blue violet laser diodes they use, that's the main reason that the few computers that still come with optical drives come with DVDR instead of BDR drives.

I can only assume that Sony and MS entered into an unholy alliance with the providers for the sake of the consoles that use them too.

*on the subject of dark mode, I don't suppose this forum has one yet?

My eyesight is bad and focusing on light text on dark backgrounds just seems to cause less headaches, so any help appreciated.

Samsung controls nearly 45% of the DRAM market and SK Hynix coming second around ~30% both of which are based in South Korea. Just a single country control nearly three quarters of the supply of DRAM modules ...

Tegra sank due to LTE, but even if they got it figured out the Tegra chips were just "weird" chips.

Not having LTE would sank any SoC, but my point here is Tegra was a small chip, missing key features that everyone thought was important, yet still have a decent gpu. Tegra was "designed" not for actual markets but instead what Nvidia hoped the market would do. Nvidia hoped the market would do the things that were Nivida's strengths (the GPU), Nvidia did little to adapt themselves to the existing marketing or where people forsaw the market going in the near future... and Nvidia paid for the price for that is not what the various OEM customers wanted. (With the exception of Automotive.) Seriously the limited design wins Nvidia did get were due to the fact the Tegra 2 was the reference design for Android 3.0 / Honeycomb, the first tablet OS for Android.

Nvidia thought that a market most of which who probably pays more for their mobile carrier network subscription service than the hardware itself would just cater to them ? Haha, that would be way too sad even for them if it were true but I wouldn't be so surprised about that possibility given their huge ego ...

Can anyone imagine a future Nvidia 'dominating' mobile with no carrier support ? LOL, Tegra is a stupid idea that needed to die off just to show an example to the world of what happens when it has no cellular technology ...

 

[soresu]

Most users could care less that their smartphones won't get driver or OS updates anymore. It sure beats never seeing mobile network carrier support for a Tegra device ...

Nvidia is never going to succeed in the mobile space without wireless internet connectivity technology. I MIGHT contemplate getting a Tegra device IF it supported 5G NR which will likely be NEVER ...

Not sure how we got onto Tegra mobile devices, I was talking about nVidia support for the SHIELD TV relative to most mobile devices.

I certainly don't expect another mobile product since they axed Icera a good half decade ago now.

As for saying most users could care less about product support - I think the term speak for yourself applies well here - not everyone buys a new phone every year, and these days the perceptible benefit of doing so is dramatically less for the average buyer than it was just 5-6 years ago.

Good product support equals good value for money, whether you are buying a flagship high end, or a low end cheapo phone.

The fact that you get companies bothering to support their products at all after purchase implies the opposite to your opinion on the subject - they don't fund product support divisions out of the goodness of their own hearts, they do so because market research tells them to.

Sadly most fund them just enough to supremely nettle people like me, despite changes to Android like Treble in the last 3 years making it far easier for them to update the OS.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

As for saying most users could care less about product support - I think the term speak for yourself applies well here - not everyone buys a new phone every year, and these days the perceptible benefit of doing so is dramatically less for the average buyer than it was just 5-6 years ago.

When it comes to smartphones I think you're firmly in the minority since 80%+ of the market consists of Android devices the vast majority of which have no long term software support from their manufacturers. It's also ironic how with absolute liberty you on bash Apple's iPhone product line despite having better software support than nearly all of the Android device manufacturers ...

Indeed software support must be valuable even though you yourself are not willing to pay for it either. Remember to practice what you preach next time ...

Also who said anything about buying a buying phone every year ? Most Android users don't do that anyways because mobile carrier plans are more valuable to them than either the hardware or the software. A phone without carrier support is just paperweight that nobody needs ...

 

[Roland00Address]

This isn't a stock market transaction, it would be a private sale unless Softbank spins off ARM and takes it public.

One of the things that Softbank has hired Goldman Sach for is exploring an IPO if they can't find a buyer that is to Softbanks satisfaction with who they are selling to (for regulatory reasons) and for a price they find acceptable.

SoftBank hires Goldman Sachs to explore sale options for chip designer Arm after getting inbound interest, sources say

SoftBank has been working toward an initial public offering of Arm Holdings more than a year from now but has received inbound interest in a potential acquisition, sources say.

www.cnbc.com

WSJ News Exclusive | SoftBank Explores Sale or IPO for Chip Designer Arm Holdings

The Japanese conglomerate, which bought Arm for $32 billion in 2016, is considering a full or partial sale of the British chip designer, or an initial public offering.

www.wsj.com

An IPO means it would be on some stock market.

 

[soresu]

Indeed software support must be valuable even though you yourself are not willing to pay for it either. Remember to practice what you preach next time ...

?

So just because I do not like Apple products I am not entitled to product support, is that it?

Jeez you are single minded.

I am paying for product support when I spend £600-£1000 for a new phone, whether it's made by an Android vendor, Apple, or anyone else.

The reason that iProducts can achieve such 'good'* product support is likely the same reason that nVidia SHIELD does - controlling the product stack from hardware to the OS, and having limited product lines.

If Apple did not fully control their product stack they would suffer precisely the same problems that other vendors do.

The sheer number of separate products per generation per vendor does figure into the product support problem - ie it's a lot easier to maintain years of support when you only have handful of separate product lines that mostly use the same or very similar SoC's.

*I say 'good' product support - but we all remember that wonderful battery/throttling kerfuffle from Apple, so don't come out with that self righteous "Apple is great product support period" rubbish, because that mess showed it clearly isn't true at all.

Slow OS updates clearly isn't the only way a company is prepared to nudge you into buying newer products.

 

[soresu]

Most Android users don't do that anyways because mobile carrier plans are more valuable to them than either the hardware or the software. A phone without carrier support is just paperweight that nobody needs ...

Again you do seem a bit out of touch.

Ever heard of Pay As You Go? SIM free phones?

Not everyone likes to be burdened with a contract.

What you call "Carrier support" is nothing more than a SIM card that connects you to a mobile service provider, you don't need a contract/plan for that, and I've known plenty of people that don't even use more than a handful of minutes or text messages a month who feel the same way about contracts as I do.

Especially today with vastly more public WiFi access than there used to be in the early days of smartphones.

With WiFi you can converse either through text or voice for free in many places without even any need for phone credit on a PAYG scheme, to say nothing about not having to worry about the data caps that exist in most MSP contracts.

 

[PingSpike]

Ploy from who? Why would nvidia want apple to bid? I get your thinking, just when Apple decides to shed their intel shackles they get new and worse nvidia shackles. From NVs point of view this makes sense as AMD and/or intel could push them out of the market over time by making their card incompatible with their CPUs so their need their own.

This isn't some fake threat to nvidia either. Nvidia sued (and won) when Intel pushed them out of the motherboard chipset market. One of their victory conditions was Intel had to provide a pcie interface their cards could use on their platforms for some amount of time. I believe that condition expired some time ago now. And with Intel making a discrete GPU (well, eventually I guess) that old threat is probably on their minds again.

 

[Thibsie]

IMO in most European countries, there's no such thing as carrier specific phones are carrier customized phones.
They offer some (very limited IMO) rebates when buying a phone but that's it. Those are of the shelf phones. Nothing else.
No SIM locked. Afaict this illegal here btw.

 

[Lodix]

Yep, in Spain it is mandatory that all phones are carrier unlocked for some years now.

 

[soresu]

This isn't some fake threat to nvidia either. Nvidia sued (and won) when Intel pushed them out of the motherboard chipset market. One of their victory conditions was Intel had to provide a pcie interface their cards could use on their platforms for some amount of time. I believe that condition expired some time ago now. And with Intel making a discrete GPU (well, eventually I guess) that old threat is probably on their minds again.

nVidia would probably just sue again and win.

I doubt Intel would pursue that track again anyway.

They aren't exactly winning hearts and minds at the moment due to current misteps, and they still have to convince people to buy their dGPU's when they land.

Not that I'm saying Intel wouldn't try something else given time to regain their footing and dig in to the dGPU market - it is still Intel, leopards, spots and all that implies.

Edit: wow my memory on those old events is shaky, I thought it was AMD chipsets locking nVidia out, thanks for the refresher!

 

[HurleyBird]

Nvidia acquiring ARM is the next best nightmare fuel to Oracale acquiring them. Licensing fees right now are pretty generous. Nvidia would try to ring out every cent possible out of licencees--it's the way they work, and Nvidia has rarely played nice with others. Having so many products on a common architecture is a good thing, but I could see a lot of companies switching to RISC-V to avoid being under Nvidia's thumb.

 

[PingSpike]

nVidia would probably just sue again and win.

I doubt Intel would pursue that track again anyway.

They aren't exactly winning hearts and minds at the moment due to current misteps, and they still have to convince people to buy their dGPU's when they land.

Not that I'm saying Intel wouldn't try something else given time to regain their footing and dig in to the dGPU market - it is still Intel, leopards, spots and all that implies.

Edit: wow my memory on those old events is shaky, I thought it was AMD chipsets locking nVidia out, thanks for the refresher!

Yeah, I agree nvidia would sue and most likely win. But lawsuits take awhile and being cut off from markets hurts. And I also agree it would be a poor strategic move for Intel, but Intel has pretty dumb management these days.

I really miss the 3rd party chipset era. The current consolidated state is incredibly dull. Back then when Intel said "we're not supporting that" Via or ALi would produce something weird to change the market. Which is of course why Intel killed them.

 

[Doug S]

Yeah, I agree nvidia would sue and most likely win. But lawsuits take awhile and being cut off from markets hurts. And I also agree it would be a poor strategic move for Intel, but Intel has pretty dumb management these days.

I really miss the 3rd party chipset era. The current consolidated state is incredibly dull. Back then when Intel said "we're not supporting that" Via or ALi would produce something weird to change the market. Which is of course why Intel killed them.

Chipsets were always going to become a commodity, it was just a question of when. Once you integrate the memory controller and PCIe, there isn't much room to add value in a chipset.

The same thing is about to happen to motherboards. One of the big differences between a $50 board and $250 board is the quality of the voltage regulation. Intel pulled that on die, then back off again but I think they're going back to that if they haven't already? DDR5 makes voltage regulation the responsibility of the DIMM, not the board. So in 2-3 years the room for differentiation between motherboards is about to get a lot smaller, and the only real difference will be in the amount of I/O expandibility but little difference quality-wise.

 

[Systems analyst]

I didn't say that nVidia was the reason for the Switch's success - you said it was "mildly successful", I refuted the "mildly" part, not the why or how of its success.

And as someone who has repeatedly screamed at vendor support pages while waiting for the next Android update from companies that make millions, I can say that updates are not trivial - especially for me waiting quite some time to finally get dark mode from the Android 10 update.

Long time support matters to a customer not willing to get a new phone every year - especially now that the benefits of doing so are generally unnoticeable for basic operations.

On that note it's actually getting rather comical that they keep making new phones bigger and bigger each generation - it's not trivial to find a decent new phone that isn't enormous and difficult to fit in the pockets of normal people clothes.

Stranglehold?

What do no one else make LPDDRx modules or something?

That sounds like a price fixing situation more than any "stranglehold domination".

It seems like regulators aren't even trying to prevent it anymore, it basically killed the BDR drive by price fixing the blue violet laser diodes they use, that's the main reason that the few computers that still come with optical drives come with DVDR instead of BDR drives.

I can only assume that Sony and MS entered into an unholy alliance with the providers for the sake of the consoles that use them too.

*on the subject of dark mode, I don't suppose this forum has one yet?

My eyesight is bad and focusing on light text on dark backgrounds just seems to cause less headaches, so any help appreciated.

I didn't say that nVidia was the reason for the Switch's success - you said it was "mildly successful", I refuted the "mildly" part, not the why or how of its success.

And as someone who has repeatedly screamed at vendor support pages while waiting for the next Android update from companies that make millions, I can say that updates are not trivial - especially for me waiting quite some time to finally get dark mode from the Android 10 update.

Long time support matters to a customer not willing to get a new phone every year - especially now that the benefits of doing so are generally unnoticeable for basic operations.

On that note it's actually getting rather comical that they keep making new phones bigger and bigger each generation - it's not trivial to find a decent new phone that isn't enormous and difficult to fit in the pockets of normal people clothes.

Stranglehold?

What do no one else make LPDDRx modules or something?

That sounds like a price fixing situation more than any "stranglehold domination".

It seems like regulators aren't even trying to prevent it anymore, it basically killed the BDR drive by price fixing the blue violet laser diodes they use, that's the main reason that the few computers that still come with optical drives come with DVDR instead of BDR drives.

I can only assume that Sony and MS entered into an unholy alliance with the providers for the sake of the consoles that use them too.

*on the subject of dark mode, I don't suppose this forum has one yet?

My eyesight is bad and focusing on light text on dark backgrounds just seems to cause less headaches, so any help appreciated.

You can set up a rudimentary dark-mode viewer with a single line in Mathematica:

Import["https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/nvidia-has-approached-
softbank-and-is-considering-buying-arm-holdings.2583290/page-2?view=
date"]

You can then adjust font, face, size and colour of text to taste.
You can also set up background colour of the cell, using a palette.

Additional code can drop the irrelevant text.
You can also find all hyperlinks in the site with:

Import["https://forums.anandtech.com//", "Hyperlinks"]

For those pages requiring page numbers, you have to add them to the end of the hyperlink in question.

 

[soresu]

I really miss the 3rd party chipset era.

I think over time complexity/cost vs reward became too much effort.

In truth I am surprised as it cut nVidia out of the x86 iGPU business, which can't have been small potatoes unless no one was buying for some reason vs low end dGPU's.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I really miss the 3rd party chipset era. The current consolidated state is incredibly dull. Back then when Intel said "we're not supporting that" Via or ALi would produce something weird to change the market.

Yeah, I miss the off-the-wall chipsets like the ALi M1695 (both AGP and PCIe simultaneously, with old fashion PCI thrown in for good measure) or simply for the memory controller to support two types of RAM (DDR-DDR2 or DDR2-DDR3 f.x.). That's the "price" we pay for today's high levels of integration. Interestingly enough, the industry has started going the chiplet route, so some customizability is returning.

What I don't miss are horribly unstable drivers.

 

[Roland00Address]

What I don't miss are horribly unstable drivers.

Thank God we improved in this area.

 

[PingSpike]

Yeah, I miss the off-the-wall chipsets like the ALi M1695 (both AGP and PCIe simultaneously, with old fashion PCI thrown in for good measure) or simply for the memory controller to support two types of RAM (DDR-DDR2 or DDR2-DDR3 f.x.). That's the "price" we pay for today's high levels of integration. Interestingly enough, the industry has started going the chiplet route, so some customizability is returning.

What I don't miss are horribly unstable drivers.

I remember I had the asrock939-dual. I used both AGP and PCIe cards while I had it. When DDR2 memory came out and DDR1 still had high prices, I bought the AM2 upgrade board sold the 939 CPU and DDR1, and upgraded to AM2+DDR2 for basically free without swapping the motherboard.

Even before that though we had Via saving us from RDRAM or those weird ECS boards with multiple types of ram slots on the same board. Not quite as fun in a wild west sort of way anymore.

 

[Thibsie]

And it was very common even way earlier.
I remember my PcChips (ouch) crap mobo with either simm or Dimm EDO/SDRAM PC66 on socket 7.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I remember I had the asrock939-dual. I used both AGP and PCIe cards while I had it. When DDR2 memory came out and DDR1 still had high prices, I bought the AM2 upgrade board sold the 939 CPU and DDR1, and upgraded to AM2+DDR2 for basically free without swapping the motherboard.

I had one of those too. But that tale is for a different thread...

 

[jpiniero]

Nvidia in Advanced Talks to Buy SoftBank’s Chip Company Arm

Nvidia Corp. is in advanced talks to acquire Arm Ltd., the chip designer that SoftBank Group Corp. bought for $32 billion four years ago, according to people familiar with the matter.

www.bloomberg.com

Now Bloomberg is saying they are in "advanced talks"

 

[Saylick]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around what the long-term vision is for Nvidia to own ARM...

If they wanted to re-enter the mobile space, they already have an ARM license and they currently made chips that have ARM processors with Nvidia GPUs. If they wanted to go into datacenters with their own CPU, again they already own an ARM license and can develop their own products already. ARM is an IP house which makes money from licensing, not from selling products, so what's in it for Nvidia? Is it because they eventually want to license out an ARM core that has NVLink built-in?

 

[Thibsie]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around what the long-term vision is for Nvidia to own ARM...

If they wanted to re-enter the mobile space, they already have an ARM license and they currently made chips that have ARM processors with Nvidia GPUs. If they wanted to go into datacenters with their own CPU, again they already own an ARM license and can develop their own products already. ARM is an IP house which makes money from licensing, not from selling products, so what's in it for Nvidia? Is it because they eventually want to license out an ARM core that has NVLink built-in?

I dunno but it smells bad for Arm ecosystem IMO. Hope I'm wrong.