Wednesday, October 6th 2021
NVIDIA's Now $54 Billion Arm Acquisition Hits Major Snag with the European Commission, Offers Concessions
It looks like NVIDIA's acquisition of Arm Holdings Plc from Japan's SoftBank, has hit its biggest regulatory hurdle, with the European Commission, the apex executive body of the European Union, deliberating on whether the deal requires a thorough investigation lasting 4 months. Reuters reports that NVIDIA offered the Commission certain "concessions," which may affect the way Arm operates under NVIDIA. The Commission did not disclose these concessions, but mentioned that it will take until October 27 to decide whether or not they merit further investigation.
NVIDIA's Arm acquisition has split the Arm licensee industry along the median. The likes of Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung, have voiced serious concerns over the deal. They fear that as a high-performance SoC designer itself, NVIDIA will withhold the most advanced bits of the Arm IP to itself, giving it a competitive edge over licensees. Not all companies see it this way, with Broadcom, MediaTek, and Marvell openly endorsing the deal. It's interesting to note here, that Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm, make faster smartphone SoCs than MediaTek, Broadcom, and Marvell (and their subsidiaries) do.
Source:
Reuters
NVIDIA's Arm acquisition has split the Arm licensee industry along the median. The likes of Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung, have voiced serious concerns over the deal. They fear that as a high-performance SoC designer itself, NVIDIA will withhold the most advanced bits of the Arm IP to itself, giving it a competitive edge over licensees. Not all companies see it this way, with Broadcom, MediaTek, and Marvell openly endorsing the deal. It's interesting to note here, that Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm, make faster smartphone SoCs than MediaTek, Broadcom, and Marvell (and their subsidiaries) do.
29 Comments on NVIDIA's Now $54 Billion Arm Acquisition Hits Major Snag with the European Commission, Offers Concessions
Yes, there's RISC-V, but they can't compete with a Cortex-A53 yet, even less the higher-end parts from Arm. They could replace some of the MCU products, but that's going to take years to do.
MIPS is still around, somewhere and could possibly, maybe pick up some of the slack, but same again, can't compete on the high-end.
So what happens if Nvidia changes the license terms after having picked up Arm, as there's nothing really stopping them from doing so.
It'll be interesting to see what the concessions are, as I doubt it'll be enough. I mean, it's not as if Nvidia can sell off the MCU business to someone else, as the Cortex-M cores are often used for system controllers or PMICs on larger Arm based SoCs.
compensationer.. concession do european politicians take before they bendoverbackwards for corporations?And not saying there's no reason of concern, but exactly what "advanced" bits could Nvidia withhold, since ARM's bread and butter is licensing instruction sets?
Personally, I think this deal should go ahead as to accelerate more investment into other ISAs ecosystem. It would be really good to have actual competition in those MCUs and mobile areas where ARM has a literal monopoly and this might be the only way to do that.
Could also be nice to have phones with nvidia graphics too or random arm socs.It's just that there's hasn't been enough interest to do any uarch of RISC-V that was of this performance class. There's of course SiFIVE but they are far more limited in size. ARM role is important as they design and licensee the core and their designs.
For say RISC-V, the ecosystem just isn't there yet. And might never be at this rate. Unless the deal goes through and people flock into it.They design the CPU cores and GPUs too. Only a couple of companies like Apple depends solely on them for the ISA as they do custom/non-generic ARM designs.
Also, (damn) $54 billion?!
How would it affect Qualcomm, except maybe make them look bad vs. MTK or Samsung (who seems to prefer AMD at the moment), since Marvell and Broadcom don't make phone chips.
Mali isn't exactly cutting edge, but then again, considering how many devices still use the old MP400/450 GPU, it shows that most Arm chip makers don't give a hoot about graphics acceleration.Arm doesn't have a monopoly when it comes to MCUs, in fact, it's the one area where they have plenty of competition. Outside of Arm, there's well over a dozen competing microcontroller cores, although a lot of them are a bit old and slow by modern standards.And you know this how? There are several companies working on various RISC-V implementations, it's just that you can't just take what they offer and throw together a working chip, as they don't offer all the block needed, unlike Arm. As such, you have to license technology from other companies and it takes a lot longer time to build something using RISC-V today compared to Arm.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Existing
I guess you missed this news post? Yes, it's not a full on SoC as such, but it shows that there's ongoing work on RISC-V hardware.
www.techpowerup.com/287033/european-processor-initiative-epac-1-0-risc-v-test-chip-samples-deliveredApparently the PRC is putting a lot of resources into RISC-V.
So is WD by the way.No, Arm doesn't manufacture anything, they design IP that is used to some degree inside Apple's chips, but Apple doesn't use the default Arm IP as is, unlike say MTK.
TSMC will continue to make Apple's chips.
[SIZE=4]Nvidia's acquisition of ARM still uncertain [/SIZE]
[SIZE=4]China has the [B]last[/B] word, and this is not great news for US-based Nvidia, Japan-based SoftBank, the current owner of the money bleeding ARM, and UK-based ARM. [/SIZE]
;)
Stupid like all day :kookoo:#
Atm we have here one producer for SSDs its called Goodram from Poland with a Franchise from Toshiba, the rest is away.:laugh::sleep:
China arm will scupper it, simples.
Whatever EU does or does not, China might block it anyway. Although after China stole the whole fucking company of chinese ARM, they might not just care anymore.