Qualcomm Opposes Nvidia's Acquisition of Arm as Deal Comes Under Increasing Scrutiny

[Nicky G]

What's to stop NVidia from forking the instruction set?

Does it matter? Apple to my understanding has designed all of their Arm processors from the ground up around the Arm ISA for many many years now. They have extended its capabilities themselves, through their GPU cores, neural engine cores, they've designed specialized high and low power cores, they've developed a shared memory fabric. They don't need the base Arm ISA to do anything else -- Is x86_64 changing any time soon?

NVIDIA wants Arm to do more with in enterprise computing/HPC/AI, IMHO, than it has been embraced for traditionally. The #1 supercomputer in the Top 500 HPC systems is Fugaku, which uses Fujitsu Arm ISA chips I believe. But there aren't many Arm HPC systems, and NVIDIA probably thinks they can go after that space to take over the territory IBM seems to be ceding with POWER. Same with the hyperscalers (cloud providers). Apple has proved the Arm ISA can make for very efficient CPUs, but isn't likely to go after the space NVIDIA really wants to occupy any time soon. It's hard to imagine PC gaming making the shift to Arm. Maybe Apple did say "why don't you talk to NVIDIA."

 

[Nicky G]

My guess is that Nvidia is quite flexible when it comes to licensing the ARM cores or ISAs. They are aiming at highly integrated SoCs with a lot of edge computing capacity.

Yep, edge and core IMHO (just look at their DGX servers). I wonder why NVIDIA really feels they need to buy Arm, though. Might halfway be to deprive someone else from getting it.

 

[1258186]

It’s sad to see a brilliant company like ARM tossed around like a football. The British government should step in, block all offers and buy the company themselves, classify it as a national security assert and maintain a controlling stake.

 

[cmaier]

It’s sad to see a brilliant company like ARM tossed around like a football. The British government should step in, block all offers and buy the company themselves, classify it as a national security assert and maintain a controlling stake.

At which point Arm would be no longer allowed to do business in a lot of countries, and anything with Arm I.P. In it would be subject to tariffs in dozens more.

 

[PlainBelliedSneetch]

I bet Apple is working on (or already has) their own instruction set so they can 100% move away from ARM. It would most likely just have have one instruction - analogous to one mouse button.

Yes, the one instruction is move money from my bank account to theirs.

 

[cmaier]

I bet Apple is working on (or already has) their own instruction set so they can 100% move away from ARM. It would most likely just have have one instruction - analogous to one mouse button.

It‘s been done. In fact, half the CPU designers I know toyed with such a thing while drunk in college.

One-instruction set computer - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Periwinkle: One Instruction Set Computer

I want to talk about a CPU that I designed way back in 2016. I implemented it in C as a VM. A friend of mine, Bjørn is the one who made an assembler for it which is written in F#. Periwinkle is an …

ikejr.com

 

[AdonisSMU]

This deal should be blocked outright. I dont understand why the EU would let someone snuff out competition like this.

 

[cmaier]

This deal should be blocked outright. I dont understand why the EU would let someone snuff out competition like this.

Just curious - how does this snuff out competition?

 

[0423MAC]

has NVIDIA publicly stated what their intention is? I haven't seen anything but might have missed it ...

I think they want to make more money.

 

[nouvejetzt]

What I find interesting is that it appears as if Apple had an offer and they reject it, which is rare. We know Apple buy all technologies from others would give them benefits, even more knowing they were developing a chip using this same technology. If they did not buy it is simply because they don't think it would pass. who knows!

 

[weckart]

So basically, greed, and turning a quick buck

SoftBank bought ARM as an investment and basically left it to run itself. Apart from the change of owership, nothing much had changed. It was still a British registered business operating from the UK. It wasn't something that could easily be incorporated into Softbank's core businesses and the investment side of things has not worked out as well as SoftBank had hoped. So here we are.

 

[wilhoitm]

What I find interesting is that it appears as if Apple had an offer and they reject it, which is rare. We know Apple buy all technologies from others would give them benefits, even more knowing they were developing a chip using this same technology. If they did not buy it is simply because they don't think it would pass. who knows!

There is no way Apple would be allowed to buy ARM! Are you kidding me! Android phones use the ARM processor too!

 

[09872738]

It’s sad to see a brilliant company like ARM tossed around like a football. The British government should step in, block all offers and buy the company themselves, classify it as a national security assert and maintain a controlling stake.

Now, lets think this through.
So, Boris Johnson gets some say... basically, one could just as well flush Arm down the toilet right away. With Mr. de Pfeffel invoved there would certainly be more drama and lying involved, but ultimately the outcome would be the same.

 

[weckart]

It’s sad to see a brilliant company like ARM tossed around like a football. The British government should step in, block all offers and buy the company themselves, classify it as a national security assert and maintain a controlling stake.

Yes and no. If you offer up all your shares to the public, then you are public property with all the boons and banes that entails. The government might make things difficult if prospective buyers aim to shift jobs abroad (remember Cadbury?) but realistically, there is little it can do unless prospective buyers fall foul of existing regulations.

Putting it in government ownership is also tricky. China won't like that one little bit but then, again, China is also pretty dependent upon ARM for now so banning it because it is owned by a currently less than friendly foreign government isn't really an option either. Businesses would rather avoid that sort of drama, though.

 

[nouvejetzt]

There is no way Apple would be allowed to buy ARM! Are you kidding me! Android phones use the ARM processor too!

Exactly my point! I'm just saying they saw the conflict of interest and did not buy it as NVIDIA appears to be doing. Although NVIDIA has less conflicts than Apple would of course.

 

[Piggie]

Time for me to ask a Stupid Question

I've known about ARM for many many many years, and myself in the UK owned one of the very 1st ARM computers (if not the actual 1st one) an Acorn Archimedes.
Way before Apple had even a sniff.

Apple licences this so it can use ARM, and sure, in the beginning they probably took a mostly stock ARM design and fiddled a tiny bit.

But many many years on, why does Apple actually need to do any of this?
Are they actually still unable, and don't have the in-house skills needed to actually create their own custom chip from the ground up, and would then not need any connection, nor need to use anything from ARM moving on?

 

[weckart]

But many many years on, why does Apple actually need to do any of this?
Are they actually still unable, and don't have the in-house skills needed to actually create their own custom chip from the ground up, and would then not need any connection, nor need to use anything from ARM moving on?

Possibly but then how far can it drift to satisfy any potential patent claims by ARM before you get incompatibilities with existing hardware - especially the millions of iDevices out there? We also don't really know the terms of Apple's licence with ARM and the ownership of it might be the least of Apple's concerns.

 

[cmaier]

Time for me to ask a Stupid Question

I've known about ARM for many many many years, and myself in the UK owned one of the very 1st ARM computers (if not the actual 1st one) an Acorn Archimedes.
Way before Apple had even a sniff.

Apple licences this so it can use ARM, and sure, in the beginning they probably took a mostly stock ARM design and fiddled a tiny bit.

But many many years on, why does Apple actually need to do any of this?
Are they actually still unable, and don't have the in-house skills needed to actually create their own custom chip from the ground up, and would then not need any connection, nor need to use anything from ARM moving on?

Apple doesn’t need anything from Arm.

 

[lowendlinux]

I’m not sure I want any big tech company owning ARM

 

[EvilEvil]

Can't wait to seem some RTX 30 series GPUs anywhere!!!

I got one back in November!

 

[Mcckoe]

Extra Extra Water is Wet!!!

 

[Krevnik]

Apple licences this so it can use ARM, and sure, in the beginning they probably took a mostly stock ARM design and fiddled a tiny bit.

But many many years on, why does Apple actually need to do any of this?
Are they actually still unable, and don't have the in-house skills needed to actually create their own custom chip from the ground up, and would then not need any connection, nor need to use anything from ARM moving on?

Note that the biggest customer/developer pain from the PPC->Intel and Intel->AS transitions are not the CPUs themselves per se, but the ISA changes.

Apple's current arrangement is that they license the rights to the ISA, but have the freedom to do whatever they want in their CPU designs. And they do. They have their own "from scratch" ARM CPU cores much in the same way AMD has "from scratch" x86 CPU cores.

Being able to leverage an existing ISA, but design their own architecture backing that ISA prevents iOS from going through one of these ISA shifts when Apple started replacing reference designs with their custom designs, so it makes sense for Apple to license the ISA like they do. Any future ISA shift will very likely affect the Apple's whole product line, so there is a bit of a disincentive to do one so quickly after migrating the Mac. It's not exactly cheap on Apple's part to provide test hardware, transition bridges like Rosetta, burning goodwill they've built up, etc.

Apple doesn’t need anything from Arm.

I'd be surprised if Apple switches ISAs anytime soon, though. While they don't need anything from ARM, they have a very practical arrangement that has benefits for Apple. So Apple does have an interest to prod future ISA additions and changes in a direction that benefits them as long as they can maintain a good working relationship.

 

[cmaier]

I'd be surprised if Apple switches ISAs anytime soon, though. While they don't need anything from ARM, they have a very practical arrangement that has benefits for Apple. So Apple does have an interest to prod future ISA additions and changes in a direction that benefits them as long as they can maintain a good working relationship.

Apple has already started adding its own instructions, and I doubt they care very much if they make it into the official Arm spec. No reason for Apple to help competitors.

 

[Krevnik]

Interestingly, the very high end and the very low end meet each other when it comes to power efficiency.

In the low end you just do not have the electric power, as you want to conserve the battery. In the high end you would have as much power as you wanted, but as all power you feed into the chip turns into heat, cooling becomes a major headache.

So, at both ends of the spectrum you need to worry about power efficiency. Not so much in the mid range (not so fast desktop GPUs). There money comes first.

Of course, the inter-core and memory communication differentiates frugal mobile and fast high end GPUs, but you still want to have as much oomph per watt as possible.

So, I don't disagree that Nvidia has the ability to deliver here. I more question the will to do the engineering work. They simply haven't been interested in the mobile space. They gave it one go and then seemed to just shrug and give up.

Going by what the X1 was able to do on Maxwell, I'm not completely convinced that they would have the same commanding lead in tech in the mobile space, compared to the desktop where it's just them, AMD, and Intel.

Apple has already started adding its own instructions, and I doubt they care very much if they make it into the official Arm spec. No reason for Apple to help competitors.

Beyond the SIMD extensions? SIMD fragmentation is a mess everywhere. I am thinking more the core parts of the ISA, rather than SIMD which needs to be checked at runtime anyways due to existing fragmentation.

It's more a pain to have to go through this whole hoopla with devs a second time around until they feel there is a need to do it. I honestly think such a move is at least a decade out, if not two.

 

[cmaier]

So, I don't disagree that Nvidia has the ability to deliver here. I more question the will to do the engineering work. They simply haven't been interested in the mobile space. They gave it one go and then seemed to just shrug and give up.

Going by what the X1 was able to do on Maxwell, I'm not completely convinced that they would have the same commanding lead in tech in the mobile space, compared to the desktop where it's just them, AMD, and Intel.



Beyond the SIMD extensions? SIMD fragmentation is a mess everywhere. I am thinking more the core parts of the ISA, rather than SIMD which needs to be checked at runtime anyways due to existing fragmentation.

It's more a pain to have to go through this whole hoopla with devs a second time around until they feel there is a need to do it. I honestly think such a move is at least a decade out, if not two.

I was thinking the SIMD, but I don’t doubt they will go ahead and change the ISA in other ways if they feel like it. They control their own compiler destiny, their own OS, Rosetta, etc. So they really don’t need Arm’s help.

Just like when I designed CPUs at AMD, I didn’t need help from Intel.