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U.S. Federal Trade Commission Sues to Block Nvidia's Planned Arm Acquisition
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No, this is a great decision to challenge this merger. Consolidation would lead to higher prices for consumers and less innovation. FTC does not care about a company becoming "de-facto US-controlled". Arm is run out of the US and UK, so there isn't even any real advantage in what you are saying.
Qualcomm probably did complain. But so did everyone who follows the tech and merger space. We need more competitors competing on the basis of price and innovation. Not just two or three companies dominating and using their capital to buy up all their competitors or buy their way into more and more market power.
The key question for me is whether we're more likely to see a viable Intel/AMD/Qualcomm/Samsung/Apple competitor with Nvidia and ARM together or apart. I can see arguments both ways-- it definitely helps to have everything under one roof, it helps if the broader world has access to the IP.
RISC-V means that Arm isn't the only game in town anymore. Even if Nvidia shut off licensing, there's other small efficient RISC cores out there for new ventures to pick up. The major players (Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung) likely have the level of access they need already to optimize the Arm designs without needing much more from Arm itself. Apple has done much of what they've done by acquiring key players in the cpu and gpu fields. AMD picked up ATI and bought their way into the GPU game. Intel is taking longer to get truly good at GPUs than one might expect and may have benefitted from acquiring the right assets and talent (I mean hypothetical Intel-- real Intel would have bought the wrong assets and talent and then squandered what value they had through neglect).
Yes, Arm has GPU cores also, but, nothing to get excited about. Integrating ARM with Nvidia would likely be a more potent combination.
Heterogenous computing looks like the future-- technological mergers make some sense in that environment.
This is a ridiculous concern. Why would nVidia spend $40B on ARM to make it worthless?
NVidia has to make licensees happy or their is no ARM business. Most likely this deal gives ARM more resources and access to better GPU tech to compete with Intel.
There's always RISC-V too.I dunno.
Officially, I haven't seen a single peep out of Apple about it. There have been others (notably Google, MS, and Qualcomm) who have publically objected to it, but Apple hasn't joined them.
I *think* this might be because Apple doesn't really care. They have a perpetual architecture license. I really wish I could track down the article right now, but it's my understanding that it really doesn't matter what happens to ARM ownership. Apple's license will survive that and allow it to continue with business as usual.
I know Apple isn't Nvidia's biggest fan right now, but now that Apple make their own CPUs and GPUs, I can't really say that AMD would be Apple's biggest fan either. They are basically competitors now.
In other words, I think that as long as ARM has deep pockets behind it to continue development, Apple's happy.
Edit: Found it the article I was remembering.
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I don't know. Nvidia taking over Arm would probably hurt the larger Arm ecosystem (since other semiconductor companies who don't like to be dependent on a competitor would probably look for alternatives) and thus potentially be in Intel's favor.I didn’t know Intel had lobbyists.
Meanwhile Apple is probably working on a Rosetta 3 that will run ARM code.
Isn't Qualcomm shooting its own foot on this?
If Nvidia can hinder access to Arm licenses to recoup its money, why couldn't any buyer do the same? If that is the case, is it wise to invest in Arm technology... For example, buying Arm chips of which Qualcomm is one of the main producers?
Better not spread fear and uncertainty against one of your flagship products mmh.
If Nvidia can hinder access to Arm licenses to recoup its money, why couldn't any buyer do the same? If that is the case, is it wise to invest in Arm technology... For example, buying Arm chips of which Qualcomm is one of the main producers?
Better not spread fear and uncertainty against one of your flagship products mmh.
It would drain no resources from Apple, ARM was very profitable before SoftBank acquired it and has continued to be so.
You assume Arm is going to be bought by someone. SoftBank could simply relist it as a separate public company on the LSE. It was very profitable before SoftBank bought it, and continued to be, so there’ll be plenty of investors interested in buying shares.
Obviously it's not the FTC's job to care about that. But the US gov as a whole should nonetheless be supportive of this, competition concerns aside. And of course it's an advantage for it to be US-controlled. The UK may be an ally, but who is to say that their interests and the US's will always be perfectly aligned in regard to ARM?
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Nvidia doesn’t need to buy ARM to fully integrate ARM cores with its own GPU offerings. They already do so in fact as does Qualcomm, as does Apple, and Samsung will be combining them with AMD GPUs. You can build heterogeneous computing as is. That’s the point of the ARM licensing. Thus, from the perspective of Nvidia’s competition (and government regulators) there’s no reason why Nvidia needs to *own* ARM other than nefarious ones to limit competition.
Now Nvidia’s claims that they can pump significant capital into ARM to the benefit of everyone is not unfounded. ARM has not been as profitable in recent years as developing more advanced cores and more of them is expensive. ARM’s costs have been increasing.
However Nvidia’s competition and government regulators aren’t buying that as a valid enough reason for Nvidia to outright own ARM and all the conflicts of interest that naturally brings. As the article mentions there are hundreds of companies that rely on this IP and especially in burgeoning fields like automotive don’t want to be locked out.
Edit : that RISC-V exists doesn’t make this okay from the perspective of competition. RISC-V’s tool chain and ecosystem is nowhere near mature enough to be a drop in replacement for ARM. And even if it were, forcing an ISA change on your competition is massively expensive. Think about it from even just an Android perspective: not a single current app would work natively on anything other than an Nvidia phone. Now I don’t think Nvidia actually wants that, but I’m just highlighting how the existence of another ISA doesn’t negate the concerns of some of ARM’s customers worried that one of the others will unfairly leverage its control over ARM’s ecosystem.
They already do - they don’t need to buy ARM for that. Unless you mean that they’re interested in selling their GPU IP like ARM does with Mali - unlikely.
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Yep, and absolutely no need to believe any of what Nvidia is saying. There is no reason to think that Arm is lacking in resources. They are multi-billion dollar company and can access both their own millions of dollars of profit as well as borrow billions of dollars if they want. Heck, SoftBank which owns them has access to basically unlimited money.
Nvidia has a business case for this $40 billion investment. It almost certainly is based on raising license fees. Qualcomm's concerns that Nvidia is trying to indirectly get information about its competitors that the competitors share with Arm is probably true. Or Nvidia is hoping that competitors are scared of that information transfer, so they share less info with Arm, resulting in competitors product's being worse, resulting in Nvidia's products being stronger by comparison. But not stronger because Nvidia makes better stuff (which is the type of competition that benefits consumers), but stronger because competitors are more limited in what they can design and develop (which is bad for consumers).
I'm sure you understand that there are things you can do with a product roadmap of a technology that you own that you can't do with a technology you license... By most accounts, Apple licensed ARM's ISA but they made the implementation their own. Nvidia may wish to do the same, and owning the team can make that easier.
Apple owned a significant part of ARM once upon a time also.
If they want to license their GPU cores to Arm's well established network of licensees they do.
Once upon a time is a good way to describe when Apple owned a significant amount of ARM and Apple wouldn’t be allowed to buy ARM either. Reportedly they were approached but even they demurred. It’s also likely that they would’ve been blocked from buying ARM and Apple has far fewer conflicts of interest compared to Nvidia.
Yes and no. Nvidia is free to integrate ARM’s offerings and ARM is very open about its roadmaps and works with its customers to tailor both its designs and even ISA changes to their needs. So again it’s not really necessary for Nvidia to own the farm for them get the milk they need.
Anyway I very much doubt that Nvidia is trying buy ARM to compete against AMD and Intel in the PC space. Heck I think they’re barely interested in the mobile space. What they really want is to control data center and especially AI/automotive IP. Far more lucrative and with nascent IP they can have more control before the competition. And that’s why their competition and regulators are objecting. Nvidia being a customer and the owner is just too much of a conflict on interest if they can lock out other customers or redirect development or gain information about what their competitors are doing years before they do so by virtue of owning the company their competitors have to get their IP from.
They don’t.
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So is your theory that everyone who doesn’t get to buy Arm (the company) will switch to RISC-V, or is nVidia special?
And a lot of the Chinese SOC and supercomputer CPU designers are migrating from ARM to RISC-V. University Academic research has already migrated to RISC-V. ARM may not have a lock on the (non-mainframe) RISC CPU market for much longer.