Companies aren't people. There is no "hate" except when there are opposing business interests or if there is a marketing opportunity. Apple ended their partnership with Nvidia after that fiasco and that was it.
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U.S. Federal Trade Commission Sues to Block Nvidia's Planned Arm Acquisition
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It’s a pretty wild story. Technically no IP has been stolen, but ARM has basically lost access to their own subsidiary and the Chinese market.
The Semiconductor Heist Of The Century | Arm China Has Gone Completely Rogue, Operating As An Independent Company With Inhouse IP/R&D
Arm China has gone completely rogue, operating as an independent company with their own IP and R&D. This is the semiconductor heist of the century. There are many questions swirling about what…
semianalysis.com
This is good news for everyone. I have a feeling that with all the regulatory scrutiny it would've invited even Nvidia would've regretted buying ARM in the long run. I actually feel like the biggest, most under-appreciated winner here is actually Softbank... I don't know what they were thinking trying to sell the golden goose like this...
This isn't surprising. China's been showing its true colors for a while now. Non Chinese companies need to wake up and get much more aggressive about protecting their IP by not building (or at the very least conducting critical R&D) in China, or else they're going to find their suppliers eating their lunch in less than a decade (kind of like what happened with Japan and Korea in consumer electronics but on a much more massive scale.)It’s a pretty wild story. Technically no IP has been stolen, but ARM has basically lost access to their own subsidiary and the Chinese market.
The Semiconductor Heist Of The Century | Arm China Has Gone Completely Rogue, Operating As An Independent Company With Inhouse IP/R&D
Arm China has gone completely rogue, operating as an independent company with their own IP and R&D. This is the semiconductor heist of the century. There are many questions swirling about what…
They also need to (continue) lobbying their governments to lock Chinese companies out of bids for major business/infrastructure/IT projects in their countries or else, again, they're going to loose their shirts to this kind of behavior.
No one needs this merger. Nvidia and ARM are fine on their own. This is great news.
So does owning the company help them redirect development or not?
$40B seems like an expensive corporate espionage scheme. Especially when it has the flaw that your targets can simultaneously deny you information and revenue by going somewhere else for IP.
Of course it does. That’s not the same as not being able to tightly integrate ARM-based CPUs with other GPU designs as ARM’s partners including Nvidia themselves already do. Of course there are benefits to Nvidia in acquiring ARM. This is about the fact that most of those benefits come at the cost of Nvidia’s competitors in the ARM market which is why those competitors and government regulators are objecting as it stifles competition by giving one ARM customer a massive advantage over the others by virtue of simultaneously being the owner. This isn’t terribly complicated or surprising. And we already covered why most of them can’t just “switch IP”.
Edit: Nvidia to get this through regulators is promising *not* to interfere with ARM development or get early access to designs. The FTC just don’t believe Nvidia.
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If companies aren’t “people’ and there is no “hate” then how does this explain this move?
Simply put, this type of move only happens when two companies truly hate each other to the point that they will do whatever it takes to destroy them.
This is Apple not ending partnership, this is Apple wanting total revenge on Nvidia for destroying the MacBook Pro user experience.
As much as I would like to believe that all will end well with this. Just seems to me like China will "somehow" get their hands on how to clone Arms secret sauce and by the time this merger is all sorted out, there will be a new player in town that everyone but Apple will go to for their tech. The coming VR revolution is going to create some new big players in the semiconductor business. And it doesn't have to be through legal and fair business practices. Its like the smart phone, once the market saw where the market was going, everyone jumped on board and essentially made iPhone clones. Same thing will happen if VR gets people to fork over $500-$1,000+, tons of companies would want to get in on that new emerging tech sector. Something, even just switching PC's to arm, is going to snowball into a thriving sector of the industry. And it really doesnt matter who owns arm if some other country can just fake it till they steal it or make it.
Nvidia stopped supporting CUDA on Macs because the number of Macs with Nvidia GPUs became vanishingly small.
Apple hasn’t said a word about the merger. They’re a rare customer of ARM’s that doesn’t care about the vast majority of its IP - just the ISA to which they have a perpetual license.
Companies can and do hate each other and simultaneously work with and against each other or ignore each other.
Exactly. Most people here are clueless.
This acquisition benefits consumers.
This gives us a 3rd integrated CPU+GPU competitor after AMD and Intel.
Nvidia needs a CPU division. They'll inject resources into ARM, provide Nvidia IP such as GPUs to make ARM cores more competitive, make ARM more competitive in datacenters and AI, and create unified CPU+GPU SoCs themselves to compete with Qualcomm, Apple, AMD, Intel.
Qualcomm wants to block this because it knows Nvidia will become a formidable competitor which means Qualcomm will have to work harder and lower prices.
Apple doesn't care because Apple has an infinite ARM license and doesn't use ARM core designs anyways.
Regardless, people are sensitive to this merger because of what Trump did in 4 years, which abused its power to destroy foreign companies. People are scared that ARM in the hands of a US company means the US government can block any country's access to the tech. Meanwhile, a joint UK/Japan is much less likely to do so because those countries are more neutral than the US.
This lawsuit smells like Qualcomm has very strong lobbyists in the government.
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I’m familiar with that story. So after Nvidia showed that they could not deliver a product that worked properly Apple switched to AMD for their GPUs across the lineup. Then both companies dropped support for CUDA after 5 years of Macs not using Nvidia chips (the last MBP with Nvidia GPUs was in 2014). How does this demonstrate hate or revenge? It seems like a logical decision.
They don't hate each other. I'm 100000% sure that Apple uses Nvidia GPUs internally for AI training and inference.
The reason Apple stopped using Nvidia GPUs is that:
1. Nvidia lost interest in doing low-margin custom work for other companies. They'd rather spend their money on CUDA, AI, and data center. This was an ingenious business move.
2. Apple wanted more control of the GPU and the stack. Only AMD was desperate enough to do so at that time.
Don't forget that AMD GPUs suffered hardware issues in Macs too.
Also, not having Nvidia GPUs in Macs made Macs less competitive over the last 6 years. Simply put, Nvidia GPUs are just faster, better, more functional than AMD GPUs.
Not really, I oversimplified for brevity. Let's take a few scenarios.
ARM stays independent:
Slowly RISC-V vendors and in-house implementations rise up to compete against ARM. I know of multiple high volume users of M and R range CPUs working towards replacing those with RISC-V. I've read about other efforts to go after the A market. I think it's just a matter of time before this erodes ARMs value proposition and creates downward pricing pressure. It will be slow, as RISC-V is still missing pieces and inertia has it's value. But a stagnating market isn't encouraging. The longer ARM is independent, the more likely some RISC-V vendor comes along to compete against the A series. Eventually ARM will be smaller and less profitable, to survive they will either find news ways to add additional value, or they will be sold.
Nvidia has to decide if they will stay an ARM customer or grow RISC-V. That probably depends on Microsoft. Tough call.
Which brings us to ARM is acquired by NVidia:
I feel Nvidia's angle is to try and crack the market for PCs plus consoles, by building an M3 Pro Ultra competitor. They will invest heavily, trying displace Intel in PCs, and AMD in consoles. On the M and R licensing business side, they will milk it while they can, but they won't invest. They will try bundling their GPUs with A series contracts, possibly no longer investing in versions that don't include a GPU.
This won't be received well by Qualcomm on the A series side, or anyone on the M and R series side, and will accelerate industry efforts to move to RISC-V. Further confirming Nvidia's decision not to invest in those markets. The M and R cpus will eventually be open sourced in some way, and Nvidia will exit those markets completely. The A+GPU business will live on, but Qualcomm will attack it with a RISC-V or some other solution. Nvidia will make some money in the portable market with A+GPU, but the real money will be in Datacenter, plus some gravy from console, and PC. The portable market will always be at risk of being cut.
How about Qualcomm buys ARM?
This is more of a mixed bag. Qualcomm would probably treat the embedded market better, but they would apply the bundling tactics with the CPU and their cellular solution, which will piss-off the A series customers. Nvidia embraces RISC-V out of spite, possibly accelerating ARMs decline.
Summary:
In the first scenario, ARM slowly becomes a small player. In the second scenario, ARM displaces a large portion of Intel's business, but shrinks in mobile. In the third, it's tougher to predict, but ARM lives on in all 3 scenarios, even though it's role changes a lot.
If you're old enough, you would have encountered the same attitude towards the Japanese back in the 70s - 90s. Basically, the west thought Japan stole IP and was incapable of developing products and services that could compete without stealing or copying. The US government did whatever it could to try to limit Japanese product sales in the US.
Same thing is happening with China now. The sentiment here is that the Chinese are simply copycats or are not capable of competing without stealing.
One of the worst things the US did was to destroy Huawei. Huawei's Hisilicon SoCs were competitive with Qualcomm already and Huawei's smartphone division was taking over Europe, South America, and Asia. Its 5G tech deployment was more competitive than Ericcson/Nokia/Cisco/etc. Now China has woken up and will play hardball with acquisitions like ARM/Nvidia and will do everything it can to compete with US tech instead of buying US tech.
nVidia is one company that has proved time and again that they will actively use all legal and illegal means to get an edge over their competition. Block this deal to hell!
Well Qualcomm seems to have tons. I'm not a fan of mergers getting blocked.I didn’t know Intel had lobbyists.
Meanwhile Apple is probably working on a Rosetta 3 that will run ARM code.
What you and @Analog Kid are suggesting is precisely what Nvidia is promising not to do - to turn ARM into Nvidia’s personal CPU division. Nvidia’s entire position to get this through regulators rests on ARM remaining independent from them - Nvidia as a customer would get no special treatment and ARM would continue to operate as a neutral party.
It’s not just Qualcomm who have objected. They’ve just been the loudest. And the FTC are not overly fond of Qualcomm right now having just lost to them in court. And neither are all the other regulators who have had run ins with Qualcomm and are currently investigating the deal. Anyway Microsoft, Google, and others have objected as well. I should note that not every ARM customer has even beyond Apple.
Also I should separate this out from my personal feelings: having Nvidia’s deep pockets bankrolling ARM development wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I’d actually like to see that in many respects. But the implications are pretty obvious for why regulators are looking at this in askance.
Nvidia doesn’t need to buy ARM to have a CPU division. The already have one. Not designing their own *cores* isn’t the same thing as not designing their own *CPUs*. And, again, Nvidia has promised not to use development of upcoming core designs or information shared with ARM to get a leg up on its competitors. The FTC is simply saying that promise isn’t good enough, the conflicts of interest are too great with too much at stake. Apparently the FTC’s board’s decision was unanimous.
Now maybe the Brits, the EU, the Japanese, and the Chinese will come to different conclusions. Maybe the courts will come to a different conclusion as well if it goes there. But this was always going to be a tough hurdle to overcome and the only thing truly surprising is that it’s the US who filed first.