i read it as the opposite. Cherry pick and dump. could affect ARM's business if they (SB) keep core component design/architecture rights. It could mean Arm in future having to pay Softbank to use something they invented, or split licencing fees. That would be an extreme case. Or more likely ARM being unable to claim against infringement if it transpires that tech was shared to Joe Bloggs by Softbank etc. It all gets very muddy if not nailed down and clearly explained who gets what and how that relates to future designs etc.
[GSV]Trig (14-09-2020)
Maybe - I was a bit more pragmatic. They paid over the odds for it, have managed to sell it for more than it's probably worth (in some eyes at least) and was a hard sell by all accounts when they bought it. Olive branch is to the execs and shareholders who opposed it.... we are both probably right
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
Could that be referencing the IoT stuff (software mainly iirc) that we had an article on a while back....
https://hexus.net/business/news/comp...le-divestment/
ik9000 (14-09-2020)
We won't ever know the full commercial details of the licences, but so far even the Chinese licence problems are not a revoke it has just been a cutting off from new IP and support.
But Apple don't need new core designs or support; they paid for the most expensive licence which means they can design their own chips that are compliant with the ARM instruction set.
As long as the Apple cores are more advanced than anything coming out of ARM itself, they won't care.
But you are right that there may be contract clauses that allow Nvidia to cancel Apple's licence. Damn I would be getting the popcorn out to see how that nuclear option went down, but I suspect only the lawyers would win. Apple could probably churn out a RISC-V CPU at the performance level of an A72 as open source and trash the ARM ecosystem and the value of the ARM company, whilst still not challenging their own chips particularly hard. I mean really, I don't understand why people think Nvidia would want to poke that bear?
Now Intel, well Nvidia have plenty of previous there.
My prediction: power ISA based huawei phone SoCs will strike down the cortex/snapdragon monopoly
DanceswithUnix (15-09-2020),Xlucine (15-09-2020)
...an "absolute disaster"... agree 100%. Still, I'm glad because I was never fond of arm's products.
I sometimes have to remind myself that these "modern" instruction sets are now actually rather middle aged. Not as decrepit as x86, but not as spritely as they were.
RISC-V is 10 years old now, old enough to have decent support and designed to be extendible for things like AI and GPU use. Simple enough to be taught how to build one in universities around the world, but good enough to scale. MIPS seems to be carving a decent low end niche in the form of 32 bit PIC controllers, but I don't really think there are any other contenders out there than RISC-V now.
On the cpu side it's pretty likely they can 'spring clean', the issue is likely more software side, just look at the issues MS are having in ridding itself of 'old code' (not all of it is instruction side, some of it is legacy use by companies) and I'm sure they're not alone in accessing 'old' stuff. We've only recently had this push for x64 only on windows, but then we also have all these people who don't want to upgrade from windows 7 for example...
There are two aspects to that:
1/ The actual old instructions (eg 16 bit mode) aren't really relevant to performance and so aren't really directly executed anyway. That's a small overhead on a large area of silicon, so as long as you aren't trying to do something like IoT ultra small low power devices it doesn't really matter.
2/ The mindset of the basic instruction set bleeds over into later instructions. You can't really do much about that.
To some degree things have improved over the years. The original 8086 had hardly any registers, and they weren't general purpose so some instructions expected arguments to be in certain inflexible registers making you have to move data around to use them. In a system with nowhere near enough registers to start with, it was utterly horrible to program. Intel tried to improve things with the 386, created SSE to rid us of the vomit inducing 8087 fpu instructions, then AMD64 increased the number of registers and cleaned some stuff up further.
So what's left? The instruction decoding is vile. With most RISC architectures if you want to know how long an instruction is, the answer is "4 bytes", which is handy if you want to execute more than one instruction at a time and you want to find where the second and third instructions start. You might have a compressed instruction set option like ARM's Thumb ISA in which case the answer is "probably 2 bytes, might be 4, but easy to work it out". But for an x86 chip...
Read the next 16 bytes into a 16 byte buffer so you can access them all in parallel. Now you can write some logic that knows the valid prefix bytes (which I believe can occur in any order) and work out how many prefix bytes there are to get to the actual instruction. Now read the instruction, which can be several bytes long, and work out the addressing modes. For each addressing mode, read in the bytes that give offsets etc. In reality programs focus on a small number of instructions (Intel even tell you which ones in performance tuning manuals) which they can decode rapidly, but you need the *ability* to decode this crud.
Note that the longest possible old x86 instruction is something like 22 bytes long, but some years ago Intel declared that they weren't executing anything over 16 bytes. So there are already some instructions that the likes of a 286 could execute but a modern chip can't.
If you look at a block diagram for a modern x86 cpu you can see a decode cache, to avoid the CPU having to guess. Thankfully modern x86 chips are good at guessing the instructions in front of them.
You can find patents on the sort of tricks they pull to do this, which is amusing as no-one but Intel (and AMD) have variable length CISC instructions to decode so the patents only serve to keep x86 nailed down to Intel.
https://www.freepatentsonline.com/7305542.html
This is the bit that many don't understand of RISC, it is the *complexity* of the instructions that is reduced. Just the simple idea that instructions can't start at an odd address location helps decoding hugely. If you compare the convoluted mess of x86 instructions with the base RISC-V instruction format (from Wikipedia):
the more modern instruction set is elegant in its simplicity, as well as being generally better suited to modern processors.
Pleiades (15-09-2020)
Some updates on this. China might be a sticking point in the deal:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/17/t...ntl/index.html
https://www.ft.com/content/75aea61b-...d-868b9c76511d
https://www.theguardian.com/business...sale-to-nvidia
Also,it appears ARM is being sued,due to the problems WRT to its Chinese department:
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ar...114801666.html
Apparently concerns by ARM employees have been ignored:
https://www.theguardian.com/business...o-nvidia-union
One of the co-founders of ARM is trying to block the sale:Opposition to the $40bn (£31bn) sale of the UK’s largest tech firm, Arm Holdings, is mounting, as the trade union Unite said staff concerned about their future had been “fobbed off” and the company’s local MP urged the government to act.
The US software company Nvidia said on Monday it had agreed to buy Arm, a global leader in designing chips for smartphones, computers and tablets, from the Japanese tech investment business SoftBank.
Arm's sale to Nvidia makes sense but we need binding guarantees | Nils Pratley
Read more
The government has so far declined to say whether it will consider deploying powers to block the deal or attach conditions, despite pressure from Labour, trade unions and Arm’s outspoken co-founder Hermann Hauser.
On Tuesday, Unite said members who worked for Arm at its Cambridge headquarters had been kept in the dark and fobbed off in an internal meeting, with senior figures telling them any transaction was at least 18 months away.
Unite called on the government to prevent the sale, saying ministers should be “protecting tech firms from being hollowed out by detrimental takeovers and providing the investment needed for the sector as a whole to flourish”.
Daniel Zeichner, the Labour MP whose constituency includes Arm’s headquarters, will meet union officials and employees on Friday.
Speaking in the House of Commons on Tuesday, he called on the government to secure a legally binding guarantee to protect jobs as well as an exemption from US foreign investment rules.
Under Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) rules, which would apply to Arm if it was American-owned, the White House can intervene in transactions involving US firms.
Zeichner asked: “Why on Earth would we want to throw away such a bargaining chip in advance of trade negotiations?”
The government has said it is watching developments closely but the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, has so far refrained from “calling in” the deal to examine whether it goes against the national interest.
Under the Enterprise Act 2002, ministers can intervene if they believe a merger or takeover would compromise national security, media plurality, financial stability or the UK’s pandemic response.
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If Dowden calls the deal in, it would trigger a review by the Competition and Markets Authority, which would gather evidence about the deal’s implications. The final decision would rest with the government.
Hauser, who vehemently opposes the deal, has written an open letter to the prime minister calling for the company to be floated on the stock market, with the government taking a “golden share” that would give it the final say on matters deemed in the national interest.
He has also expressed concern that Nvidia would “dismantle” Arm’s model of freely licensing its technology – used in the majority of smartphones – to other companies, instead keeping the next generation of chips for itself to get ahead of competitors.
“They can make more than $40bn by destroying it,” he said.
Nvidia, which has promised Arm employees that they will take part in a $1.5bn share payout if the deal goes ahead, has said it will retain the open licensing model and keep its HQ, jobs and intellectual property in the UK.
But the company is yet to offer any more than verbal guarantees about its plans.
A spokesperson for Arm said: “Communication sessions have been ongoing with employees at a global, regional and departmental level since the deal was made public. Together, [Arm CEO] Simon Segars and [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang held multiple interactive communications sessions with Arm employees, providing them with the highest levels of transparency within the legal constraints of the situation. It was also clearly communicated that the regulatory process does not have a specific timetable and employees will be kept informed as we get more information relating to the initial estimate of 18 months.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/nvid...20-9?r=US&IR=T
He worries that Nvidia would get "preferential treatment" over other Arm licensees, which could create a backlash from those companies — a risk to the deal's success that other analysts have warned about too. As one CCS Insight analyst put it: "Independence is critical to the ongoing success of Arm and once that is compromised, its value will start to erode."
Hauser also wrote that tensions between the US and China could impact Arm's business if it's owned by US-based Nvidia. Hundreds of UK companies that use Arm chips and export their products to China would have to contend with strict US regulations, he said.
"Sovereignty used to be mainly a geographic issue, but now economic sovereignty is equally important," Hauser wrote. "Surrendering UK's most powerful trade weapon to the US is making Britain a US vassal state."Hauser made three recommendations to the Prime Minister to protect the UK's national interests and to preserve Arm's status as a neutral chip designer: Nvidia would need to make legally-binding agreements not to cut UK-based jobs at Arm, not give itself preferential treatment over any other Arm licensees, and to give Britian exemption from US trade laws so UK companies may continue accessing Arm "unfettered."
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