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About LinkBacksRead more.Arm-based processor claimed to offer "10x the performance" in complex AI/HPC workloads.
Read more.Arm-based processor claimed to offer "10x the performance" in complex AI/HPC workloads.
And it is revealed why Nvidia wants to purchase ARM, they want to be on the frontline of CPU production for datacentre driven deep learning.
Oh what an edge that would be being both the master and consumer of the very resource that is being used.
And this is exactly why Nvidia should not be allowed to acquire ARM, the writing is on the wall that if the acquisition goes through, competitive ARM offerings in the trickle down DL to server space will always be behind Nvidia. If history is anything to go by, if the acquisition were to go through, Nvidia has years where it can stifle competition before it'll get pulled up and many more years before Nvidia will be charged and many more years after that where Nvidia will be forced to do anything.
No licensee should become the owner of the source, not Nvidia or AMD or Intel.
Couldn't agree more. Unfortunately this is in the hands of people who don't understand how this works at a level beyond "boxes of magic and pixies" because their interest is economics and markets. It worries me that the important, technical details which make this a really terrible idea will be beyond them (much like money beyond "here, have some magic paper" is beyond me).Originally Posted by Tabbykatze
Looks more like a SoM (System on Module) to me than a CPU, but ok Nvidia, you go ahead and call it a CPU.
Bigger is better, right? Also Good for social media marketing.
Last edited by kalniel; 13-04-2021 at 06:16 PM.
We still think that NVidias acquisition of ARM will get denied?
I think it can go one of two ways now.
The US (at least the remnants of Trump but Biden ain't exactly rolling back very quick) would do anything for it to be US controlled because to deny China ARM would be highly destructive to China.
However, there seem to be just as many sensible people going "hold the fawn" and seeing Nvidia as a dangerous owner. I mean, look at the GeForce Partner Program that we still don't know all the details of, Nvidia could easily do that to ARM in far more nuanced ways.
The supposed benefits of Nvidia injecting Mellanox and DL capabilities into ARM are not worth the risk of it being narrowed to an extension of Nvidias empire. Companies tend to hate dealing with Nvidia, Linux foundation is always in tenderhooks, Apple would rather rub their soft appendages through glass, not sure exactly where MS stands but even Nvidias own GPU partners have sour tastes.
ARM is like Mjolnir, you should be worthy to wield it, otherwise it should be left to its own devices.
USA needs total consumer CPU control and Nvidia is a USA company. Maybe if China and the rest can work hard on RISC-V.
Well if we were stupid enough to let it go in the first place, we should be expected to either spend over the odds to get it back, or just let it go and move on..
UNFORTUNATLEY for the rest of the world we depend on USA tech companies. Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, AMD, IBM, Nvidia, Qualcomm etc etc. ARM will start to be propriety tech and we will do nothing about it. Unless we accuse Tesla of Spying!
Who knows, it could go one of two ways. I mean Microsoft bought Github and haven't been bad in how they have handled that (they're just using the developers as a resource), if Nvidia took the same approach then it would probably only be China that would try to block due to export restrictions on US companies. I'm honestly doubtful that EU regulators would approve the move either. ARM fits really well with the Nvidia business model, but what happens when they basically block competitors from having a license to chip designs? There really need to be conditions set on them to prevent that from occurring, because we know from the past that Nvidia can behave badly.
Someone has to own the source, surely if that person is changing then it would be one of the licensee's that would take over?
What you don't want is someone who also owns the competitor (e.g. Intel/AMD own x86) as that has monopoly implications.
I think the worry is that Nvidia can undercut competitors in designs.
Given Nvida are making FE GPUs atm and undercutting their "partner" manufacturers, that seems on some level that they have previous and it is fair to worry. The answer there is that Nvidia should not be making graphics cards in the first place and should just sell silicon to board makers. But then, those FE cards are our only real chance atm of getting a sane priced card. So are Nvidia the rogue for undercutting their board partners, or the hero for giving us cheap video cards?
I don't really think the ARM licence situation is the same though. The pure breath of ARM chips, from the little Raspberry Pi Pico (£3.60 for the whole board) up to the likes of an NXP server chip costing hundreds just for the silicon, but giving lots of 64 bit cores and a lot of serial lanes for up to 100GbE networking. Nvidia just can't undercut all of those if it wanted to, and when you look at it the only ARM thing that Nvidia sell in any quantity right now is the Nintendo Switch. Interestingly. when Nintendo started selling the switch is around when Nvidia stopped selling Tegra based Android tablets making it look like they didn't want to be competing in any way with Nintendo even though being a flat thing with a Tegra in it you could argue they aren't really otherwise the same.
I don't think you can complain as a consumer about FE GPU's. Having good quality cards that will always be sold at RRP is the best way of controlling partners pricing. It's also what the big pc vendors want as Nvidia guarantee the cards will be produced for the lifetime of the product. That's great for Dell as they only need to verify it once and then they can use it. If you have to buy partner cards then you have no guarantee the partner won't stop selling that card, or change the design. It's part of the reason why so many vendors stock Nvidia over AMD.
As for ARM I don't think Nvidia undercutting is the issue if they own ARM as ARM licenses are so cheap - they don't have much impact on the cost. The issue is more that Nvidia might decide to massively increase the cost of licensing ARM chips, or might stop licensing them altogether instead demanding you get Nvidia to make them. Basically do what Intel/AMD do in x86. I think that it's highly unlikely Nvidia will stop licensing ARM, but I think it's very like the cost of licensing will go up. On the plus side Nvidia are very good at innovating, and have a lot of very smart people from a wide range of fields to call on - chances are ARM will progress faster if Nvidia own them.
That is a really narrow market of PCs/laptops and servers though. The ARM ecosystem is potentially *everything*. In that IoT world where every object around us contains a CPU and has an IP address, I think ARM already had it just right for world dominance: knock out a range of cores and allow people to come up with SoCs that use them in all sorts of new and interesting ways. I can see Nvidia wanting world dominance.
If Nvidia were to try and nail it down, people will just switch to RISC-V. Nvidia will know this, they already made the conversion themselves: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads...ijstermans.pdf
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