Arm Sale to NVIDIA Would Be a “Disaster,” Says Co-founder

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With NVIDIA’s history of heavy-handed tactics, a potential Arm acquisition would probably be bad news, right? That’s pretty much a certainty, according to co-founder Hermann Hauser, who recently talked to the BBC about Softbank’s intention of selling off the mobile-chip leader. In a moment of frankness, Hauser stated that the deal would be a “disaster,” as the company would not be able to retain its neutrality and license to anybody/everybody under NVIDIA’s ownership.



“It’s one of the fundamental assumptions of the ARM business model that it can sell to everybody,” he explained. “The one saving grace about Softbank was that it wasn’t a chip company, and retained ARM’s neutrality. If it becomes part of Nvidia, most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia, and will of course then look for an alternative to ARM.”...
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If he was so concerned about the future of arm then maybe he shouldn't have sold the company to Softbank in 2016.
 
Armenius said:
If he was so concerned about the future of arm then maybe he shouldn't have sold the company to Softbank in 2016.
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Burticus said:
Yeah that guy got paid already, so STFU, sellout.
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You guys are technically correct, but he is right too.

This could be really bad for just about every ARM licensee, except maybe Nvidia.

ARM Holdings has a long history of being neutral. you want a license? They will sell you a license. That's why they have been so popular and grown so explosively over the years.

Nvidia on the other hand is the absolute opposite of that. They try to manipulate, lock in, lock out, and use business practices reminiscent of Intel in the bad old days, every chance they get. I'd have a difficult time thinking of a worse company to own ARM Holdings for the industry as a whole.
 
Zarathustra said:
Nvidia on the other hand is the absolute opposite of that. They try to manipulate, lock in, lock out, and use business practices reminiscent of Intel in the bad old days, every chance they get. I'd have a difficult time thinking of a worse company to own ARM Holdings for the industry as a whole.
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I have a hard time not seeing a future where everyone switches over to MIPS or Embedded PowerPC (or worse, Atom) if nVidia gets ahold of ARM.
 
Zarathustra said:
RISC-V
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Don't pull this over from H. RISC-V is not even near the maturity level of MIPS or PowerPC. Just because erek posts some regurgitated blurb about an architecture that is in its infancy doesn't mean it is a real alternative yet.
 
X86... Just because Atom is crap doesn't mean everything will be. Perhaps a single ryzen 3 8core ccx module could be tuned for efficiency at a level we don't expect, and would give the best ARM mobile chips a run for its money.
 
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From the beginning of these rumors my first thought was that the purchase of ARM by nVidia would be the absolute fastest and easiest way for ARM to be killed off.
 
Uvilla said:
X86... Just because Atom is crap doesn't mean everything will be. Perhaps a single ryzen 3 8core ccx module could be tuned for efficiency at a level we don't expect, and would give the best ARM mobile chips a run for its money.
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I wouldn’t necessarily write AMD off on that entirely, but I would think if x86 could be tunes down to competitive levels with ARM, Intel would have put it out the door immediately. Atom was as good as they got.
 
Brian_B said:
I wouldn’t necessarily write AMD off on that entirely, but I would think if x86 could be tunes down to competitive levels with ARM, Intel would have put it out the door immediately. Atom was as good as they got.
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AMD existed for a very long time on the funds generated by producing custom solution chips. (ASIC's really) So if Nvidia enters the arena strong with ARM I would expect a competitive solution from AMD in short order. And I would expect it to be chiplet based for scalability beyond what Nvidia will be able to do quickly.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
Don't pull this over from H. RISC-V is not even near the maturity level of MIPS or PowerPC. Just because erek posts some regurgitated blurb about an architecture that is in its infancy doesn't mean it is a real alternative yet.
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Agreed. It's not ready yet, but any migration away from ARM in response to an Nvidia takeover would be slow and drawn out too, so who knows.

That, and MIPS and RISC-V are very closely related. MIPS - as I recall - is essentially a for profit fork of the original RISC instruction set, which RISC-V is the fifth generation of.
 
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