UK Watchdog Begins Investigating Nvidia's $40 Billion Takeover of Arm (theguardian.com) 22
Britain's competition watchdog has launched an investigation into the $40 billion takeover of the UK-based chip designer Arm by the US company Nvidia. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has called for interested parties to submit views on the contentious deal before the launch of a formal investigation later this year. Arm Holdings, which employs 6,500 staff including 3,000 in the UK, is a global leader in designing chips for smartphones, computers and tablets. California-based Nvidia, a graphics chip specialist, announced its plan to buy the British tech group from Japan's SoftBank in September. SoftBank had acquired Arm for $32 billion in 2016, when the Japanese company took advantage of the fall in value of the pound after the Brexit vote. Arm is based in Cambridge but has operations in a number of UK towns and cities, including Manchester, Belfast and Warwick. Its chief executive, Simon Segars, acknowledged at the time of the Nvidia deal that it could take up to 18 months to win approval from regulators around the world.
For the industry sake... (Score:1)
Block this!!
Nvidia wont pay 40 billions just to be nice to the industry.
Given how bad they have been to customers, partners and the whole industry, they dont have any good intentions for this purchase.
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Can they block the merger on the basis of nVidia being asshats?
I hope this deal doesn't go through (Score:2)
This will harm the industry as a whole IMO. Why? Because most of Nvidia's competitors are ARM's customers and this would be an easy way to cut them off. It would also harm the microprocessor industry as Nvidia doesn't care much about this space. I hope the acquisition fails.
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nVidia's primary source of revenue is their GPU & Compute division: graphics cards, dedicated AI accelerators, etc. Their Tegra SoC unit is only responsble for 13% of their revenue share. nVidia isn't spending $40 billion to acquire ARM to prop up their Tegra business. They're doing it to protect their GPU business, where their main competitors are AMD and . . . AMD. And maybe Intel at some point in the future. But for now, just AMD.
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Prop up in what way?
Seems like they want to expand their SoC business. It's a massive market, so many devices now using them.
Re:I hope this deal doesn't go through (Score:4, Interesting)
nVidia is at risk of losing their enterprise/Big Compute/Big AI foothold. Right now, to get the most out of nVidia professional/datacenter-class video cards/accelerators, you need NVLink. NVLink is proprietary and supports compute models such as Unified Virtual Memory (UVM). At the present, there are motherboard manufacturers out there that can and will integrate NVLink support into their motherboards/chipsets, assuming they license the tech from nVidia first.
What many are waking up to is that nVidia relies extensively upon their product stack of GPGPU accelerators, CUDA, and NVLink to drive high margins and high profits. There are numerous open efforts to replace that product stack, using a variety of disparate hardware connected by common interfaces such as CCIX. AMD and Ampere support CCIX, while Intel is pushing CXL for their OneAPI initiative. nVidia rightly fears that the proliferation of open device interconnects that can compete with NVLink will reduce their market share slowly over time. AMD and Intel can effectively kick nVidia off their platforms. There's no sign that the up-and-coming ARM server vendors (notably Ampere) are interested in embracing NVLink either.
The latter changes if nVidia buys up ARM and starts alterting the reference Neoverse platform.
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Nvidia could establish another foothold in the big compute business through Arm. Looking at Nvidia's latest GPUs do they not to have difficulties manufacturing up to 52 billion transistor GPUs. Take for comparison Fujitsu's A64FX CPU with its 48 Arm cores used in the latest #1 super computer, which only has got a 10 billion transistor count. Nvidia shouldn't have too big of a problem in knocking "the ball out of the park" here if they wanted to. Imagine the possibilities: a 128-core Arm CPU with vector unit
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I see this deal as the only way the consumer ARM industry will have enough investment to compete with Apple.
Huge scale will be needed going forward to compete with Apple, they are locking down entire new nodes of TSMC for nearly a year ... even without being able to invest more into architectural innovation that will make it impossible to compete.
Someone has to step up to make competition possible and I see this as the most feasible route. NVIDIA is mostly a component company, yes they will want to push the
Why not just pay for it? (Score:2)
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ARM is owned by a Japanese company.
England is trying to close the barn door after the horse has already bolted. If they had any objections, they should have protested against the sale of an English company to a Japanese company in the first place. Their international legal standing is very wobbly. I'll wait for tomorrow when "The Economist" briefs me thoroughly on this.
If the UK wants it, outbid Nvidia. I'm sure they could buy it for $50 Billion.
COVID + Brexit = no extra money for England right now.
They could however, nationalize it through debt that the next few generations in England would have to pay for.
Norwa
North Sea oil wealth fund. (Score:2)
Interesting idea to use the fund for projects which help reduce energy consumption via low power draw and to buy IP to protect European interests.
Investing in other hardware IP could be profitable and useful in many ways. Not being Norse, how does one get their attention?
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Yeah, and duck islands too ;-)
This will be a cash-grab by the UK government. The sale will go through no matter how terrible it might be for the UK, but there'll be some deal associated with it that either pays money directly, or else ensures X number of people remain employed in the UK for Y years. If the MPs get really fancy, they might ensure a certain amount of profit is shown in the UK, so that corp tax gets paid, but I doubt that's so likely (whilst probably more lucrative, it doesn't work on Daily Ma
RISC-V (Score:2)
No need to be worried. There are still options. In the worst case scenario of this deal will it forces some people to switch to RISC-V.
Deepest sympathy for the British people & Indu (Score:1)
You experience such a disastrous period: Brexit, the pandemic, another disruptive and world-changing British IP going down the drain... Who knows what might come next. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Re: British people & Industry (Score:1)
Truncated title should read "& Industry"
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Who knows what might come next.
Next we all turn into snowflakes.