The threat and issues of Nvidia buying ARM

Tech Talk
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Okay let’s be honest many of we know how Nvidia is SPECIALLY with its drivers, and some if not many for us know how semi open ARM is…

Ok then, what would happened IF some closed mega brand like Nvidia buys ARM? We as users lose all the openness of ARM, the big brands which use ARM for their devices will need to bend to Nvidia’s desires or best case scenario they will need to invest a lot R&D on RISC 5, I know they are already slowly transitioning to it but this would be a huge hit to them, even brands which only uses ARM processors as coproxessors

I know Nvidia uses an ARM coprocessor for some tasks of their GPUs and as such they need ARM alive, but I would prefer to see it being bought to an enterprise that values the worth of open standards like Microsoft or Google or something else but not Nvidia, please remember how uncompetitive they are

If they get it they could lock Apple from modifying it to their needs or worst, from getting the license which would be catastrophic to them now that they ditched Intel, and in the world of single board computers remember that they have their own SBC, if they get ARM they could unfairly create a modified version of their current standard CPUs giving it a better and more powerful close sourced architecture than the others for their Jetson nano and easily they could not license it to anybody getting an unfair advantage to the Raspberry pi or to any other SBC in the market to the point that because they would have all the power they could go so far as selling Jetson nanos at at loose to drive competing boards out of the market

I have been a huge fan of ARM since I got my pi 3 and I would hate to see it die because of a brand so predatory as Nvidia

I apologise myself for this post but as an ARM fan I fear the worst

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Part of the terms for the sale of ARM to SoftBank from the UK Government was that they have to keep the licensing model in place.

I’m sure they will make the same stipulation when SoftBank sells on ARM. It is one of the reasons why they are selling ARM in the first place. A bunch of their other investments (Uber, WeWork etc.) tanked and they tried to change the licensing model of ARM to compensate, only they can’t really do that much to the licensing model to increase income dramatically.

nVidia would face the same problem. All work they do directly in ARM gets licensed out to anyone willing to buy a (FRAND) license. That means there is no real advantage to having ARM, they would need to carry on as they do now, having ARM separate from nVidia and nVidia doing all the chip optimization themselves. They would have some say in the direction ARM can take, strategically, influencing new features etc., but everybody would get those new features.

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Hearing that is a relief but I still fear they could do as Facebook or Google and promise those things but after some years doing as they please

Good counterpoint man

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It costs money to make a new platform, and get it adopted, but if any one of the ones out there went full proprietary, there would definitely be others who would rebel and build something new. I think you might find some of the server side open tech pursuits interesting. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V or the things that https://oxide.computer want to produce.

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That is true, maybe the future could be in RISC 5