> This is what Nvidia was looking for since out of the big 3 US semiconductor manufacturers, it doesn't have its own IP on CPUs. Now it will soon be able to control ARM to its advantage against the competition.
In all fairness, consider the market from Nvidia's perspective: they've spent a few decades being a stone's throw from Intel eating them. They started as one of many add-on card manufacturers and have turned into a dominant player by innovating, iterating, and being ruthless.
Some here might not remember how cutthroat the early-GPU days were. Nvidia survived.
Now, an opportunity to become a technical peer to Intel at the CPU level? To control their own destiny?
I don't remember it being all that cutthroat tbh. 3dfx was arguably the only game in down and ATi was it's whipping boy. Matrox was over in the corner saying "look nah two monitors at once!"
3dfx stumbled right as nVidia dropped the GeForce and blew everything away.
ATi became nVidia's whipping boy and Matrox just added the ability to drive more monitors.
I mean aside from not knowing if Matrox is still around, not much has changed from what I can see.
They spent a lot of time and money first building motherboard chipsets[1] with on-board GPUs for AMD CPUs only to have CMD buy ATI.
Then they started a program to build their own x86 CPU[2] which Intel sued them over[3]. There was a counter suite, and the EU settlement around the same time and Intel ended up paying NVidia $1.5B3[3] which was often read a win for NVidia. Of course in retrospect it gave Intel another 10 years of CPU domination.
So then NVidia announced they were building a desktop ARM processor[5]. That went pretty much nowhere. So then there was their mobile play (the Tegra)[6]. That was supposed to let them dominate mobile phones, and went just about as well as their launch partner phone (the Microsoft Kin). It has found use in robotics (the NVidia Jetson series) and cars (the Telsa model 3) though.
So they've lost a bunch of fights, and outside GPUs it really has been cut throat.
FYI, Nintendo Switch is Tegra based as well. 61 million units isn't bad, and there are significantly more Tegras in use in Switch consoles than in Jetson boards or even Telsas (~1 million).
You just described a space with 4 competitors fighting for the same market. How could it be anything other than cutthroat? GPUs are not the kind of space where it’s easy for new companies to enter. It very much was a winner takes all market.
Of course. The multi billion dollar market is just too small for more than one company. Nvidia is just biding it’s time on ~20% market share until it can put the finishing moves on the other 9 major vendors.
Cutthroat usually means something like unprincipled or ruthless competition. When 3DFX and now Nvidia were on top, there was no assailing them. You exist in a position they allow you to exist.
Perhaps the competition between 3DFX and ATi or Nvidia and AMD could be described as cutthroat but the other "competitiors" in the space couldn't even compete and eventually they all just pivoted into other things without anyone noticing or caring.
It's not unlike the x86 processor market. Companies like Via and Transmeta existed but they never were any serious competition to Intel or AMD.
SiS also had 3D graphics chips. Tseng Labs was probably one of the earliest victims of the 3D GPUs wars, having developed but never completed the ET6300.
PowerVR still exists and is seems successful in the mobile market (having provided Apple's GPUs until A10).
Imgtech/PowerVR was successful in the mobile market until Apple stopped buying their GPUs. Now they have practically no mobile customers though they're still reasonably successful in the automotive market.
Qualcomm used to license AMD's handheld GPUs (IP), then acquired that whole business unit from AMD. They've never used either Mali or PowerVR in any products that I know of.
Source: worked at PowerVR 2006-2007, then worked at AMD's handheld division including during the acquisition by Qualcomm, and stayed there until 2017.
> Source: worked at PowerVR 2006-2007, then worked at AMD's handheld division including during the acquisition by Qualcomm, and stayed there until 2017.
David, you're entirely too qualified to be speaking about these things.
That was the gist of my comment. Nvidia could have easily been PowerVR, if Intel had shown earlier interest (~00s) in developing a serious graphics product.
As it was, it seems they made the Microsoft/Internet and Microsoft/Mobile mistake and saw market evolution only as a threat to their existing portfolio, rather than as an opportunity.
I'm not sure that's correct, one of the main reasons why NVIDIA succeeded is that they actually pushed technology and they always seem to have a much longer term vision than for the next 1-2 iterations.
I'm also not sure if you are suggesting NVIDIA made the same mistake as Microsoft regarding mobile, but them buying ARM is anything but that.
Them buying ARM is a way for them to offer a fully vertically integrated solution for the enterprise, pushing their existing initiatives such as NVDLA (https://github.com/nvdla/) being able to exert more control over the future of ARM architectures and designs for specific fields especially automotive as well as potentially getting their graphics and compute IP into billions of devices.
Anyone who thinks NVIDIA is buying ARM to simply trash it or to mess up with their competition is wrong, I'm not saying NVIDIA would necessarily be successful but most of the so called competitors that people are point at aren't their competitors at all.
NVIDIA is also buying a lot of talent with this acquisition, specifically the likes of ARM Austin which were responsible for the A76-78 cores.
NVIDIA + ARM + Mellanox has the potential to be a player on an unprecedented level for the hyperscaler and HPC markets, especially if the likes of Apple and Amazon (and to lesser extend Cloudflare etc.) do a lot of the heavy lifting for them. Apple going with ARM is probably the best thing NVIDIA could've asked for.
> Now, an opportunity to become a technical peer to Intel at the CPU level? To control their own destiny?
> They'd be insane not to take this opportunity.
It made financial sense for ARM's board to sell to SoftBank; it makes financial sense for SoftBank to sell to NVIDIA; it makes financial and strategic sense for NVIDIA to buy ARM; it makes financial and strategic sense for NVIDIA to radically change the way the ARM ecosystem works to benefit themselves.
And yet, the world will lose out massively by having the ARM ecosystem radically changed to benefit NVIDIA.
Capitalism certainly does a lot to create value for society as a whole, but this is just one of many examples of where capitalism also destroys value for society as a whole.
If NVIDIA treats ARM poorly, that benefits alternative ISAs and may ultimately undermine NVIDIAs investment. If NVIDIA treats ARM well, then that benefits the platform as a whole. The reality is going to be somewhere in the middle.
Market equilibrium does not imply maximum benefit for any one interest group. "Consumers" or "end-users" are often conflated with "society".
Looking through the doomsayers in this thread, this is the result I believe to be most likely. If ARM goes belly up through gross mismanagement, then the laurels will be taken up by someone else. I think another aspect to consider is the perpetual license agreements ARM holds with several other businesses. I think this may muzzle Nvidia to some extent.
ARM also has well-funded competition in many spaces in the form of Intel and AMD. And to a lesser extent in Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
And while people may grouse about many things, chiefly paying a perceived Nvidia tax, I don't think anyone would accuse Nvidia of being strategically incompetent.
The more likely negative outcome seems to be that Nvidia would steer future ARM development so that their CPU+GPU solutions are more performant than anything anyone else can afford to produce.
Which seems like a negative... but far from the worst negative.
TBH, I think ARM's non-GPU business isn't interesting enough to Nvidia to screw with.
> the world will lose out massively by having the ARM ecosystem radically changed to benefit NVIDIA.
if that's the case, then the people who stand to lose from this _should_ be pushing the gov't to standardize and prevent fracturing of ecosystems from happening.
Why stop there ? It'll make financial sense for previous users of ARM license to start looking for alternatives ( such as riscV) and create more competition in the field.
Which ultimately benefits to the people as a whole.
In all fairness, consider the market from Nvidia's perspective: they've spent a few decades being a stone's throw from Intel eating them. They started as one of many add-on card manufacturers and have turned into a dominant player by innovating, iterating, and being ruthless.
Some here might not remember how cutthroat the early-GPU days were. Nvidia survived.
Now, an opportunity to become a technical peer to Intel at the CPU level? To control their own destiny?
They'd be insane not to take this opportunity.