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What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up.

Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa.

In 2011, I thought that they would learn the lessons and warnings highlighted from Eric Schmidt about the UK creating long standing tech companies like FAANMG. [0] I had high hopes for them to learn from this, but after 2016 with Softbank and now this, it is just typical.

ARM will certainly be more expensive after this and will certainly be even more closed-source, since their Mali GPUs drivers were already as closed as Nvidia's GPUs. This is a terrible outcome I have seen but from Nvidia's perspective, it makes sense. From a FOSS perspective, ARM is dead, long live RISC-V.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schm...



Once they were sold to SoftBank ARM had no more control over its destiny. You're saying that they're repeating the pattern, but they had no choice in this today. This was SoftBank's decision as the owner of ARM.


Softbank has some losses of it’s own to make up, so that’s not very surprising.


Losses? Masayoshi Son just made a cool 8 billion on this deal. Time to hit up the roulette table in Vegas to double that to 16 billion


Buying a stake in AAPL,FB, or any tech company would have netted higher returns for less effort than buying ARM. If anything, a 25% ROI in 4 years is quite poor.


love the armchair CEO perspectives that NVIDIA spent $40b only to flush the whole ARM ecosystem right down the drain, that's definitely a rational thing to do, right?

Jensen's not an idiot, how many OG 90s tech CEOs are still at the helm of the company they founded? Any severely negative moves towards their customers just drives them into RISC-V and they know that.

Yes, ARM customers will be paying more for their ARM IP. No, NVIDIA is not going to burn ARM to the ground.


Have you read the press release at all? It's too early to judge this now. ARM will stay in Cambridge and Nvidia wants to invest in this place.


It's not too early to judge, because this has been in the news for a while and people have had the time to do an analysis of what it means for Nvidia to buy ARM. The press release doesn't add much to that analysis. We've seen a ton of press releases go by for acquisitions and they're always full of sunshine... at the moment, I'm thinking of Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but that's just one example. The typical pattern for acquisitions is that a tech company will acquire another tech company because they can extract more value from the acquired company's IP compared to the value the acquired company would have by itself, and you can extract a lot of value from an IP while you slash development budgets. Not saying that's going to happen, but it's a common pattern in acquisitions.

I think it's enough to know what Nvidia is, how they operate, and what their general strategies are.

Not saying I agree with the analysis... but I am not that optimistic.


And when Facebook bought Oculus, they said no FB login would be required to use Oculus. FoxConn was supposed to ramp up production in the US according to a press release. That was then, now time has passed. bigCorp hopes your short term memory forgets the woohooism from a foregone press release.


I'm reminded of this recent development:

https://www.oculus.com/blog/a-single-way-to-log-into-oculus-...

Discussed here on HN, with the top comment being a copy and paste of Palmer Lucky's acknowledgement that the early critics turned out to be correct:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24201306

Different situation, different companies, but if you "follow the money" you'll never be too far wrong.


Corporations say these types of things with every acquisition. It might be true initially and superficially, but that's all.


One of the (many) synergies in this acquisition is that it's also an acqui-hire for CPU development talent. NVIDIA's efforts in that area have not gone very smoothly. They aren't going to fire all the engineers they just bought.


A bigger concern is that they would hoard future cores and not license them.


They might, just like Apple do. But then their forty billion dollar investment would stagnate and be eaten by riscv, which is probably what they are hoping to avoid.


I doubt they will move all of the talent to the USA. I mean California is nice and all but I think a lot of Brits are happy to stay in Cambridge.


Cambridge is one of the most beautiful cities on the planet.


Agree!


Why would you read the press release at all? Do you expect a company to not do what's in their own financial self-interest? Look, I love nVidia. I only buy nVidia GPUs and I adore their devices like the SHIELD TV, handheld, tablet, even the Tegra Note 7. Even I can see that they're not just buying ARM on a whim. They intend to make that money back. Them using ARM to make that money is good for absolutely nobody except nVidia themselves.


Well it seems to be normal to judge without reading in 2020 and customize your news yourself. Time will tell...


I'll listen to what they're saying but I'm paying far more attention when I look at what they're doing. The only way buying ARM helps nVidia is by damaging their competitors, AKA almost everyone.


My experience of acquisitions is that sweet songs are sung to calm the horses. Then the next financial quarter comes around and the truck from the glue factory arrives.

If you take at face value anything from a press release, earnings call or investor relations website, then I would like to take a moment to share with you the prospectus of Brooklyn Bridge LLC.


My money is currently tied up in ocean front property in Arizona.


[flagged]


Netflix really doesn’t belong in the same category as the others. It’s big but not as big, and it isn’t a sprawling conglomerate. Clearly “FAGMA” is the best acronym.


Or MAGA: Microsoft Apple Google (Alphabet) Amazon. $1 trillion dollar club.


I think you meant the four comma club


GAFAM is often used in the french speaking world


Because smoking is no longer acceptable


Because it has an offensive slur in it


People should be fighting to join their favorite Silicon Valley FANMAG. Some would prefer the Bill Gates FANMAG, others Jeff Bezos...


Sounds more like a F-MANGA. Gates goes Super Saiyan while Bezos builds a mechwarrior army.




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