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Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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This is a premature judgement.

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.

At least that's the theory of capitalism..

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