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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

I’m not convinced this is a death sentence for ARM. I doubt nVidia spent $40b on a company with the intention of killing it’s golden goose business model. The contractual agreements might change, but ARM wasn’t exactly giving their IP away for free before this move.

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It is less about them intentionally killing it and more about their culture and attitude killing it.

Does Nvidia have a habit of killing acquisitions? I'm only familiar with their graphics business, but as far as I can see the only culture going on there is excellence.

NVIDIAs whole schtick is making a bunch of interesting software and arbitrarily locking it to their own hardware. Doesn't seem compatible with being the steward for what has up until now been a relatively open CPU architecture.

arbitrarily? Nvidia invests a lot in software R&D, why should they just give it away to their competitor AMD who basically invest nothing in comparison?

Arbitrary as in, without technical reasons.

An open architecture, and business model based on partnership doesn't really synchronize with vendor locking your products for increased profits.

At issue is the conflict between ARM's business model- which revolves around licensing designs to other companies- and Nvidia's reputation of not playing nicely with other companies.

The concern is more that nvidias culture has historically been being overall hostile to parterships. Which works great for what Nvidia is doing right now, but is probably bad for a company that depends heavily on partnerships.

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