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Comment by bobsmooth | Hacker News Reader

I'm conflicted. As an NVDA holder, I'm disappointed. As a tech lover, this is for the best.

Is it? Nvidia gave plenty of good examples of what it has been able to accomplish with ARM tech in their previous keynotes. If anything, I've come around from thinking this was simply a power play on Nvidia's part, to seeing this merger as a win-win-win for Nvidia, the ARM ISA, and ISA competition as a whole.

Whatever neat things Nvidia is doing with ARM can be done with ARM being independent.

Can you show evidence of this?

There has never been a good open ARM processor for mobile computing ever, the Jetson is the best open one while the Apple chips and M1 is the technically best one.

You answered your own question. Nivida doesn't need to own the entirety of the mobile processor market.

So then they’re no good reason to block it. They would do a better job than it currently it currently is in now, mobile processors aren’t all ARM either.

> mobile processors aren’t all ARM either

How many non-Arm mobile processors are there?

Most of them. I think of an ASIC and FPGA, what do you mean mobile?

I took "mobile processors" to mean "mobile phone CPU". (and even if it's not the main CPU, I believe most of the chips in a modern mobile phone tend to be arm based).

Nvidia is building ARM supercomputers. The only other company that has shown interest in ARM supercomputer chips is Fujitsu. The ARM ISA has mostly been left to mobile chips, low-powered computer kits, and experimental desktop computing (StrongARM,XScale, etc.) decades since its inception. If ARM, inc. or Softbank were interested in high-powered chips, either of these companies would have done it by now. But they haven't. Nvidia is the kick in the rear needed to push the ARM instruction set further.

AWS Graviton and Ampere are both based on Arm Neoverse designs.

Plus Apple M1.

Arm ISA does not need Nvidia for a ‘kick in the rear’.

All very recent developments, but they all have limitations. Graviton is meant for data centers, Ampere is a GPU solution. M1's top configuration, while impressive in the prosumer space, is barely past the teraflop barrier. I doubt Apple and Amazon have any plans to build HPCs.

If only HPC counts as powerful then you’ve already quoted that Nvidia and Fujitsu are using Arm under the existing ownership structure.

> If ARM, inc. or Softbank were interested in high-powered chips, either of these companies would have done it by now. But they haven't.

Just factually incorrect given what is happening at the moment with Neoverse.

(And Ampere Computing not the Nvidia GPU design)

Tegra from a tech lover standpoint is awesome. Nobody making ARM is good with drivers off the top of my head. Qualcomm with their shitty non updated drivers is BS compared to the updated Jetson.

And nvidia can keep making tegra, even without buying out ARM

Great if you don’t need better hardware. But they’ll never be able to make an APU like AMD.

Huh? Apple doesn't own ARM either, and have a GPU with an ARM CPU, Nvidia has an architectural license just like Apple does.

GPU with ARM CPU isn’t an APU.

Apples CPU design is absolutely an APU, I advise knowing what the market actually looks like before constantly posting.

Care to post a source?

Why doesn’t the SoC mention APUs but mentions Intel CULV? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip

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