NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own ARM CPUs with an unlimited ARM license.
ARM doesn't give NVIDIA a world-class CPU team like apple's, amazon's or fujitsu. ARM own cores are "meh" at best. Buying such a team, would also have been much cheaper than 40b$.
Mobile ARM chips are meh, but nvidia doesn't have GPUs for that segment, and their current architectures probably don't work well there. The only ARM chips that are ok-ish are embedded/IoT at < 1W power envelope. It would probably take nvidia 10 years to develop GPUs for that segment, the margins on that segment are razor thin (0.10$ is the cost of a full SoC on that segment), and it is unclear whether applications on that segment need GPUs (your toaster certainly does not).
The UK appears to require huge R&D investments in ARM to allow the sale. And ARMs bottom line is 300million $/year in revenue, which is peanuts for nvidia.
So if anything, ARM has a lot to win here with nvidia pumping in money like crazy to try to improve ARM's CPU offering. Yet this all seem super-risky because at the segments ARM is competing at, RISC-V competes as well, and without royalties. It is hard to compete against something that's free, even if it is slightly less good. And chances are that over the next 10 years RISC-V will have much better cores (NVIDIA themselves started replacing ARM cores with RISC-V cores in their GPUs years ago already...).
Either way, the claim that it is obvious to everybody what the 3D-chess being played here is false. To me this looks like a bad buy for nvidia. They could have paid 1 billion for a world class CPU team and just continue to license ARM and/or switch to RISC-V chips. Instead they are spending 40 billion in a company that makes 300 million a year, makes meh-cpus, is heavily regulated in the UK and the world, has problems with China due to being in the West, have to invest in the UK which is leaving the EU in a couple of weeks, etc.
If you only look at today's numbers, it doesn't make a ton of sense. But looking at the market, the world is moving -more- towards ARM, not away. The last couple years have given us ARM in a gaming console, ARM in mainstream laptops, ARM in the datacenter. Especially as the world strives to go 'carbon neutral', ARM kills everything from Intel/AMD. So with that in mind, I don't think it's a bad buy, but time will tell.
RISC-V and ARM can coexist, but RISC-V in the mainstream is a far away due to nothing more than momentum. People won't even touch Intel in a mobile device anymore, not just because of power usage, but software compatibility.
No. Precisely the Tegra SoC within the Nintendo Switch (X1) uses ARM Cores. Specifically A57 and A53. NVIDIA's project to develop their own v8.2 ARM-based chip is called Denver.
What do you define the difference between an in-house developed SoC with ARM-IP Cores and Denver's "ARM-based chip"? It is going to be a new architecture, but using a mix of ARM IP blocks and in-house IP following the ARM ISA?
It’s a bad buy unless they plan to use this to leverage a better position. Your argument is that ARM is essentially worthless to NVIDIA or at least extremely high $40bn bet. I guess only time will tell but I think NVIDIA intend to make their money back on this purchase and that won’t be through the current licensing model (as your own figures show).
NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own ARM CPUs with an unlimited ARM license.
ARM doesn't give NVIDIA a world-class CPU team like apple's, amazon's or fujitsu. ARM own cores are "meh" at best. Buying such a team, would also have been much cheaper than 40b$.
Mobile ARM chips are meh, but nvidia doesn't have GPUs for that segment, and their current architectures probably don't work well there. The only ARM chips that are ok-ish are embedded/IoT at < 1W power envelope. It would probably take nvidia 10 years to develop GPUs for that segment, the margins on that segment are razor thin (0.10$ is the cost of a full SoC on that segment), and it is unclear whether applications on that segment need GPUs (your toaster certainly does not).
The UK appears to require huge R&D investments in ARM to allow the sale. And ARMs bottom line is 300million $/year in revenue, which is peanuts for nvidia.
So if anything, ARM has a lot to win here with nvidia pumping in money like crazy to try to improve ARM's CPU offering. Yet this all seem super-risky because at the segments ARM is competing at, RISC-V competes as well, and without royalties. It is hard to compete against something that's free, even if it is slightly less good. And chances are that over the next 10 years RISC-V will have much better cores (NVIDIA themselves started replacing ARM cores with RISC-V cores in their GPUs years ago already...).
Either way, the claim that it is obvious to everybody what the 3D-chess being played here is false. To me this looks like a bad buy for nvidia. They could have paid 1 billion for a world class CPU team and just continue to license ARM and/or switch to RISC-V chips. Instead they are spending 40 billion in a company that makes 300 million a year, makes meh-cpus, is heavily regulated in the UK and the world, has problems with China due to being in the West, have to invest in the UK which is leaving the EU in a couple of weeks, etc.