ARM deal nears closure with Nvidia mulling $40B purchase from SoftBank

Too many legal land mines in this sale. An IPO would be better and keep things out of court.

I don't imagine that Apple has concerns one way or the other. Apple is likely at a point where they have in house capability and have licensed necessary IP to create their own proprietary ISA, while also large enough to create the design and validation tools needed to fab at TMSC, or whomever.

I would prefer that ARM reside in Japan or the UK, and not Taiwan, simply for National Security reasons.

tmay said:

I don't imagine that Apple has concerns one way or the other. Apple is likely at a point where they have in house capability and have licensed necessary IP to create their own proprietary ISA, while also large enough to create the design and validation tools needed to fab at TMSC, or whomever.

I would prefer that ARM reside in Japan or the UK, and not Taiwan, simply for National Security reasons.

You can't create any ARM designs without licensing from ARM Holdings. Even if it were possible somehow, Apple's existing line of processors - A, T, S, U, W, H - are all based on designs that they currently licensed from ARM. Creating 6 new lines of processors in a way that doesn't infringe on the MANY RISC-based CPU patents - and there are tons as RISC has been around since the early 1980s - would take years, and one would have no idea about such real world issues as performance, heat and scalability. Speaking of real world issues, Apple would be responsible for things like creating a new instruction set, architecture, microcode etc. as well as publishing all that stuff and securing patents for it. They also would need to build an entire application stack on top of the new architecture AND migrate their existing applications for their hardware to it, while still supporting the 2 billion iOS devices on the previous architecture for the 5-6 years that all those devices last. 

Another thing: basic R&D like this isn't Apple's deal. It is amazing that so many people are convinced that it is. In fact, Apple doesn't do originality. Instead they take existing technology - stuff that has been around for awhile and has been proven - and incorporate them into their existing design language. At most, one could say that they excel at taking parts innovated or improved by others and using them to make new great products. But the truth is that nothing in Apple's present existence or their previous history indicates that they are capable of coming up with a "new" CPU design, or even a major advance on an existing design. Even their own CPUs, in addition to being based on the existing ARM design, were the result of acqui-hiring PA Semiconductor. Even something MUCH SIMPLER such as a fingerprint scanner, they had to buy a company that already had the tech, where Qualcomm and Samsung created their own using their own R&D departments (which is why they were able to make under-the-screen fingerprint scanners so quickly). 

killroy said:

Too many legal land mines in this sale. An IPO would be better and keep things out of court.

Nah. First off, a company creating tech and licensing it to competitors is nothing new. Recall that Sony had no issues licensing Blu-Ray tech to everyone else in the industry who wanted to make Blu-Ray players, including not a few companies that took their IP and used it to make far more money off Blu-Ray players than Sony did. Also specific to this case, there is no other way to monetize the IP otherwise. Is Nvidia going to start making smartphones, tablets, computers etc.? Meanwhile if anything does happen - whether through malice, neglect or even incompetence - Apple and the rest of Nvidia's licensees can and will hammer them in lawsuits and win.

Apple doesn't do this because Apple - see above - Apple isn't into basic R&D. They do R&D for their own products for which it isn't in their interests to license. 

As for the IPO thing ... Softbank investigated that, largely because it was the stated preference of ARM Holdings' current employees, previous owners/stakeholders as well as many of the licensees. The problem is that there is absolutely no way that ARM Holdings is going to generate anywhere near $32 billion in an IPO. ARM Holdings doesn't make/sell products. They are what a lot of folks on this board would not hesitate to call a patent troll were ARM to ever sue Apple or vice versa. Their only value is to an existing company that wants to bring their R&D in house. 

Nvidia is pushing an to create an ARM-based edge computing platform (something about parallel processing on GPUs to take advantage of architectural capabilities that do not exist in CPUs because of the way that CPUs are designed to handle instructions) to sell to data centers and cloud companies. They are satisfied with the software but right now are basically running it on commodity hardware. They want to create their own custom ARM-based data center GPU hardware that is designed specifically for and optimized for their platform software and the data center workloads. If they are able to buy ARM and dedicate their R&D resources towards this design issue, they are going to dominate this market - which is very lucrative and on the verge of exploding but is also niche because it requires specialized hardware and software that is very difficult and expensive and not many companies have the expertise or capability to provide or any real way of getting it anytime soon - and this $40 billion will pay for itself many times over. But if they are not able to, then that will give the competition - which does exist - time to catch up by coming up with a similar platform but with better hardware (or software) or another approach to edge computing altogether. 

But the bottom line, Nvidia's reasons for buying ARM have nothing to do with consumer devices like phones, tablets, PCs and smartwatches. Nvidia's competitors in the ARM-based enterprise hardware space have some reasons to be concerned but that is about it.

cloudguy said:

tmay said:

I don't imagine that Apple has concerns one way or the other. Apple is likely at a point where they have in house capability and have licensed necessary IP to create their own proprietary ISA, while also large enough to create the design and validation tools needed to fab at TMSC, or whomever.

I would prefer that ARM reside in Japan or the UK, and not Taiwan, simply for National Security reasons.

You can't create any ARM designs without licensing from ARM Holdings. Even if it were possible somehow, Apple's existing line of processors - A, T, S, U, W, H - are all based on designs that they currently licensed from ARM. Creating 6 new lines of processors in a way that doesn't infringe on the MANY RISC-based CPU patents - and there are tons as RISC has been around since the early 1980s - would take years, and one would have no idea about such real world issues as performance, heat and scalability. Speaking of real world issues, Apple would be responsible for things like creating a new instruction set, architecture, microcode etc. as well as publishing all that stuff and securing patents for it. They also would need to build an entire application stack on top of the new architecture AND migrate their existing applications for their hardware to it, while still supporting the 2 billion iOS devices on the previous architecture for the 5-6 years that all those devices last. 

Another thing: basic R&D like this isn't Apple's deal. It is amazing that so many people are convinced that it is. In fact, Apple doesn't do originality. Instead they take existing technology - stuff that has been around for awhile and has been proven - and incorporate them into their existing design language. At most, one could say that they excel at taking parts innovated or improved by others and using them to make new great products. But the truth is that nothing in Apple's present existence or their previous history indicates that they are capable of coming up with a "new" CPU design, or even a major advance on an existing design. Even their own CPUs, in addition to being based on the existing ARM design, were the result of acqui-hiring PA Semiconductor. Even something MUCH SIMPLER such as a fingerprint scanner, they had to buy a company that already had the tech, where Qualcomm and Samsung created their own using their own R&D departments (which is why they were able to make under-the-screen fingerprint scanners so quickly). 

You do realize that Apple created the first 64 bit ARM implementation before ARM actually provided its own ARM 64 bit implementation.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/12/02/a7-how-apples-custom-64-bit-silicon-embarrassed-the-industry

Apple has never been challenged in SOC's since.

"Apple doesn't do originality" is a bullshit meme.