NVIDIA is reportedly in "advanced talks" to buy ARM for $32B.

Press F for Intel...

In b4 EU regulators

How does one buy ARM? I thought ARM system were built by lots of different manufacturers. Are ARM archs IPs licensed?

Edit:

Doh! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

@Demolishun ARM the company. SoftBank, the Japanese company that owns ARM, wants to sell it to offset losses from covid (or something of the sort). Apple apparently declined, nvidia was interested, but dunno how regulators would see this.

@shakur maybe for the market share.

@RememberMe
Don't sell them short. Covid, wework, half the bets masayoshi made. There's innumerable reasons SoftBank needs to bail water.

@SortOfTested true, true.

Great, every ARM kernel will need a proprietary firmware-blob to enable "performance mode", i.e. normal operation mode, or it will creep along in a snail's pace.

@metamourge intresting. 😆😆😅😆

@mirimmad
I mean, that what they did with their GPUs.

@metamourge idk about that. But having a proprietary firmware code to enable performance mode is.....well... evil. xD

ARM is dead end unless they opensource it.

If some EU baked fund would buy it and make it opensource be better then all their stupid innovation programs.

F

So there will only be AMD in the future?

Ah no sorry it’s just dead end and waste of money.

Who needs more computing power except corporations ?
One cpu for all applications is dead end and it’s old technology from somewhat 40 years ago ?
Typical consumer can live with what they have now so game console, phone with hd video and decent camera. They don’t need anything more that they have.

Anything else will be wiped by first in-house 3d printed cpu and innovation behind it. And it won’t be silicon based as this technology is to complicated and exclusive to laboratories.

@vane https://hackaday.com/2018/10/...

@vane
Home-printed CPUs will probably take some generations to get into the consumer market. Currently, there isn't any such technology on the horizon.

But better AI in games will need more computing power than the consumer can currently get.
Also there is nothing wrong with wanting your smartphone to be able to identify any mushroom or plant in almost any lighting condition while having no signal.

I really dont get this idea that prop blobs are bad. People and corps have a right to protect the millions of man hours they invest to create roms for the hardware they develop.

Well arm had a good run, if Nvidia do aquire them, it'll become a nightmare

@FrodoSwaggins RV standard instruction sets and extensions are pretty comprehensive though and most RV devices I've worked with (admittedly a few boards here and there because it isn't exactly ubiquitous) just used those, with fairly decent support from gcc. In particular almost every RV embedded board I used supported rv32g (rv32im at least).

Custom sets are an issue though for sure.

@Demolishun thanks

@Oktokolo ai will get own processors something tensor core like. I already saw some spin off companies making those.

As for 3d printed cpus there are some advancements like conducive polymers ( you can buy them already blackmagic3d graphene filament ) or first printed circuits.
https://nano-di.com/blog/...
Polymers market will grow exponentially in next 10 years. Most of money will go to medicine but advancements can go different ways.
3d printing is hot topic.

I think everyone in this thread saying arm is dead grossly underestimates what arm gets from licencing, not just smartphones but maaaany other applications. My company works with many arm chips and oh boi the licencing fees.

@Oktokolo Home printed cpu? Hahhahahahaahah. Sorry never had that good of a laugh in a while.
Nope, you cant print cpu's, you have no idea how tiny, fragile and difficult it fucking is. Photoresist is the only way now. Fuck 3d printing for giving people stupid ideas.

@Gregozor2121
Hey, home-printed CPUs aren't my pipe dream - @vane came up with that.