Huawei, China Firms Said To Seek Curbs on Nvidia's Arm Deal (bloomberg.com) 28
Chinese technology companies including Huawei have expressed strong concerns to local regulators about Nvidia's proposed acquisition of Arm, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter said, potentially jeopardizing the $40 billion semiconductor deal. From a report: Several of the country's most influential tech firms have been lobbying the State Administration for Market Regulation to either reject the transaction or impose conditions to ensure their access to Arm technology, the people said. Chief among their concerns is that Nvidia may force the British firm to cut off Chinese clients, they said, asking not to be identified discussing private deliberations. China's fear is that Arm -- whose semiconductor designs and architecture are central to most of the world's electronics from smartphones to supercomputers -- will become yet another pawn in a U.S.-Chinese struggle for tech supremacy. Nvidia is buying the British firm from Japan's SoftBank, bringing it under American jurisdiction and theoretically threatening its cherished status as a neutral party in the chip industry.
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Re: So WindBourne (Score:2)
homegrown (Score:1)
I thought China was ramping up their own home CPU design and fab capabilities anyway, those with eye to future over there should be glad.
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They are but it will take time to reach parity with ARM.
Re: homegrown (Score:2)
An ARM license is also a great defence against patent lawsuits.
fuck China and 'merka (Score:1)
Re: homegrown (Score:2)
Someday. Currently the whole world trembles when Trump threatens to sanction something. You can not afford to lose access to the western world and you can not avoid those sanctions with a hard headed administration, trying to get help to circumvent them will just get the helpers fucked. Doesn't matter how many temporary intermediaries you put in between.
Plausible deniability might save you in the court of law, but not the court of Trump.
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Re: homegrown (Score:2)
Nvidia making arms deals.. What in the world? (Score:3)
+legs -arms (Score:2)
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The gaming industry is pushing it a bit too far!!
Nvidia should not aquire arm (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be bad for the myriad of microprocessor companies that have already licensed arm chips. What Nvidia will do is use ARM to give them a competitive advantage. Since ARM mostly licenses their designs to others, this would be bad for anyone who has used their designs in their products.
This acquisition is bad for ARM if they don't get acquired. I could see a mass exodus from ARM products and an uptake of RISC V open source processors.
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How would nVidia, who isn't a major player in the ARM SoC market, use this to their competitive advantage? They've committed to continuing to license ARM IP just like it always has been, because nVidia realizes that the entire value of ARM is the widespread use because of that licensing.
In my opinion, nVidia wants ARM for two reasons: to be able to license their GPU IP to ARM customers in place of ARM's lackluster Mali designs, and to replace AMD processors in their datacenter solutions. nVidia's servers to
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How does acquiring a company invalidate all of its licensing deals? ARM is not declaring bankruptcy and selling off its assets, they are selling an entire company, including all of its contractual obligations, including any licensing deals in place.
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Western digital already uses RISC V, there are companies that license RISC V cores.
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> I could see a mass exodus from ARM products and an uptake of RISC V open source processors.
Yes, but that would be good...for everyone (except ARM). The US government does not have control over RISC V, so if the industry moves from ARM to RISC V, that will be a good thing...in the longer term anyway.