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Nvidia Admits Acquisition of British Chip Designer Arm May Take Longer Than 18 Months (theverge.com) 35

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted for the first time that the company's planned acquisition of British chip designer Arm may take longer than the initially-scheduled 18 months. From a report: The acquisition, which would bring together two of the most powerful chip companies in the world, is facing scrutiny from regulators in the US, UK, and China. "Our discussions with regulators are taking longer than initially thought, so it's pushing out the timetable," Huang told The Financial Times. "It's not one particular delay," he added. "But we're confident in the deal, we're confident regulators should recognize the benefits of the acquisition."

Huang was previously unwavering in his prediction that the acquisition would be completed by March next year. The agreement between Nvidia and Arm's current owner SoftBank gives the US chip designer until the end of 2022 to clear the purchase with regulators. The opposition to the deal is varied and speaks to Arm's global importance.

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Nvidia Admits Acquisition of British Chip Designer Arm May Take Longer Than 18 Months

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  • Company eats company's arm just like a wild dog. Dog eat dog. Cat eat cat. Ouch!
    • by 2TecTom ( 311314 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @10:29AM (#61707691) Homepage Journal

      not capitalism, it's pseudo-capitalism, in a real capitalistic system, we the people would have fair and reasonable access to capital.What we have is a corrupt system of economic slavery and indentured servitude overseen by an evil, greedy and irresponsible upper class. These uncaring and abusive people are going to destroy the biosphere before they're through.

      • ARM is currently owned by Softbank.
        Softbank is primarily owned by funds such as Fidelity International Index Fund.

        At benefits enrollment for one at work, if you check the box labeled "401K", you'll probably end up owning Fidelity International Index Fund, or a similar fund. Which will mean you'll own Softbank. Which means you own ARM.

        If you want to own ARM (and 500 other companies), just check the damn box already. Then you can *be* rich people instead of spending your days whining about rich people.

        We've m

        • by Pascoea ( 968200 )

          Lol. Yeah, we can all be rich, all you have to do is contribute to a 401k! Keep telling yourself that the $2M you'll need in your 401k when you retire is being "rich".

          I mean, I agree with what you're saying, it is idiotic to not be participating in a 401k (type) plan. And I'm 100% opposed to the whole "eat the rich" types of movements. That being said... Implying that you, I, and the other 99% aren't getting fucked by the other 1% is ludicrous. Any one of them would ruin your life without losing a wink

          • > saying, it is idiotic to not be participating in a 401k (type) plan.

            Agreed. Not that people who don't are *idiots*, maybe the just don't know. Maybe someone told them something wrong. But yeah, definitely you should be doing it - it's free money, in most cases.

            I take it you've been doing that for a couple of years. Plus you're reasonably smart. Which means your income is probably somewhere between $55k-$150k. Decent guess?

            > getting fucked by the 1%

            If your income is more than $100K, that's more tha

            • by Pascoea ( 968200 )

              Not that people who don't are *idiots*,

              That's fair, I shouldn't have called people that don't participate "idiotic". How about: People who don't participate are missing out on free money, and are likely compromising their future by not saving. And when Social Security runs out of money before they retire, they are going to be extra fucked.

              My only argument against the rest of your comment is that it isn't really appropriate to use "the rest of the world" as a metric. If I lived in India at my current salary I'd be well above the 1% line. Pick

              • I totally get comparing yourself to your own neighbors, so even if you're in top 1% you can still look a certain way at people who are EVEN RICHER than you. I understand that.

                I also understand that when I do that, I'm Hillary Banks whining that the neighbor has a Bentley and I only have a BMW.

                I've found over time that I FEEL a lot better about life if I'm paying attention to how much *I* am giving, what percentage of my salary. That leads to gratitude. Vs spending my time looking at somebody in a Bentley.

                Wh

        • You own it in the responsibility sense, like when you own a house. Don't pay your mortgage or taxes? then you get it taken away from you.

          You don't own a company in the sense that you get to decide anything, even through a vote.

          And if you don't have voting shares, and don't have preferred shares (paid first in a liquidation event), then you're not really playing the game of capitalism. For most of us the best we can do is jump into a mutual fund and home we're not fleeced, most of us are rubes for the real p

          • You have every right to vote your shares. It's the shareholders who elect the board of directors.

            MOST people sign the proxy, allowing Fidelity to vote on their behalf, because the person at Fidelity who follows that company *for a living* knows more about it than than the individual shareholder does.

            That's what most people choose to do, but you can vote your shares directly, or sign on to another proxy whom you think is better aligned with your values.

      • I've never heard a good explanation for how we prevent money and power from accumulating across generations at the top. Not that I'm saying we scrap private ownership of the means of production entirely (people like owning stuff) but I don't think anyone's really comfortable with the amount of regulation and the amount of income redistribution needed to Democratize Capitalism.

        People tell me to vote with my dollars, but I have so few of them. Imagine if we did real voting like that. If Bill Gates got 130
        • The supposed problem of wealth passing between generations is solved, at least at the high end. Look at the richest people each decade of the past 100 years. It keeps changing. New technologies arise, allowing new wealth to be created. Typically wealth will decline as it passes to descendants less able to generate wealth.

          There doesn't seem to be an issue to be solved unless you think we should prevent everybody from using their wealth, big or small, to help their children rise higher than they could.

        • While the ideas you espouse sound nice, the fundamental belief of progressivism is the notion that someone else should pay for societal progress. Which is why progressive utopian ideals never become reality.

          If you took it upon yourself to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, care for the sick, visit those in prison... etc... you would soon be ostracized as a conservative by progressives. The church has had a solution to societal problems for centuries, but the problem has always been in getting believers

      • by evanh ( 627108 )

        Ah, no. The "free-market" is your true capitalism. And there's nothing fair about how a truly free market works. It's dog-eat-dog and only monopolies come out on top. Corruption also rules then.

  • The sooner I can buy decent SOCs with RISC-V the sooner I'll start using those in my designs. These days I tend to favor NXP i.MX, ST, and TI OMAP for most boards I design. It would be nice if I had similar parts to choose from but with a RISC-V core capable of running Linux.
    • The advantage of ARM is not the instruction set but the IP you can license from them. It's going to be quite some time before RISC V reaches a similar level of capability and market penetration.

      We first saw RISC V embedded into ASICs instead of custom processors. Because maintaining the software tools and writing the validation suites is such a pain. RISC V really fills this niche well. There is still a long way to go for us to see settop boxes, tablets, and routers with these SoCs in them.

      As for price, an

      • I don't want to re-ignite the CISC-vs-RISC wars, but is there some reason why R5 would be "so much better" as a SOC? Like you said, one can run Linux on existing chips. What would R5 bring to a SOC that doesn't already exist?
        • R5 can be extended with vendor specific instructions to meet some deeply embedded special purpose. Of course that makes binaries using those extensions incompatible between systems. But there is a base level that one could use to make generic libraries or bootloaders or kernels, which could be licensed to vendors making special R5s. (like a RTOS that runs on any R5 even one that has some wacky AI extension instructions)

          ARM doesn't really want people doing this. Part of your license is that you can't alter t

          • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

            "ARM doesn't really want people doing this. Part of your license is that you can't alter the ISA and still use the ARM trademark."

            If your goal is to engineer proprietary instructions "o meet some deeply embedded special purpose", why do you give a shit about using the ARM trademark? You can't use the ARM trademark when using RISC-V either.

            None of this makes the slightest sense. If you want to do custom, then it's custom. Otherwise, it's not. You're suggesting ARM is not customizable due to licensing. T

            • If your goal is to engineer proprietary instructions "o meet some deeply embedded special purpose", why do you give a shit about using the ARM trademark?

              If youâ(TM)re doing a one-off for an edge case, you probably donâ(TM)t care about the trademark: thatâ(TM)s more of a âoejust get shit doneâ scenario. If youâ(TM)re doing something mainstream that will possibly have a legacy, it matters a bit more: in that case, you might want others to get involved in the development, in some respect. Perhaps some sort of open source endeavor. Being able to say ARM in that case provides a reassurance of legitimacy.

            • why do you give a shit about using the ARM trademark?

              You don't and I worked on just such a project. We dropped some ARM instructions for dealing with unaligned, byte swapped, and 16-bit values that needed a patent at a time. And used gcc with a little replacement for gas that replaced some of the instructions we couldn't use with a macro or reported an error if the C code was really too complex for a macro. It did lock us into a particular version of gcc, and we never upstream the changes (or distributed our in-house GNU tools). But there you go, that's how t

      • by rlwinm ( 6158720 )
        My hope is that much like the Linux kernel if there are enough companies with a vested interest in efficient implementations the quality of implementations will grow quickly once it gets a little popular.
        • I think MIPS Technologies, Inc. is going all RISC-V. For the market in general, there will be a LOT of choices in the future for licensing R5-based designs for embedded system. I'm not sure it the free licensing model for R5 will translate into cheaper SoCs than ARM. But it ought to show more variety (and varying quality).

          Initially I think we'll see MIPS and Xtensa(Tensilica) being replaced with R5 and perhaps PPC (and I guess ColdFire if it's still around). Places where an ARM Cortex-M or -R makes sense is

    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      And no doubt that your transition, based on parts that YOU can buy, of the copious boards that YOU design, will send shockwaves through the industry.

      Since the parts you reference, that YOU favor, are mere conglomerations of logic it seems lilkely that you are at least as much a cut-and-paster "designer" as the people who define your "favored" parts. Considering that, why should you give a shit what instruction set inside a part you don't understand uses to execute code that you also don't understand?

      Love t

      • by rlwinm ( 6158720 )
        Wow, you really are showing off your asshole skills. FWIW RV has lots of extensions to choose from. Most than most ARM SoCs.
  • Arm is a UK company and NVIDIA is American. So how does China get a say?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Arm is a UK company and NVIDIA is American. So how does China get a say?

      Just like every country on the plant, if you want to do business in China you have to follow Chinese law. Why is it y'all get so triggered every time an article mentions China?

    • Because Jensen Huang is from Taiwan, which China considers theirs.
  • ARM may present NVIDIA unparallel bars to competition.

  • Brexit... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Thursday August 19, 2021 @11:52AM (#61707949) Homepage
    Theresa May moved very, very quickly to approve the ARM deal in conscious effort to show that after Brexit the UK was open for international trade and investment-friendly. Plus it was a chip manufacturer which doesn't get much emotional flag-waving press here, I'm sure if it had been a coal mine or car factory it would have generated many more tabloid headlines.

    Move on a few years with Brexit a reality (whether you're pro or against...not what I'm writing about here), the regulators are not under the same political pressure and are now taking the kind of look that should have been taken in the first place. It's interesting to see this one revisited - not sure how it will pan out to be honest, but it's good to see the scrutiny being upped from the original political knee-jerk

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