SoftBank considering selling ARM

[filssavi]

So what does it mean for ARM µC's? shall I just go off and learn some other chip series?

Nothing. If nVidia is to jeopardize the ARM MCU market, do you think your UK government will let it happen and f* all UK engineers? Unless ARM says f* off UK market, UK government has the rights to vote.

In the short term I expect no changes, especially for microcontrollers.

In the long run though I expect nvidia to drop there ARM branding altogether, and fire/relocate the UK team as soon as they can wiggle themselves out of the UK government protection clauses.

I expect them to stop selling the IP for the A series of cores and start doing their own silicon, much better than anything else other parties have to offer (by giving other people the specs for the next architectures at the last minute for example), Quickly becoming the dominant player in the Android space (maybe aided by selling at a loss at first, undercutting the competition). This will almost certainly push Qualcomm out of the mobile processors market, and probably Samsung as well. Once they have a solid lead in market share( 80%+) they will start jacking up the prices significantly (as they did with GPUs) so I expect prices of phones to raise significantly as a result.

In the server market they will come out with their own chips, they will also stop licensing stuff to other companies in that space, or if they legally can’t (unlikely) thy will jack license prices up so much (shkreli stile) that they will drop out of the race

Amazon, apple and other similar size companies will probably not be affected, as I assume their legal department will have gone over everything in the contract with an extremely fine toothed comb, making sure they can continue to use and develop aarch64 autonomously.

The microcontroller space will ignored at first, in the long run I see two scenarios, best case nvidia will keep operating as ARM is now so they are able to pretend to support competition, market and all of that if the antitrust authorities wake up to the shady anticompetitive practices they have been pulling for decades. The second, frankly more probable scenario is that they will abandon the segment and stop developing new cores, as there just isn’t enough money to be made (the margins on MCUs are way to low for an nvidia style company). That said the current offer is probably more than good enough for the foreseeable future in terms of pure MCUs. For the more IoT/edge computing use cases where a little more grunt is necessary I guess RISCV could fill the gap, if nvidia doesn’t decide to compete

[filssavi]

So what does it mean for ARM µC's? shall I just go off and learn some other chip series?

Nothing. If nVidia is to jeopardize the ARM MCU market, do you think your UK government will let it happen and f* all UK engineers? Unless ARM says f* off UK market, UK government has the rights to vote.

UK government only cares about the jobs, not what products the engineers are developing, nvidia will keep the UK team, for the time being (no way they don’t find a way to sack them in the future 5-10 year).

The only hope would have been a EU level movement to retain the talent given that the USA are not our allies anymore, however with Brexit and BoJo desperate for a UK-US  trade deal, I don’t think we can really count on that happening

Thus new MCU development will probably stop as soon as the deal goes through

[TomS_]

I wonder what this means for Nvidias RISC-V interests.

AFAIK they are one of the biggest producers of RISC-V cores, embedded in their GPUs. If they now own ARM, will they ditch RISC-V and start embedding ARM cores instead?

Seems like a big loss to RISC-V if such a thing were to come true.

[filssavi]

Keeping two processors design team just for the good of the RISCV community doesn’t seem very nvidia like 

Also any RISCV processor nvidia might be using is just some random core embedded deep into their GPU and it is probably very far from being user programmable, especially given the secrecy around even the GPU low level interface, thus I don’t think a RISCV -> ARM transition would not even be noticed by the GPU users

[westfw]

I remember when Apple bought PA Semi.
It sucked.  We were going to use those chips.  :-(

[coppice]

So what does it mean for ARM µC's? shall I just go off and learn some other chip series?

Nothing. If nVidia is to jeopardize the ARM MCU market, do you think your UK government will let it happen and f* all UK engineers? Unless ARM says f* off UK market, UK government has the rights to vote.

Using the UK as an example doesn't really work. The UK MCU market is now too small for anyone to care about losing it.

[TheNewLab]

Wait, I am just waking up to this. When did Nvidia become USA? I thought it was ROC Tawan manufacturer?

[coppice]

Wait, I am just waking up to this. When did Nvidia become USA? I thought it was ROC Tawan manufacturer?

nVidia is an American company. They don't actually make anything. All their production is in Asia, at TSMC and a bunch of assembly and test sub-contractors, but the company is American.

[Simon]

TSMC make all the ARMs?

[coppice]

TSMC make all the ARMs?

Everyone makes ARMs.

[Simon]

Yea i mean they are a huge player in the phone market aren't they? they are the actual fab that make's most phone ARM chips, I'm not talking about micro controller makers (low M series)

[coppice]

Yea i mean they are a huge player in the phone market aren't they? they are the actual fab that make's most phone ARM chips, I'm not talking about micro controller makers (low M series)

This depends on the season. Some years TSMC seems to make almost all phone chips. Some years Samsung and others get a fair chunk of the work. Its all a matter of who has the best performing process that year, the best prices, and adequate capacity. Phone chips are usually made in the finest geometry processes available, so there aren't many fabs which can handle them. The great danger for the people farming out work to these fabs is the number of suitable fabs may shrink to one, and they will be in a monopoly situation, with all the problems that brings.

[Doctorandus_P]

Gosh Simon,

you just motivated me to add a rule to my add blocker for the whole simonelectronics domain.
I'm not sure if that was your intention.

[Simon]

Gosh Simon,

you just motivated me to add a rule to my add blocker for the whole simonelectronics domain.
I'm not sure if that was your intention.

obviously not and your choice, it's been like that a while and I am not the only one. As for Ad blocker, it's part of my signature. I spent a long time looking at sizes to get a balance compromise of being able to see it but not too big.