<story><title>Nvidia is reportedly in ‘advanced talks’ to buy ARM for more than $32B</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/nvidia-said-in-advanced-talks-to-buy-softbank-s-chip-company-arm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fluffything</author><text>You are not wrong, but the facts you have cherry picked fail to portrait the whole picture.&lt;p&gt;For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past.&lt;p&gt;The claim that Nintendo is the only company nvidia successfully collaborates with is just wrong:&lt;p&gt;- nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with ARM today...&lt;p&gt;The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well...&lt;p&gt;I mean, this is not nvidia specific.&lt;p&gt;You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don&amp;#x27;t open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.).&lt;p&gt;I mean, you even try to paint this as if Nvidia is the only company that Apple has parted ways with, yet Apple has long track record of parting ways with other companies (IBM PowerPC processors, Intel, ...). I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that the moment Apple is able to produce a competitive GFX card, they will part ways with AMD as well.</text></item><item><author>DCKing</author><text>This is quite concerning honestly. I don&amp;#x27;t mind ARM being acquired, and I don&amp;#x27;t mind Nvidia acquiring things. But I&amp;#x27;m concerned about this combination.&lt;p&gt;Nvidia is a pretty hostile company to others in the market. They have a track record of vigorously pushing their market dominance and their own way of doing things. They view making custom designs as beneath them. Their custom console GPU designs - in the original Xbox, in the Playstation 3 - were considered a failure because of terrible cooporation with Nvidia [0]. Apple is probably more demanding than other PC builders and have completely fallen out with them. Nvidia has famously failed to cooporate with the Linux community on the standardized graphics stack supported by Intel and AMD and keeps pushing propietary stuff. There are more examples.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to not make &amp;quot;hostile&amp;quot; too much of a value judgement. Nvidia has been an extremely successful company &lt;i&gt;because of it&lt;/i&gt; too. It&amp;#x27;s alright if it&amp;#x27;s not in their corporate culture to work well with others. Clearly it&amp;#x27;s working, and Nvidia for all their faults is still innovating.&lt;p&gt;But this culture won&amp;#x27;t fly well if your core business is developing chip designs &lt;i&gt;for others&lt;/i&gt;. It&amp;#x27;s also a problem if you are the gatekeeper of a CPU instruction set that a metric ton of other infrastructure increasingly depends on. I really, really hope ARM&amp;#x27;s current business will be allowed to run independently as ARM knows how to do this and Nvidia has time and time again shown not to understand this at all. But I&amp;#x27;m pessimistic about that. I&amp;#x27;m afraid Nvidia will gut ARM the company, the ARM  architectures, and the ARM instruction set in the long run.&lt;p&gt;[0]: An interesting counterpoint would the Nintendo Switch running on an Nvidia Tegra hardware, but all the evidence points to that this chip is a 100% vanilla Nvidia Tegra X1 that Nvidia was already selling themselves (to the point its bootloader could be unlocked like a standard Tegra, leading to the Switch Fusee-Gelee exploit).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vngzs</author><text>&amp;gt; The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong [...]&lt;p&gt;Hey! Wait a second, there. Nvidia isn&amp;#x27;t bad because it has a properietary Linux driver. Nvidia is bad because it actively undermines open-source.&lt;p&gt;Quoting Linus Torvalds (2012) [0]:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;m also happy to very publicly point out that Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we&amp;#x27;ve had with hardware manufacturers, and that is really sad because then Nvidia tries to sell chips - a lot of chips - into the Android Market. Nvidia has been the single worst company we&amp;#x27;ve ever dealt with.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; [Lifts middle finger] So Nvidia, fuck you.&lt;p&gt;Nvidia managed to push some PR blurbs about how it was improving the open-source driver in 2014, but six years later, Nouveau is still crap compared to their proprietary driver [1].&lt;p&gt;Drew DeVault, on Nvidia support in Sway [2]:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Nvidia, on the other hand, have been fucking assholes and have treated Linux like utter shit for our entire relationship. About a year ago they announced “Wayland support” for their proprietary driver. This included KMS and DRM support (years late, I might add), but not GBM support. They shipped something called EGLStreams instead, a concept that had been discussed and shot down by the Linux graphics development community before. They did this because it makes it easier for them to keep their driver proprietary without having work with Linux developers on it. Without GBM, Nvidia does not support Wayland, and they were real pricks for making some announcement like they actually did.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.phoronix.com&amp;#x2F;scan.php?page=article&amp;amp;item=nvidia-nouveau-2019&amp;amp;num=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.phoronix.com&amp;#x2F;scan.php?page=article&amp;amp;item=nvidia-n...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;drewdevault.com&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;26&amp;#x2F;Fuck-you-nvidia.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;drewdevault.com&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;26&amp;#x2F;Fuck-you-nvidia.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Nvidia is reportedly in ‘advanced talks’ to buy ARM for more than $32B</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/nvidia-said-in-advanced-talks-to-buy-softbank-s-chip-company-arm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fluffything</author><text>You are not wrong, but the facts you have cherry picked fail to portrait the whole picture.&lt;p&gt;For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past.&lt;p&gt;The claim that Nintendo is the only company nvidia successfully collaborates with is just wrong:&lt;p&gt;- nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with ARM today...&lt;p&gt;The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well...&lt;p&gt;I mean, this is not nvidia specific.&lt;p&gt;You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don&amp;#x27;t open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.).&lt;p&gt;I mean, you even try to paint this as if Nvidia is the only company that Apple has parted ways with, yet Apple has long track record of parting ways with other companies (IBM PowerPC processors, Intel, ...). I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that the moment Apple is able to produce a competitive GFX card, they will part ways with AMD as well.</text></item><item><author>DCKing</author><text>This is quite concerning honestly. I don&amp;#x27;t mind ARM being acquired, and I don&amp;#x27;t mind Nvidia acquiring things. But I&amp;#x27;m concerned about this combination.&lt;p&gt;Nvidia is a pretty hostile company to others in the market. They have a track record of vigorously pushing their market dominance and their own way of doing things. They view making custom designs as beneath them. Their custom console GPU designs - in the original Xbox, in the Playstation 3 - were considered a failure because of terrible cooporation with Nvidia [0]. Apple is probably more demanding than other PC builders and have completely fallen out with them. Nvidia has famously failed to cooporate with the Linux community on the standardized graphics stack supported by Intel and AMD and keeps pushing propietary stuff. There are more examples.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to not make &amp;quot;hostile&amp;quot; too much of a value judgement. Nvidia has been an extremely successful company &lt;i&gt;because of it&lt;/i&gt; too. It&amp;#x27;s alright if it&amp;#x27;s not in their corporate culture to work well with others. Clearly it&amp;#x27;s working, and Nvidia for all their faults is still innovating.&lt;p&gt;But this culture won&amp;#x27;t fly well if your core business is developing chip designs &lt;i&gt;for others&lt;/i&gt;. It&amp;#x27;s also a problem if you are the gatekeeper of a CPU instruction set that a metric ton of other infrastructure increasingly depends on. I really, really hope ARM&amp;#x27;s current business will be allowed to run independently as ARM knows how to do this and Nvidia has time and time again shown not to understand this at all. But I&amp;#x27;m pessimistic about that. I&amp;#x27;m afraid Nvidia will gut ARM the company, the ARM  architectures, and the ARM instruction set in the long run.&lt;p&gt;[0]: An interesting counterpoint would the Nintendo Switch running on an Nvidia Tegra hardware, but all the evidence points to that this chip is a 100% vanilla Nvidia Tegra X1 that Nvidia was already selling themselves (to the point its bootloader could be unlocked like a standard Tegra, leading to the Switch Fusee-Gelee exploit).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nvarsj</author><text>There’s no defending Nvidia’s approach to Linux and OSS. It is plain awful no matter how you try to twist the reality. And it is actively damaging because it forces extra work on OSS maintainers and frustrates users. You should not be required to install a binary blob in 2020 to get basic functionality (like fan control) to work. Optimus and wayland support is painfully, purposely bad.</text></comment>