Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B - <AUTHOR> https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for-40-billion-creating-worlds-premier-computing-company-for-the-age-of-ai <comment><USER3> This is terrible. Not really just because of Nvidia - which has a lot of problems I've previously commented on the rumors of this [1] - but Nvidia's ownership completely changes ARM's incentives.

ARM created a business model for itself where they had to act as a "BDFL" for the ARM architecture and IP. They made an architecture, CPU designs, and GPU designs for others. They had no stake in the chip making game, and they had others - Samsung, Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Huawei, Mediatek, Rockchip and loads of others make the chip. Their business model was to make the ARM ecosystem accessible for as many companies as possible, so they could sell as many licenses as possible. In that way, ARM's business model enabled a very diverse and thriving ARM market. I think this is the _sole_ reason we see ARM eating the chip world today.

This business model would continue to work perfectly fine as a privately held company, or being owned by a faceless investor company that wants you to make as much money as possible. But it's not fine if you are owned by a company that wants to use you to control their own position in the chip market. There is no way Nvidia (any other chip company, but as laid out previously Nvidia might even be more concerning) will spend 40 billion on this without them deliberately or inadvertently destroying ARM's open CPU and GPU ecosystem. Will Nvidia allow selling ARM licenses to competitors of Nvidia's business? Will Nvidia reserve ARM's best IP as a selling point for its own chips? Will Nvidia allow Mali to continue existing? Any innovations ARM made previously it sold to anyone mostly indiscriminatorily (outside of legal restrictions), but now every time the question must be asked "does Nvidia have a better propietary purpose for this?". For any ARM chip maker the situation will be that Nvidia is both your ruthless competitor, but it also sells you the IP you need to build your chips.

EDIT: ARM's interests up to last week were to create and empower as many competitors for Nvidia as possible. They were good at that and was the root of the success of the ARM ecosystem. That incentive is completely gone now.

Unless Nvidia leaves ARM alone (and why would they spend $40B on that??), this has got to be the beginning of the end of ARM's golden age.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24010821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24010821)

<comment><USER4> To play devil's advocate a bit, are nVidia's incentives necessarily so different? Their goal will be to make as much money as possible, and it's clear that licensing has been a winning strategy for ARM.

Samsung comes to mind as another company that makes their own TVs, phones, SSDs, ect., but is also perfectly happy to license the underlying screens and chips in those products to other companies. From my vantage point, the setup seems to be working well?

<comment><USER5> How do we know that Samsung hasn't stifled some potential competitors by refusing to sell them screens or by selling them an inferior product?

<comment><USER6> Samsung makes (excellent) screens for iPhones, which are huge competitors to Samsung's own flagship phones, but Samsung still seems happy to take the profits from the screen sales. If there are smaller potential competitors that Samsung won't work with it's most likely because the scale is too small to be in their economic interest, not because they're rejecting profits in order to stifle potential competitors.

<comment><USER7> Apple is a much bigger company than Samsung, they can't realistically turn down a contract that big when LG is lying in wait to take all that money.

<comment><USER8> Not really. Revenues and Profits of Samsung group and Apple are roughly comparable and in many ways Samsung's revenue streams are more diversified and sustainable.. stock valuation notwithstanding.

<comment><USER9> "stock valuation notwithstanding" Perhaps you were thinking of Samsung Electronics, not Samsung Group.

<comment><USER10> There isn't really much outside Samsung Electronics in terms of revenue/profit.

<comment><USER11> Samsung SDS made $635 million in profit in 2019 which I think was higher than ARM? As far as I'm aware the 'Samsung Group' doesn't actually have all the companies under that so it's difficult to see what the overall revenue/profit is of the entire 'group'. It has quite a few other companies, like heavy industries, insurance, asset management, etc and I think they all have thousands of employees and are very large companies in their industries so I'd be surprised that when combined the other companies weren't significant. Did you have any data on this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No one has seemed to notice the following two things:

"To pave the way for the deal, SoftBank reversed an earlier decision to strip out an internet-of-things business from Arm and transfer it to a new company under its control. That would have stripped Arm of what was meant to be the high-growth engine that would power it into a 5G-connected future. One person said that SoftBank made the decision because it would have put it in conflict with commitments made to the U.K. over Arm, which were agreed at the time of the 2016 deal to appease the government." (from [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/nvidia-reportedly- to...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/nvidia-reportedly-to-acquire- arm-holdings-from-softbank-for-40-billion/) )

and

"The transaction does not include Arm's IoT Services Group." (nvidia news.)

which appear to contradict each other.

I'm not sure about the significance of this. I would have guessed Nvidia would have wanted the IoT group to remain.

Also, to first order, when a company issues stock to purchase another corporation, that cost is essentially "free" since the value of the corporation increases.

In other words, Nvidia is essentially paying $12 billion in cash for ARM up front, and that's all. (The extra $5B in cash or stock depends on financial performance of ARM, and thus is a second-order effect.)

<comment><USER13> There were two separate IoT business units: Platform ([https://pelion.com](https://pelion.com)) and Data ([https://www.treasuredata.com/](https://www.treasuredata.com/)). The Platform unit fits the Segars post-acquisition comment about end-to-end IoT software architecture, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24465005](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24465005)

 _> One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make commitments to the UK government over Arm's future in Britain, where opposition politicians have recently insisted that any potential deal must safeguard British jobs._

So the deal has already been influenced by one regulator. That should encourage other regulators.

 _> SoftBank will remain committed to Arm's long-term success through its ownership stake in NVIDIA, expected to be under 10 percent._

Why is this stake necessary?

<comment><USER14> The UK government never learns. Kraft made similar promises when buying Cadbury regarding jobs,but quietly reneged on them over time. The Kraft CEO was asked to show up before an UK parliament committee, but of course declined, and that was the end of the story.

<comment><USER15> Except the Cadbury-Kraft debacle led to major reforms in how the UK regulates foreign takeovers.

In the case of Arm, the guarantees provided back in 2016 were legally binding, which is why we're here, four years and another acquisition later, with Nvidia now eager to demonstrate it is standing by those commitments.

Maybe in this particular instance they did learn something?

<comment><USER16> They should learn to prevent the sale, period. Promises to retain some jobs (for ever? What happens if profits decline? What happens if the core tech is sold and ARM becomes a shell? Do the rules still apply?) address a tiny fraction of the problems presented by the sale of one of our core national tech companies.

<comment><USER17> I would have liked to see ARM remain owned in the UK. I think it's proven itself capable of innovation and organic growth on its own.

But how can we evaluate the whether that will continue?

What if ARM is not sold, and then (for whatever reason) stagnates, doesn't innovate, gets overtaken in some way, and enters gradual decline?

Perhaps that's unlikely, but _prevent the sale, period_ is feels too absolute.

<comment><USER16> That feels like giving up, to me. We should have the confidence that British industry can development and flourish on its own merits without being sold off to foreign interests.

<comment><USER18> What have confidence when we can just look at ARM financials?

There are more ARM chips sold each year than those of all its competitors together. Yet ARM's revenue is 300 million $.

Why? Because ARM lives from the ISA royalties, and their revenue on the cores they license is actually small.

With RISC-V on the rise, and west sanctions against china, RISC-V competition against ARM will only increase, and it is very hard to compete against something that's good / better and has lower costs (RISC-V royalties are "free").

I really have no idea why NVIDIA would adquire ARM. If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu, etc. are built and designed by better teams). ARM cores are used by Qualcom and Samsung, but these aren't world-class and get beaten every gen by Apple Silicon. If they want ARM royalties, that's high risk business, and very low reward (there is little money to make there).

The only ok-ish cores ARM makes are embedded low-power cores (not mobile, but truly IoT < 1W embedded). Hard to imagine that an architecture like Volta or Ampere that perform well at 200-400W would perform well at the <1W envelope. No mobile phone in the world uses nvidia accelerators, and mobile phones are "supercomputers" when compared with the kind of devices ARM is "ok-ish" at.

So none of this makes sense to me, except if NVIDIA would want to "license" GPUs with ARM cores to IoT and low power devices like ARM does, but that sounds extremely far-fetched, because nvidia is super-far away from a product there, and also because the margins for those products are very very thin, and nvidia tends to like 40-60% margins. You just can have those when buying IoT chips for 0.12$. Its also hard to sell a GPU to these use cases because they often don't need it.

<comment><USER19> >" If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu, etc. are built and designed by better teams)."

The latest Fujitsus HPC offering the A64FX is also ARM based though.[1][2] And it sounds as though this is replacing their SPARC64 in this role .

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_\(supercomputer\))

<comment><USER20> Fujitsu is using custom cores, but AWS Graviton (1 and 2) actually uses Arm Neoverse cores. The Ampere Altra will too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When will Europe realise that there is no second place when it comes to a market - the larger player will always eventually end up owning everything.

I can not put into words how furious I am at the UK's Conservative party for not protecting our last great tech company.

Europe has been fooled into the USA's ultra free market system (which works brilliantly for the US but is terrible for everybody else). As such American tech companies have brought EVERYTHING and eventually moth balled them.

Take Renderware it was the leading game engine of the PS2 era consoles, brought by EA and mothballed. Nokia is another great example brought by Microsoft and mothballed. Imagination Technologies was slightly different in that it wasn't bought but Apple essentially mothballed them. Now ARM will undoubtedly be the next via an intermediate buyout.

You look across Europe and there is nothing. Deepmind could have been a great European tech company - it just needed the right investment.

<comment><USER22> And you really think more protectionism will help?

Maybe part of the problem is that due to so many regulations, there's not a healthy startup ecosystem and the compensation isn't remotely high enough to draw the best talent.

<comment><USER23> Regulation has little to do with it. Most of the tech industry is inherently winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most because of how easy it is to scale up tech solutions. US companies get a huge head-start because of their large home market compared to the fragmented EU market, and can easily carry that advantage into also dominating the EU market.

There is a reason Russia and China have strong tech companies and Europe doesn't. That reason isn't lack of money, lack of talent or regulations. The only way for Europe to get big tech companies is by removing or crippling big US companies so EU companies can actually compete. The US companies would be quickly replaced by EU alternatives and those would offer high compensation all the same.

Whether or not that is worth it from the perspective of the EU is not so black and white - tech is obviously not everything - but the current situation where all EU data gets handed to the US government on a silver platter is also far from optimal from the perspective of the EU.

<comment><USER24> When is the time china and Russia has a lead in IT by not protectionist and copycat. I can only think of tik tok.

The strange thing is if you do not count brexit, Arm is one of the many example Uk can do it. And whilst we say Nokia, Sieman and japan fuji (sitting in Hosiptal now and thinking those mri, ...) non-chinese and non-Russia do dominate the tech world even they are not USA. But communist ideology totalitarian I found tik tok is really the exception.

Hence I think Eu has their problem. But not because they are not as good as Russia or china.

<comment><USER25> Tmall of Alibaba processed 544,000 transactions per second during the peak of its Singles' Day in 2019. I believe this has set a new world record for an e-commerce platform.

In case you didn't know about Singles' Day: [https://graphics.reuters.com/SINGLES-DAY- ALIBABA/0100B30E24T...](https://graphics.reuters.com/SINGLES-DAY- ALIBABA/0100B30E24T/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I see this going a few ways for different players:

The perpetual architecture license folks that make their own cores like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Fujitsu (I think they needed this for the A64FX, right?) will be fine, and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there. Apple especially will be fine as they can get code into LLVM for whatever "Apple Silicon" evolves into over time.

The smaller vendors that license core designs (like the A5x and A7x series, etc.) like Allwinner, Rockchip, and Broadcom are probably in a worse state - nVidia could cut them off from any new designs. I'd be scrambling for an alternative if I were any of these companies.

Long term, it really depends on how nVidia acts - they could release low end cores with no license fees to try to fend off RISC-V, but that hasn't been overly successful when tried earlier with the SPARC and Power architectures. Best case scenario, they keep all the perpetual architecture people happy and architecturally coherent, and release some interesting datacenter chips, leaving the low end (and low margin) to 3rd parties.

Hopefully they'll also try to mend fences with the open source community, or at least avoid repeating past offenses.

<comment><USER27> It seems to me that if Apple felt that Nvidia would limit them, they could have outbid them for ARM! So I think you are correct.

<comment><USER28> Apple would not get antitrust approval (iPhone maker controls all android chips????). So that's why.

<comment><USER29> Exactly, Apple is already straddling the line (and imho way past it) on anti- comp laws.

<comment><USER30> I'm not defending Apple, just thinking that can't we say this for many of the biggest tech firms? They are way past the line on anticompetitive business.

<comment><USER31> Yes, Apple is not alone in this. Google is another example, and they are very aware of this and are acting very carefully

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> And there you have it. Perhaps the greatest thing to happen to RISC-V since the invention of the FPGA :-).

I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to.

Regarding the federal investment in FOSS thread that was here perhaps CPU architecture would be a good candidate.

<comment><USER33> The next Apple machine I am going to buy will be using RISC-V cores.

<comment><USER34> I suspect you'll be waiting for quite a long time, if not forever.

<comment><USER35> FWIW Apple isn't even listed on RISC-V's membership page:

[https://riscv.org/membership/members/](https://riscv.org/membership/members/)

While some like Google and Alibaba are listed as platinum founding members.

<comment><USER36> I agree that Apple wont do RISC-V but you don't need to be a member to us it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I love this, I was amongst early engineers on CUDA (compilers).

NVIDIA was so well run, but boxed into a smaller graphics card market - <USER2> and it were forced into low margins since they were made replaceable by OpenGL and DirectX standards. For the standard fans - they resulted a wealth transfer from NVIDIA to Apple etc. and reduced capital available for R&D.

NVIDIA was constantly attacked by a much bigger Intel (which changed interfaces to kill products and was made to pay by a court)

Through innovation, developing new technologies (CUDA) they increased market cap, and have used that to buy Arm/Mellanox.

I love the story of the underdog run by a founder, innovating it's way to getting into new markets against harsh competition. Win for capitalism!

<comment><USER38> Nvidia might have been an underdog once, but they are now the world's largest chipmaker, even surpassing Intel.

[https://www.extremetech.com/computing/312528-nvidia- overtake...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/312528-nvidia-overtakes- intel-as-worlds-most-valuable-chip-maker)

<comment><USER39> And Intel's revenue remains 700% larger than Nvidia's

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Talking points from the founders of Arm & Nvidia: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/09/13/its- officialnvidia-acquires-arm-for-40b-to-create-what-could-be-a-computing- juggernaut/)

 _> Huang told me that first thing that the combined company will do is to, "bring NVIDIA technology through Arm's vast network." So I'd expect NVIDIA GPU and NPU IP to become available quickly to smartphone, tablet, TV and automobile SoC providers as quickly as possible._

 _> Arm CEO Simon Segars framed it well when he told me, "We're moving into a world where software doesn't just run in one place. Your application today might run in the cloud, it might run on your phone, and there might be some embedded application running on a device, but I think increasingly and with the rollout of 5g and with some of the technologies that Jensen was just talking about this kind of application will become spread across all of those places. Delivering that and managing that there's a huge task to do."_

 _> Huang ... "We're about to enter a phase, where we're going to create an internet that is thousands of times bigger than the internet that we enjoy today. A lot of people don't realize this. And so, so we would like to create a computing company for this age of AI."_

<comment><USER40> My instincts are telling me this is smoke and mirrors to rationalize a $40E9 deal. The only part of that that computes at all is the GPU integration, and that only works if NVIDIA doesn't terrorize Arm licencees. The rest is buzzwords.

<comment><USER41> Want to be nerdy and use powers-of-ten? Fine by me! But then please go all the way: $4E10!!!

<comment><USER42> Perhaps the parent prefers engineering notation, which uses exponents that are a multiple of three?

<comment><USER40> Got me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> My initial reaction is that this reminiscent of the AMD-ATI deal back in 2006. It almost killed both companies and comparatively, this deal size is much bigger ($40B vs. $6B) for both a more mature industry and companies involved.

$40B is an obscene lot of money objectively and what's the endgame for Nvidia? If it's to "fuse" ARM's top CPU designs with their GPU prowess, then couldn't they invest the money to restart their own CPU designs (e.g. Carmel)? My inner pessimist, as with others here, is that Nvidia will somehow cripple the ARM ecosystem or prioritize their own needs over those of other customers'. Perhaps an appropriate analogy is Qualcomm's IP licensing shenanigans and how they've crippled the non-iOS smartphone industry.

That said, there's also examples of companies making these purchases with minimal insidious behavior and co-existing with their would-be competitors: Microsoft's acquisition of Github, Google's Pixel smartphones, Sony's camera lenses business and even Samsung, which supposedly firewalls its components teams so the best tech is available to whoever wants (and is willing to pay for it).

I suppose if this acquisition ends up going through (big if), then we'll see Nvidia's true intent in 3-5 years.

<comment><USER44> I see two ways of it playing out for Nvidia:

1) Adoption of ARM CPU's (AWS Graviton, rPi etc) will cause software to be adapted to ARM anyway, meaning: Nvidia could come out with a full vertically integrated cloud.

or

2) Leveraging full vertical integration with ML based super computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm not convinced this is a death sentence for ARM. I doubt nVidia spent $40b on a company with the intention of killing it's golden goose business model. The contractual agreements might change, but ARM wasn't exactly giving their IP away for free before this move.

<comment><USER46> It is less about them intentionally killing it and more about their culture and attitude killing it.

<comment><USER47> Does Nvidia have a habit of killing acquisitions? I'm only familiar with their graphics business, but as far as I can see the only culture going on there is excellence.

<comment><USER48> NVIDIAs whole schtick is making a bunch of interesting software and arbitrarily locking it to their own hardware. Doesn't seem compatible with being the steward for what has up until now been a relatively open CPU architecture.

<comment><USER49> arbitrarily? Nvidia invests a lot in software R&D, why should they just give it away to their competitor AMD who basically invest nothing in comparison?

<comment><USER50> Arbitrary as in, without technical reasons.

An open architecture, and business model based on partnership doesn't really synchronize with vendor locking your products for increased profits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Softbank paid $32B for ARM in 2016.

A 25% gain over a horizon of four years is not bad for your average investment -- but this isn't an average investment.

First, compared to the SP500, this underperforms over the same horizon (even compared to end of 2019 rather than the inflated prices right now).

Second, ARM's sector (semiconductors) has performed far, far better in that time. The PHOX (Philadelphia Semiconductor Index) doubled in the same time period.

And looking at AMD and NVIDIA, it feels as if ARM would have been in a position to benefit from the surrounding euphoria.

On the other hand, unless I'm misremembering, ARM back then was already considered massively overvalued precisely because it was such a prime takeover target, so perhaps its the $32B that are throwing me off here.

<comment><USER52> It vastly overperforms the Softbank ventures we usually hear about (excluding BABA).

<comment><USER53> To be honest, cash deposited in a boring current account outperforms Softbank's Vision Fund

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The British should never have allowed foreign ownership of their core tech

<comment><USER55> Yes. It'd have been reasonable to block sales to non eu parties for national security reasons.

Now arm is yet another US company.

<comment><USER56> Isn't the UK leaving the EU?

<comment><USER57> Yes, but the Brexit referendum was only 1 month before SoftBank acquired Arm Holdings. The deal was probably already in progress, and finalised before the UK had any real policies about Brexit, so EU requirements would have been reasonable if decided ahed of time. But the timing may also explain the lack of any national security focused requirement (general confusion).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Most tech acquisitions are fairly bland - they often maintain their separate ways for several years with a bit of integration. Others satisfy a political purpose or serve to stifle competition.

However, given the momentum of Nvidia these past several years alongside the massive adoption and evolution of ARM, this is probably going to be the most interesting acquisition to watch over the next few years.

</comment><comment><USER59> Many various reasons for this but one perspective I am curious about is how much this is actually a defensive move against Intel, because nVidia knows Intel is busy developing dedicated graphics via Xe, and if nVidia just allows that to continue they are going to find themselves simultaneously competing with and dependent on a vendor that owns the whole stack that their platform depends on. It is not a place I would want to be, even accounting for how incompetent Intel seems to have been for the last 10 years.

Edit: yes I meant nVidia not AMD!

<comment><USER60> How does AMD enter into this? Did you mean Nvidia?

<comment><USER59> ouch I wrote a whole comment and systematically replaced Nvidia with AMD ... kind of impressive.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> On the bright side, this could end up being a big boost for RISC-V.

<comment><USER62> and this would be killer for intel

<comment><USER63> Even if/when RISCV takes over, Intel and AMD will be in a unique position to offer "combination" chips with both x86 and RISCV cores which could milk the richest enterprise and government markets for decades to come.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I wonder what this means for NVIDIA's recent RISC-V efforts [1]. Apparently they've been aiming to ship (or already have been shipping?) RISC-V microcontrollers on their GPUs for some time .

[1] [https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm- NVIDI...](https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDIA- Sijstermans.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER65> None of the top comments disuss the possibility of the deal not going through due to antitrust or other concerns by regulators. While it's owned by a Japanese company and being sold to an American one, China most likely doesn't approve and it could be a diplomatic issue due to security and intelligence concerns?

Not sure how relistic that scenario is, although I personally can very much see this being used as a negotiation vehicle, depending on the actual security concern (I'm obviously not an expert there..)

[1] [https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1200871.shtml](https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1200871.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER66> Qualcomm and Apple are going to be fine even with NVIDIA owning ARM. They are American companies under the protection of US legislation and representation.

However the situation for Chinese companies is even clearer now. Huawei, Hikvision etc. need to move away from ARM. Probably on to their own thing as RISC-V is dominated by US companies.

<comment><USER67> Qualcomm, Apple and NVidia will lose favor with the US government unless they bring (at least a full copy of) their FAB partners and the rest of their supply chains home to America (Southwest including USMCA zone). We love Southeast Asia, but the pandemic highlighted our vulnerability and, as a country, we're not going to keep sourcing our critical infrastructure in China —or it's back yard. If those American CEOs keep balking at the huge investment required, you will see the US government write massive checks to Intel (has numerous, albeit obsolete, domestic FABs), DELL and upstarts (like System76 in Colorado) to pick winners, while the elevator to hell gains a new stop in Silicon Valley and San Diego (nationalizing patents, etc) during a sort of "war effort" like we had in the early 1940s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Related discussions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24009177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24009177)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173539](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173539)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454958)

<comment><USER69> and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467989)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Just noting that Apple _doesn 't_ have a perpetual license, they have an architecture license[1], including for 64bit parts[2].

This allows them to design their own cores using the Arm instruction set[3] and presumably includes perpetual IP licenses for Arm IP used while the license is in effect. New Arm IP doesn't seem to be included, since existing 32bit Arm licensees had to upgrade to a 64bit license[2].

[1] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries- part-1-h...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-how- arms-business-model-works/3)

[2] [https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-...](https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm- adds-architectural-licensee-2015-04/)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural_licence)

</comment><comment><USER71> Tangential, but when I hear about all these insane "start-up du jour" valuations, does anyone else feel like $40B isn't a lot of a hardware company sur as ARM?

<comment><USER72> $40 billion is a real valuation though, as opposed to WeWork's.

<comment><USER73> Maybe referencing Nikola?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> We've been repeating the word "bad" for the last couple of weeks here, but I don't really remember any insights on what can happen long term (and I'm asking, because I have absolutely no idea). I mean, let's suppose relationships with Qualcomm don't work out (which we all kind of suspect already). What's the alternative? Is it actually possible to create another competitive architecture at this point? Does it take 5, 10 years? Is there even a choice for some other (really big) company, that doesn't want to depend on NVIDIA?

</comment><comment><USER75> This seems fair, as long as it stays true(regarding open licensing and neutrality). I've mentioned before, I think this will ultimately be a good thing. NVidia has the gpu chops to really amp up the reference implementation, which is a good thing for competition in the mobile, settop, and perhaps even desktop space.

<comment><USER76> No, what everyone thinks will happen is a pretend open ARM architecture and Nvidia CPUs dominating. Nvidia isn't going to license the best GPU features they start adding.

It's an excellent deal for NVIDIA of course, I'm certain they intend to make the chips they produce much faster than the ones they license (if they even ever release another open design) to the point where buying CPUs from Nvidia might be they only game in town. We'll have to see but this is what I expect to happen.

<comment><USER18> That's not what everyone thinks.

NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own ARM CPUs with an unlimited ARM license.

ARM doesn't give NVIDIA a world-class CPU team like apple's, amazon's or fujitsu. ARM own cores are "meh" at best. Buying such a team, would also have been much cheaper than 40b$.

Mobile ARM chips are meh, but nvidia doesn't have GPUs for that segment, and their current architectures probably don't work well there. The only ARM chips that are ok-ish are embedded/IoT at < 1W power envelope. It would probably take nvidia 10 years to develop GPUs for that segment, the margins on that segment are razor thin (0.10$ is the cost of a full SoC on that segment), and it is unclear whether applications on that segment need GPUs (your toaster certainly does not).

The UK appears to require huge R&D investments in ARM to allow the sale. And ARMs bottom line is 300million $/year in revenue, which is peanuts for nvidia.

So if anything, ARM has a lot to win here with nvidia pumping in money like crazy to try to improve ARM's CPU offering. Yet this all seem super-risky because at the segments ARM is competing at, RISC-V competes as well, and without royalties. It is hard to compete against something that's free, even if it is slightly less good. And chances are that over the next 10 years RISC-V will have much better cores (NVIDIA themselves started replacing ARM cores with RISC-V cores in their GPUs years ago already...).

Either way, the claim that it is obvious to everybody what the 3D-chess being played here is false. To me this looks like a bad buy for nvidia. They could have paid 1 billion for a world class CPU team and just continue to license ARM and/or switch to RISC-V chips. Instead they are spending 40 billion in a company that makes 300 million a year, makes meh-cpus, is heavily regulated in the UK and the world, has problems with China due to being in the West, have to invest in the UK which is leaving the EU in a couple of weeks, etc.

<comment><USER77> > NVIDIA already has an CPU architect team building their own ARM CPUs with an > unlimited ARM license.

Famously, the Tegra SoCs, as used in the Nintendo Switch.

<comment><USER78> No. Precisely the Tegra SoC within the Nintendo Switch (X1) uses ARM Cores. Specifically A57 and A53. NVIDIA's project to develop their own v8.2 ARM-based chip is called Denver.

<comment><USER77> What do you define the difference between an in-house developed SoC with ARM- IP Cores and Denver's "ARM-based chip"? It is going to be a new architecture, but using a mix of ARM IP blocks and in-house IP following the ARM ISA?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> This it terrible news for the FLOSS community.

Nvidia has consistently for many years refused to properly support Linux and other open source OSs.

Heck, Wayland compositors just say "if you're using nvidia then don't even try to use our software" since they're fed up of Nvidia's lack of collaboration.

I really hope ARM doesn't go the same way. :(

<comment><USER80> ARM itself has little to no impact on open source community. They only license chip IP, they don't make any chips themselves. And most of the ARM architecture is documented and open, with the exception of things like the MALI GPU.

Whether or not some SoC (e.g. in a phone) is going to be supported by Linux doesn't depend on ARM but on the manufacturer of the given chip. That won't change in any way.

ARM maintains the GCC toolchain for the ARM architecture but that is unlikely to go anywhere (and even if it did, it is open source and anyone else can take it over).

The much bigger problem is that Nvidia could now start putting squeeze on chip makers who license the ARM IP for their own business reasons - Nvidia makes its own ARM-based ICs (e.g. the Jetson, Tegra) and it is hard to imagine that they will not try to use their position to stiffle the competition (e.g. from Qualcomm or Samsung).

<comment><USER63> [https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source- sof...](https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source- software/linux-kernel)

ARM directly maintains the main ARM parts of the Linux kernel among other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> I feel like this is yet more terrible news for the UK.

</comment><comment><USER82> On the one hand, this is bad news - I would prefer ARM to remain independent. But on the other, from a purely selfish standpoint, NVIDIA will likely lean on Apple pretty hard to get its GPUs into Apple devices again, which bodes well for GPGPU and deep learning applications.

Apple is probably putting together a RISC-V hardware group as we speak. The Jobs ethos will not allow them to depend this heavily on somebody else for such a critical technology.

<comment><USER83> A few weeks ago there were rumors that ARM was looking to be sold to Apple and Apple turned them down. If an NVIDIA acquisition is such a deal breaker for Apple, why wouldn't they have just acquired ARM to begin with?

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> nvidia is notorious for being not nice to oss developers as Linus Torvalds claims: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&ab_channel=Silic...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&ab_channel=SiliconNews)

I wonder how Linux would react to this news.

</comment><comment><USER85> > Immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin and EPS

Can someone explain this? (From the bullet points of the article)

I looked up the definition of accretive: "characterized by gradual growth or increase."

So it seems like they expect this to increase their margins. Does that mean ARM had better margins than NVIDIA?

Edit: I don't know what non-GAAP and EPS stand for

<comment><USER86> EPS -> earnings per share

Non-GAAP -> doesn't follow generaly accepted accounting practices. There are alternative accounting methods. GAAP is very US-centric (not good or bad, just stating a fact).

<comment><USER87> Though note the intent of GAAP is to cut down on "creative accounting" which can tend to mislead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Eeek. My gut reaction to think is.. could we have less powerful conglomerates.. please?

</comment><comment><USER89> Arm's primary base is in the IoT and the edge, and it has been very successful there. Its focus on low power allowed it to shut out Intel from the mobile phone market, and from there it has been gaining ground in a slew of vertical markets ranging from medical devices to Apple computers. But as more intelligence is added to the edge, the next big challenge is to be able to radically improve performance and further reduce power, and the only way to make that happen is to more tightly customize the algorithms to the hardware, and vice versa [https://semiengineering.com/nvidia-to-buy-arm- for-40b/](https://semiengineering.com/nvidia-to-buy-arm-for-40b/)

</comment><comment><USER90> [https://semiwiki.com/ip/287846-tears-in-the-rain-arm-and- chi...](https://semiwiki.com/ip/287846-tears-in-the-rain-arm-and-china-jvs/)

Does this mean Nvidia will have to deal with the hot mess at China ARM?

<comment><USER91> Allegedly it has been sorted, before this deal was announced. No idea how.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Why would Nvidia spend $40B to ruin Arm? I can't see them making a return on this investment. No one wants to work with Nvidia they are notoriously roothless. I'm sure everyone is making plans to move to something else ASAP. Maybe RISC-V

<comment><USER93> Some decision makers there dislike Apple that much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Sounds like everyone is rallying around RISC-V. What does this mean for MIPS?

"ARM was probably what sank MIPS" \- saagarjha

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24402107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24402107)

<comment><USER95> Wave owns MIPS, about which I had no idea and googling that also returns that Wave went Chapter 11 this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> This isn't going to do good things for anyone who doesn't own a lot of Nvidia stock.

This is going to do especially bad things for anyone who needs to buy a cell phone or the SoC that powers one. There's no real alternative to ARM-based phone SoCs. Given Nvidia's business practices, any manufacturer who doesn't already have a perpetual ARM license should expect to have to pay a lot more money into Jensen Huang's retirement fund going forward. These costs will be passed on to consumers and will also provide an avenue for perpetual license holders to raise their consumer prices to match.

<comment><USER97> Android worked on x86 and MIPS in the past, it could presumably be ported to work with RISC-V

<comment><USER96> Android still works on x86-64; indeed there are quite a few actively maintained x86-64 Android ports that are used, both on bare metal PCs and virtualized, for various purposes.

The problem is that there are no x86 SoCs that are sufficiently power efficient to be battery-life competitive with ARM SoCs in phones.

<comment><USER98> Can confirm, just spun up Bliss OS on my Surface Book. Not at all the smoothest experience I've ever had using an Android tablet, but it's nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> I am surprised that no one has mentioned China will very likely block this deal.

<comment><USER100> On what grounds/with what authority?

<comment><USER101> Is it that hard to see that China might see this as an American company further monopolizing silicon tech, potentially cutting China off from Arm designs.

But more to the point, this is also China. If you want to do business in China, you're going to do as they tell you, or you get the stick. And if you don't like it, what are you going to do?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> The root problem here is the concept of patents -- at least as far as I can see.

If patents did not exist, and nVidia were to close down ARM and tell people " _no more ARM GPUs; only nVidia GPUs from now on_ ", then a competitor who offers ARM-compatible ISAs would quickly appear. But in the real world, nVidia just bought the monopoly rights to sue such a competitor out of existence.

It's really no wonder nVidia did this given the profits they can extract from this monopoly (on the ARM ISA).

</comment><comment><USER103> Excellent, can't wait for Jensen to pull out a Cortex A-78 TI from his oven next year. /s

<comment><USER104> hodl out for the Titan A-78 Super if you can, I hear it runs a bit faster

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> edge-AI!

They're also building an ARM supercomputer at Cambridge, but server-ARM doesn't sound like a focus.

I'm just hoping for some updated mobile Nvidia GPUs... and maybe the rumoured 4K Nintendo Switch.

They _say_ they won't muck it up, and it seems sensible to keep it profitable:

> As part of NVIDIA, Arm will continue to operate its open-licensing model > while maintaining the global customer neutrality that has been foundational > to its success, with 180 billion chips shipped to-date by its licensees.

<comment><USER18> > but server-ARM doesn't sound like a focus.

ARM doesn't have good server CPU IP. Graviton, A64FX, etc. belong to other companies.

<comment><USER78> Graviton is Neoverse, ARM's Neoverse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> They sure seem to be marketing this as a logical move for their AI platform.

</comment><comment><USER107> Wow, didn't someone call this out recently on HN? I mean, someone mentioned that this was going to happen. (Or rather, feared that this was the direction things were going in.)

On a different topic, how would this influence Raspberry Pis going forward?

</comment><comment><USER108> No doubt because Softbank was facing investor pressure to make up for their losses.

</comment><comment><USER109> Could Apple hypothetically use their perpetual license to ARM to license the ISA to other manufacturers if they so desired? (not that they do now, but it could be a saving grace if Nvidia assimilated ARM fully).

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure they can't, but I also think there's no way in hell they'd do it if they could. It's not in Apple's DNA. Better for them if no one else has access to the instruction set.

I bet they'd make a completely custom ISA if they could. Heck, maybe they plan to some day, and that's why they're calling the new Mac processors "Apple Silicon".

<comment><USER110> > _I bet they 'd make a completely custom ISA if they could. Heck, maybe they > plan to some day, and that's why they're calling the new Mac processors > "Apple Silicon"._

That was my first thought.

I'd be surprised if Apple wasn't already working on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> Well, China will surely block this, just like how it blocked the Qualcomm attempt to buy NXP ([https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nxp-semicondtrs-m-a- qualc...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nxp-semicondtrs-m-a- qualcomm/qualcomm-ends-44-billion-nxp-bid-after-failing-to-win-china-approval- idUSKBN1KF193)).

Otherwise ARM would become a US company, and then the US would have another weapon in their arsenal to sanction China's tech companies (e.g. Huawei).

</comment><comment><USER62> Can anyone point me who would be competing with Nvidia in AI Market ?

<comment><USER112> There's low power inference from Intel (Movidius) and Google (Coral Edge TPU). Nvidia doesn't really have anything below the Jetson Nano. I think there are a smattering of other low power cores out there (also dedicated chips in phones). TPUs are used on the high performance end and there are also companies like Graphcore who do insane things in silicon. Also niche HPC products like Intel Knight's Landing (Xeon Phi) which is designed for heterogeneous compute.

There isn't a huge amount of competition in the consumer/midrange sector. Nvidia has almost total market domination here. Really we just need a credible cross platform solution that could open up gpgpu on AMD. I'm surprised Apple isn't pushing this more, as they heavily use ML on-device and to actually train anything you need Nvidia hardware (eg try buying a Macbook for local deep learning training using only apple approved bits, it's hard!). Maybe they'll bring out their own training silicon at some point.

Also you need to make a distinction between training and inference hardware. Nvidia absolutely dominate model training, but inference is comparably simpler to implement and there is more competition there - often you don't even need dedicated hardware beyond a cpu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Okay let's look at this from a slightly different POV. We have two different things here, ARM CPU design licenses and ARM ISA licenses. If I was an ARM cpu maker I think it would be best to setup something to design better shared ARM CPU designs, the problem of course is building an amazing team and patents which could prove extremely expensive to solve.

Is it possible/legal for nvidia to charge a billion dollars per cpu for the isa license or are these things perpetual?

</comment><comment><USER113> (Nvidia - ARM) - Nvidia >> 40 Bn

Only about 50% is gaming and nascent divisions like data centres can get a big boost from the acquisition.

We only connected Nvidia with GPUs, perhaps AI & ML. Now they are going to be a dominant player everywhere from consumer devices, IOT, cloud, HPC & Gaming.

And since Nvidia does not FAB its own chips like intel, this transformation is going to be pretty quick.

If only they go into public cloud business, we as costumers would have one other strong vendor to choose from.

</comment><comment><USER114> Amidst all the hand-wringing: RISC-V is at least a decade away (at current pace + ARM's own example). But what if Google bought AMD and put TPUs on the die?

<comment><USER115> Because so many of Google's acquisitions have ended up doing well...

<comment><USER116> Android, YouTube, Google Maps, DoubleClick, Applied Semantics (became AdSense), DeepMind, Urchin, ITA Software, etc.

I think Google has done ok.

<comment><USER117> Has it had any successes with hardware acquisitions?

<comment><USER95> Google has steadily gained smart home device market share vs a very good competitor and is now the dominant player.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> SoftBank isa true banking company .. invested (Bought) in ARM and selling it now for meagre profit. A company that says it has 300 year vision

<comment><USER119> Maybe they are forced to choose behind the scene. Or, they know better opportunities and they need to cash out right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> Doesn't this need regulatory approval from the USA and Japan? (Not that the USA would look a gift horse in the mouth, of course.)

<comment><USER121> There is a note at the end of the article:

"The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals for the U.K., China, the European Union and the United States. Completion of the transaction is expected to take place in approximately 18 months."

Hopefully, the EU does its job, laughs at this and tells Nvidia to either go home or forces them to FRAND licensing of ARM IP.

<comment><USER122> > forces them to FRAND licensing of ARM IP

FRAND licensing is worthless, if Qualcomm taught us anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> nVidia clearly wants to compete with Intel in data centers. But how does buying ARM help with that? They already have an architectural license.

Right now, I can see nVidia replacing Mali smartphone GPUs in low to mid-end Exynos SoCs and the like. But it's not like nVidia to want to be in that low- margin area.

<comment><USER18> > I can see nVidia replacing Mali smartphone GPUs in low to mid-end Exynos > SoCs and the like.

Replacing these with what? What nvidia gpus can operate at that power envelope ?

<comment><USER123> Lower power versions of what they put in Tegra / Switch? Or perhaps they can whip up something in 1-2 years. I'd be astonished if nVidia doesn't take any interest in smartphone GPUs after this acquisition.

<comment><USER18> A nintendo switch has ~2 hours of battery...

There is a big difference between having interest in a market, and being able to compete in it. There are also many trade-offs.

Nobody has designed yet a GPU architecture that works at all from 500W HPC clusters to sub 1W embedded/IoT systems, much less that works well to be a market leader in all segments. So AFAICT whether this is even possible is an open research problem. If this were possible, there would already be nvidia GPUs at least in some smartphones and IoT devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> This sort of stuff really isn't going to produce long term benefits for humanity is it.

Does anyone know if or how Apple will be affected by this? What are the licensing agreements on the ISA?

<comment><USER61> This has been out there in the news for well over a month, I guess I don't understand why Apple didn't try to make a bid for ARM? Or why Apple didn't try to set up some sort of independent holding company or consortium to buy ARM. They definitely have the money and clout to have done something like that.

<comment><USER76> I guess Apple have a perpetual ARM ISA license. They haven't used the CPU designs from ARM for many years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> Why do you think Nvidia cares about Arm? Probably the "access" into a lot of industries?

<comment><USER125> I think this is driven by partly embedded applications and more directly by the datacenter.

Nvidia already own the parallel compute/ML part of the datacenter and the Mellanox acquisition had brought the ability to compete in the networking part of the datacenter - but they were missing CPU IP, for tasks that aren't well matched to the GPU. This plugs that hole. They are in control of a complete data-center solution now.

<comment><USER126> There's a huge number of synergies that this deal provides.

(a) NVIDIA becomes a full-fledged full-stack house, they have both CPU and GPU now. They can now compete with AMD and Intel on equal terms. That has huge implications in the datacenter.

(b) GeForce becomes the reference implementation of the GPU, ARM processors now directly fund NVIDIA's desktop/datacenter R&D in the same way consoles and Samsung SOCs fund Radeon's R&D. CUDA can be used anywhere on any platform easily.

(c) Acqui-hire for CPU development talent. NVIDIA's efforts in this area have not been very good to date. Now they have an entire team that is experienced in developing ARM and can aim the direction of development where they want.

Basically there's a reason that NVIDIA was willing to pay more than anyone else for this property. And (Softbank's) Son desperately needed a big financial win to show his investors that he's not a fucking idiot for paying $32b for ARM and to make up for his other recent losses.

<comment><USER127> Quite. Nvidia will be able to make a single chip CPU, GPU and Infiniband. Plus they'll score some people that know about cache coherency from Arm. We can see the future datacentre starting to form...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER128> I'm confused. What is it that Nvidia can do by owning ARM that it can't do by just licensing the architecture? Can't they just license and build all the chips people think they'll build without buying the whole thing?

</comment><comment><USER129> Vertical integration. It's the end products, not the producers that matter.

Or maybe, more accurately, the middle of the supply chain doesn't matter. The most value is at either end: raw materials and energy, and end products.

Or so it seems :p ;) xx

</comment><comment><USER130> This is _awful_. Out of all the big tech companies, Nvidia is probably least friendly to open source and cross-platform comparability. It seems to me that their goal is to monopolize AI hardware over the next 20 years, the same way Intel effectively monopolized cloud hardware over the last 20. Expect to see less choice in the chip market and more and more propietary software frameworks like CUDA. A sad day for CS and for AI.

<comment><USER131> NVIDIA's hardware works on x86, PowerPC, and ARM platforms.

Many of their AI libraries/tools are in fact open source.

They stand to be a force that could propel ARM's strength in data center and desktop computing. For some reason you're okay with the current x86 duopoly held by AMD and Intel, both who have their own destiny over CPUs and GPUs.

The HN crowd is incredibly biased against certain companies. Why not look at some of the potential bright sides to this for a more nuanced and balanced opinion?

<comment><USER106> Yes I wonder the same thing about the sentiment against nvidia. It's be helpful if there were some wiki about things they've killed or instances they've acted against foss systems.

<comment><USER132> Linus famously gave them the middle-finger.

<comment><USER126> "linus went on a hyperbolic rant" isn't sufficient evidence for anything.

linus is a hyperbolic jerk (as he admitted himself for a few months before resuming his hyperbolic ways) who is increasingly out of touch with anything outside the direct sphere of his projects. Like his misguided and completely unnecessary rants about ZFS or AVX.

if there are technical merits to discuss you can post those instead of just appealing to linus' hyperbole.

(I won't even say "appeal to authority" because that's not what you're appealing to. You're literally appealing to his middle finger.)

<comment><USER133> He just responded to a complaint that nVidia hardware wasn't working with "nVidia is the worst company we've dealt with". I don't think that's "out of touch", it's pretty much the kind of stuff his job description entails. If you don't like his style, fair enough, but if the leader of a project says "company X is the worst company we deal with" then that doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence.

<comment><USER126> AFAIK the debate was mostly settled by NVIDIA submitting their own EGLStreams backend for Wayland (that promptly exposed a bunch of Wayland bugs). _So_ difficult to work with, that NVIDIA, asking to do something different and then submitting their own code to implement it!

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=EGLStrea...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=EGLStreams- Merged-KWin-5.16)

AFAIK it also ended up being literally a couple thousand lines of code, not some massive endeavor, so the Wayland guys don't come off looking real great, looks like they have their own Not Invented Here syndrome and certainly a lot of generalized hostility towards NVIDIA. Like Torvalds, I'll be blunt, my experience is that a lot of people just _know_ NVIDIA is evil because of these dozens of little scandals they've drummed up, and they almost all fall apart when you look into them, but people just fall back on asserting that NVIDIA _must_ be up to something because of these 27 other things (that also fall apart when you poke them a bit). It is super trendy to hate on NVIDIA in the same way it's super trendy to hate on Apple or Intel.

Example: everyone used to bitch and moan about G-Sync, the biggest innovation in gaming in 10 years. Oh, it's this _proprietary_ standard, it's using a _proprietary_ module, why are they doing this, why don't they support the Adaptive Sync standard? Well, at the time they started doing it, Adaptive Sync was a draft standard for power-saving in laptops that had languished for years, there was no impetus to push the standard through, there were no monitors that supported it, and no real push to implement monitors either. Why take 10 years to get things through a standards group when you can just take a FPGA and do it yourself? And once you've done all that engineering work, are you going to give it away for free? Back in 2016 I outright said that sooner or later NVIDIA would have to support Adaptive Sync or else lose the home theater market/etc as consoles gained support. People told me I was loony, " _NVIDIA 'S just not that kind of company_", etc. Well, turns out they were that kind of company, weren't they? Turns out people were mostly mad that... NVIDIA didn't immediately give all their engineering work away for free.

The GPP is the only thing I've seen that really stank and they backed off that when they saw the reaction. Other than that they are mostly guilty of... using a software license you don't like. It says a lot about the success of copyleft that anyone developing software with a proprietary license is automatically suspect.

The truth is that NVIDIA, while proprietary, does a huge amount of really great engineering in novel areas that HNers would really applaud if it were any other company. Going and making your own monitor from scratch with a FPGA so you can implement a game-changing technology is exactly the kind of go- getter attitude that this site is supposed to embody.

Variable refresh rate/GSync is a game changer. DLSS 2.0 is a game changer. Raytracing is a game changer. And you have NVIDIA to thank for all of those, "proprietary" and all. They would not exist today without NVIDIA, AMD or Intel would not have independently pushed to develop those, even though they do have open-source drivers. What a conundrum.

<comment><USER133> I'm not sure if Linus was talking about the Wayland stuff specifically; the answer was in response to a complaint that the nvidia/Intel graphics card switching didn't work on Linux.

I haven't used nvidia products for about 10 years and I' m not really in to gaming or graphics, so I don't really have an opinion on them either way, either business or technical. I used their FreeBSD drivers back in the day and was pretty happy it allowed me to play Unreal Tournament on my FreeBSD machine :-)

Linus is not always right, but a lot of what he says is often considerably more nuanced and balanced than his "worst-of" highlight reel suggests. There are plenty of examples of that in the presentation/Q&A he did from which this excerpt comes, for example (but of course, most people only see the "fuck you" part).

So if Linus – the person responsible for writing operating systems with their hardware – says they're the "worst company we deal with" then this strikes me as a good reason to at least do your research if you plan to buy hardware from them, if you intend to use it with Linux anyway. I'll take your word for it that they're doing great stuff, but if it outright refuses to work on my Linux box then that's kinda useless to me.

This was also 6 or 7 years ago I think, so perhaps things are better now too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER134> Softbank buys low ($32B in 2016) and sells high ($40B in 2020). Nice trade!

<comment><USER135> i thought that would be low in investment world.

<comment><USER136> 4 years, 8 billions. 2 B / year. I don't think that's low. And during this time Arm was also filling its owner coffers. The only real question here is if they filled the coffers at a greater 2B/year or not. My guess is they didn't. Now SoftBank has a lot of cash to acquire more shining toys.

<comment><USER135> i guess i watched too many tv shows where investors think anything below 50% ROI is low

<comment><USER63> 5% over inflation is average. US congress manages 25-30%, but that's on the back of insider trading (technically illegal thanks to a law signed by Obama, but also without much ability to actually investigate -- also law signed by Obama a few months later without fanfare).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER137> It's so amazing Apple didn't win this M&A race.

<comment><USER138> Apple isn't interested in selling tech licences to other companies - they want to own their core technologies so they can sell products to consumers. And, as an original member of the Arm consortium, they have a perpetual licence to the Arm IP (I have no inside knowledge about that, just many people who know more than me have said it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER139> Isn't pay for IP model used by companies to avoid paying tax? I wonder if Nvidia is going to be forced to absorbe Arm in its entirety to avoid tax issues?

</comment><comment><USER140> What do 5 hurricanes, global pandemic, and Nvidia buying Arm have in common?

What a wild year! Let's not forget Apple announce they are transitioning from x86 to Arm :b.

</comment><comment><USER141> What does this change for STM32 and many other such low power MCUs? They're pretty ubiquitous in electornics.

</comment><comment><USER142> Simple question, is this about ARM architecture and IP... or securing a worldwide competitive advantage in 5G?

</comment><comment><USER143> Nvidia being like "Apple did now want to use our tech? Let's just buy ARM!"

</comment><comment><USER144> This is all about NVLink in ARM.

</comment><comment><USER145> Has this become the post with the most points and engagement by number of comments?

</comment><comment><USER146> Looking at the conversations almost 24 hours after posting the IP, licensing, ecosystem, political, and overall business aspects of this have been discussed to death. Oddly for Hacker News there has been little discussion of the potential technical aspects of this acquisition.

Pure speculation (of course)...

To me (from a tech standpoint) this acquisition centers around three things we already know about Nvidia:

\- Nvidia is pushing to own anything and everything GPGPU/TPU related, from cloud/datacenter to edge. Nvidia has been an ARM licensee for years with their Jetson line of hardware for edge GPGPU applications:

[https://developer.nvidia.com/buy-jetson](https://developer.nvidia.com/buy- jetson)

Looking at the architecture of these devices (broadly speaking) Nvidia is combining an ARM CPU with their current gen GPU hardware (complete with Tensor Cores, etc). What's often left out of this mention is that they utilize a shared memory architecture where the ARM CPU and CUDA cores share memory. Not only does this cut down on hardware costs and power usage, it increases performance.

\- Nvidia has acquired Mellanox for high performance network I/O across various technologies (Ethernet and Infiniband). Nvidia is also actively working to be able to remove the host CPU from as many GPGPU tasks as possible (network I/O and data storage):

[https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect](https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect)

\- Nvidia already has publicly available software in place to effectively make their CUDA compute available over the network using various APIs:

[https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server](https://github.com/triton- inference-server/server)

Going on just the name Triton is currently only available for inference but it provides the ability to not only directly serve GPGPU resources via network API at scale but ALSO accelerate various models with TensorRT optimization:

[https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/triton-inference- server...](https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/triton-inference-server/user- guide/docs/optimization.html#framework-specific-optimization)

Given these points I think this is an obvious move for Nvidia. TDP and performance is increasingly important across all of their target markets. They already have something in place for edge inference tasks powered by ARM with Jetson but looking at ARM core CPU benchmarks it's sub-optimal. Why continue to pay ARM licensing fees when you can buy the company, collect licensing fees, get talent, and (presumably) drastically improve performance and TDP for your edge GPGPU hardware?

In the cloud/datacenter, why continue to give up watts in terms of TDP and performance to sub-optimal Intel/AMP/x86_64 CPUs and their required baggage (motherboard bridges, buses, system RAM, etc) when all you really want to do is shuffle data between your GPUs, network, and storage as quickly and efficiently as possible?

Of course many applications will still require a somewhat general purpose CPU for various tasks, customer code, etc. AWS already has their own optimized ARM cores in place. aarch64 is more and more becoming a first class citizen across the entire open source ecosystem.

As platform and software as a service continues to eat the world cloud providers likely have already started migrating the underlying hardware powering these various services to ARM cores for improved performance and TDP (same product, more margin).

Various ARM cores are already showing to be quite capable for most CPU tasks but given the other architectural components in place here even the lowliest of modern ARM cores is likely to be asleep most of the time for the applications Nvidia currently cares about. Giving up licensing, die space, power, tighter integration, etc to x86_64 just seems to be foolish at this point.

Meanwhile (of course) if you still need x86_64 (or any other arch) for whatever reason you can hit a network API powered by hardware using Nvidia/Mellanox I/O, GPU, and ARM. Potentially (eventually) completely transparently using standard CUDA libraries and existing frameworks (see work like Apex):

[https://github.com/NVIDIA/apex](https://github.com/NVIDIA/apex)

I, for one, am excited to see what comes from this.

</comment><comment><USER147> What is Amazon's license for ARM like to make graviton processors?

</comment><comment><USER148> How large or little of boost does this give the likes of RISC-V?

</comment><comment><USER149> This is really bad news. I hope the deal somehow falls through.

</comment><comment><USER150> this should have triggered an anti-trust probe into the deal, as this radically changes powers at play into the the chip market how many have outlined.

</comment><comment><USER151> I was hoping that Apple's switch to ARM would prompt better ARM support for popular Linux distros. Given NVIDIA's track record with the OSS community, I'm definitely less hopeful now.

</comment><comment><USER152> There is now but one choice... RISC-V, full throttle.

</comment><comment><USER153> Sounds like we need someone to found another ARM.

</comment><comment><USER154> So when does everyone switch to risc-v then

</comment><comment><USER155> What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up.

Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa.

In 2011, I thought that they would learn the lessons and warnings highlighted from Eric Schmidt about the UK creating long standing tech companies like FAANMG. [0] I had high hopes for them to learn from this, but after 2016 with Softbank and now this, it is just typical.

ARM will certainly be more expensive after this and will certainly be even more closed-source, since their Mali GPUs drivers were already as closed as Nvidia's GPUs. This is a terrible outcome I have seen but from Nvidia's perspective, it makes sense. From a FOSS perspective, ARM is dead, long live RISC-V.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/26/eric- schm...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schmidt- chairman-google-education)

<comment><USER156> Have you read the press release at all? It's too early to judge this now. ARM will stay in Cambridge and Nvidia wants to invest in this place.

<comment><USER157> Corporations say these types of things with every acquisition. It might be true initially and superficially, but that's all.

<comment><USER126> One of the (many) synergies in this acquisition is that it's also an acqui- hire for CPU development talent. NVIDIA's efforts in that area have not gone very smoothly. They aren't going to fire all the engineers they just bought.

<comment><USER158> A bigger concern is that they would hoard future cores and not license them.

<comment><USER127> They might, just like Apple do. But then their forty billion dollar investment would stagnate and be eaten by riscv, which is probably what they are hoping to avoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER159> It was good while it lasted. RIP ARM

</comment><comment><USER160> This is horrible for Arm

</comment><comment><USER161> smic and Huawei better be prepared to have to dump arm asap

</comment><comment><USER162> Can we,for once, hear the opinions of people in the chip industry and not the same tired posts from software folks? NVIDIA Bad! Ok, we get it. Do you have anything more insightful than that?

I'm starting to feel like social media based on upvotes is a utter waste of time. Echo chambers and groupthink. People commenting on things they barely know anything about and getting validation from others who don't know anything. I'd rather pay for insightful commentary and discussion. I feel like reddit going downhill has pushed a new group of users to HN and it's sending it down the tube. Maybe it's time for me to stop participating and get back to work.

<comment><USER108> You are just starting to feel that now?

<comment><USER162> I know, right? It's finally hitting me. I am realizing how much of an asshole I've become thanks to the validation of a handful of strangers on the internet. I have caught myself commenting on things I have only cursory knowledge of and being justified by the likes of strangers. I actually believed that the online communities I participated in actually represented the world at large.

I'm not quite ready to end my participation in HN, but I'm close. I am looking back on the last 10 years of participation in forums like this and wondering what the hell good it did. I am also suddenly very worried for what sites like Reddit are doing to kids. That process of validation is going to produce some very anti-social, misguided adults.

I would rather participate in an argument map style discussion, or, frankly, just read the thoughts of 'experts'.

<comment><USER163> It is best to limit your exposure to these type of sites. There was a post yesterday about Wikipedia being an addictive MMORPG. Well, so are Hacker news, twitter, reddit, and so on...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER131> HN being hyperbolic and anti-NVIDIA as usual. I think this is a great thing. Finally a competitor to the AMD-Intel x86 duopoly. I imagine the focus will first be on improving ARM's data center offerings but eventually I'm hoping to see consumer-facing parts available sometime as well.

<comment><USER164> I think the biggest concern is NVIDIA's stance against OSS.

<comment><USER131> Look at their AI/CUDA documentation and associated githubs. Many of their tools and libraries are open source.

Tell me, what other AI platform works with x86 and PowerPC and ARM? Currently NVIDIA's GPUs do.

<comment><USER165> I spent most of this afternoon tying to get cuda in docker to work on my Mac for a machine learning use case. It doesn't. Because nvidia

<comment><USER166> "Because NVIDIA" is blatantly false.

CUDA support for docker containers is provided through the open source Nvidia- Docker project maintained by Nvidia[1]. If anything this is a great argument _for_ NVIDIAs usage of open source.

Searching that project's issues shows that Nvidia-Docker support on MacOS is blocked by the VM used by Docker for Mac(xhyve) not supporting PCI passthrough, which is required for any containers to use host GPU resources.[2]

xhyve has an issue for PCI passthrough, updated a few months ago, which notes that the APIs provided by Apple through DriverKit are insufficient for this use case[3]

So your comment should really say "Because Apple"

[1] [https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia- docker](https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker)

[2] [https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia- docker/issues/101#issuecomm...](https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia- docker/issues/101#issuecomment-294578633)

[3] [https://github.com/machyve/xhyve/issues/108#issuecomment-616...](https://github.com/machyve/xhyve/issues/108#issuecomment-616052121)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER167> This is not good

<comment><USER168> I have heard numerous arguments but they arguments don't feel that compelling, what are reasons why this is bad?

<comment><USER169> ARM will not be cheaper after this.

<comment><USER170> Conversely, Nvidia has done a solid job of advancing GPU performance even in the face of weak competition, and with their additional resources, ARM performance may advance even faster, and provide the first competition in decades to x86 in servers and desktops.

<comment><USER171> The tech may have advanced due to the insatiable hunger of machine learning, but the weak competition has meant pricing has not decreased as much as it should have or could have, only enough to move more GPUs. (nvidia biggest competitor are the GPUs they manufactured two years earlier).

<comment><USER28> Really? You get 2x perf per dollar with Ampere. That's not good enough on the pricing front?

<comment><USER171> Yes really. Performance that is cleverly hampered by RAM (and driver licensing) on the low end from an ML perspective. The only reason they can do this is because of lack of competition. The performance of 3000 series cards could be dramatically improved for large models at a modest increase in price if RAM was doubled.

It really is possible to be critical of a monopoly without disparaging the product itself. It is when a true competitor arises that we see the monopolist's true capabilities (see Intel and AMD).

<comment><USER28> The GeForce series is targeted at gamers. Video games are not making use of more than ~8GB of VRAM.

There is literally no benefit to 90% of the audience if they doubled the RAM. Of course, they also want to do market segmentation too, but you can't blame GeForce for not being designed for ML training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER172> They need to block this deal. A real clean case.

<comment> iso8859-1 Who needs to block it? And why is it a clean case?

</comment></comment><comment><USER173> Holy shit this is huge. Did anyone see this coming?!?

</comment><comment><USER174> I am really worried of a single company monopolising over the entire market

</comment><comment><USER175> How does this get past the FTC? Oh right, it's been a dead letter since the Reagan administration. Monopoly 'R Us.

Never mind the FTC - the rest of the semiconductor industry has to be [very] strongly opposed.

</comment><comment><USER176> LOL, Apple must be shitting bricks. Serves them right for going with ARM for their new Mac Books, the smarter move would have been to move to an AMD Ryzen APU, they also clearly should have gone with AMD Epyc for the new Mac Pro's.

</comment><comment><USER177> I still think the real reason was just to spite Apple :)

<comment><USER178> The company who was part of the creation of ARM and has a perpetual license to its IP? Tell me how.

<comment><USER179> Even perpetual license to future IP?

<comment><USER56> Why would Apple need future ARM IP? They have more than enough in house talent to take their license in any direction they wish.

<comment><USER179> Such deal could certainly benefit both players. Hence my question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER180> I wonder what the this means for Apple and their move to ARM for their macbooks. End of 2019 Apple and NVIDIA broke up their cooperation on CUDA. Both these companies are very tight on their hardware. Apple must've known this was happening but I guess they weren't willing to pay more than 40B for this risky joint venture they're bound to go into.

Anyone has a proper analysis on the ramifications of this acquisition for Apple's future in ARM?

<comment><USER181> Apple is an ARM founder. You can bet your boots they made sure they were safe through the history of ARM's existence and sale to Softbank in the first place. No one can cite the deep magic to them, they were there when it was written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER182> That's nasty Nvidia, very nasty. But on the other hand might be it will be a motivation for everyone to use ARM less.

I quite expect AMD for example to drop ARM chips from their hardware. Others should also follow suit. Nvidia is an awful steward for ARM.</comment>


New features in C# 7 - <AUTHOR> https://www.kenneth-truyers.net/2016/01/20/new-features-in-c-sharp-7/ <comment><USER2> New features in C# 7: Tuples, Record types, Pattern Matching, Immutable types, and Non-nullable reference types.

</comment><comment><USER3> These are nice, will probably allow some C# code to be more succinct. I wonder if this will eventually help improve F# interop?

</comment><comment><USER4> With the new Microsoft, C# definitely looks better than Java!</comment>


How to run a Linux based home web server - <AUTHOR> http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=73

<comment><USER2> Slicehost has some good articles on configuring linux servers for various webservers/frameworks:

<http://articles.slicehost.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to do this when I lived at home, with AT&T DSL. I ran a site for my friends for three or four years. I used <http://freedns.afraid.org/> for dns hosting, and just had a cron script update my ip every 15 minutes. It worked great.

The only issue is upload speed, so any large files take forever to transfer and kill your internet speed for your family. I did fix this a bit by using the traffic shaping support you can compile into the Linux kernel.

EDIT: it should be noted that this is against the TOS for AT&T.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Include all your own CSS and Javascript in the same file as your HTML, so that only one page needs to be requested. During times of heavy load, 99.9% of your visitors only load a single page of your web site anyway, so it makes no sense to split things up into different files._

This is terrible advice. Your JS and CSS should be consolidated into single files for latency purposes, but including them in every HTML page is insane. The bandwidth costs for two extra connections are negligible. After that you are wasting bandwidth every single time someone would have have those files cached.

On the latency front, reducing the number of connections improves latency on the later connections (given the standard browser limit of two connections per domain). However cramming CSS and JS into the HTML file actually will increase latency as it has to process those before it can display the page. This is arguably a benefit in the case of CSS so your visitors don't see an unstyled page, but with JS it's definitely bad.

</comment><comment><USER5> How is this hacker news? basic unix admin skills are a prerequisite for hacking.

<comment><USER6> So PG is not a hacker then?

[http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/10-questions-for- paul-g...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/10-questions-for-paul- graham.html)

(Question 4)

<comment><USER7> No problem. Hackers can be pretty good at working around their flaws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder, if I don't need hugh amount of bandwidth should I go for a home solution?. Is it worth the hassle of administrating my own machine for web- hosting vs paying a web hosting service? Hostgator has a plan for 5dls a month. My admin time, power consumption, etc costs less than 5dls a month?

<comment><USER9> Truly, I say unto thee, that this one hath not the heart of a hacker.

;)

<comment><USER8> Hehehe, one thing is having my own server (which I have, CUPS, LAMP, Samba) and another thing is using it outside my private home network.

Although I have LAMP and make my things locally I prefer to "outsource" my hosting to someone else.

<comment><USER10> There shouldn't be much to administer once you're done setting everything up. Worst case scenario (which was my case), you spend a day fiddling with the damn thing.

Then you stick it under your desk, and it purrs along forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> <http://www.no-ip.com/> is a good way to go for DNS.

</comment><comment><USER12> 47 upvotes for a sudo apt-get article. Great.

<comment><USER13> The articles not that amazing I agree, but it started a fairly interesting discussion.</comment></comment>


Today's Apple keynote video has been posted to Apple's podcast feed. - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=275834665

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple just put up their usual web stream at <http://apple.com/quicktime/qtv/specialevent0909/> ... it's a bit faster than the podcast download, currently.</comment>


ZFS Is the FS for Containers in Ubuntu 16.04 - <AUTHOR> https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/16/zfs-is-the-fs-for-containers-in-ubuntu-16-04/ <comment><USER2> "OpenZFS" actually means ZoL, the only way to legally ship meant dkms until now, unless there has been CDDL/GPL reinterpretation, a different codebase or agreement with Redwood Shores. The three concerns are stability (battle tested in production at scale, not just some home torrent servers), performance (which wasnt yet up to other production fses) and lawsuits from the Emerald Kingdom.

If it works, great, but there's been ppas for ZoL and the docker zfs backed for a while (we've tested it but decided to go with whats faster and more supportable).

I guess this also means ZoL may be able to drop dkms after they consult their own lawyers, because I'm not entirely convinced Canoncial has this right.

Edit: confirmed this is actually CDDL ZoL code linked as modules, so perhaps Canonical lawyers reinterpreted zfs and spl binary modules shipped to users are still not part of the kernel to be copacetic. [http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/zfsutils- linux](http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/zfsutils-linux)

[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is amazing news. I can't believe that it did not get more coverage! Will I be able to use Ubuntu with ZFS as the main file system too?</comment>


Ask HN: How do I start learning about personal finance? - <AUTHOR> I understand that "learning" personal financial management can only happen by actually doing it, but I'd like to start by knowing some basic concepts and maybe some advanced stuff too. Where can I do that and what are the best resources to get started? Any recommendations are welcome! <comment><USER2> For getting started, I like this book:

[https://www.amazon.com/Yes-You-Can-Financial- Life/dp/1401911...](https://www.amazon.com/Yes-You-Can-Financial- Life/dp/1401911250/)

</comment><comment><USER3> 'Smarter Investing' by Tim Hale</comment>


Japan sends rocket into space with a launch crew of just 2 laptops and 8 people - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/story/1141644/japans-laptop-controlled-space-rocket-launch

<comment><USER2> 発進!!

<comment><USER3> > 発進!!

The English literal translation is "departure", but based on a Web search for related terms I suspect this has a different idiomatic meaning in everyday Japanese -- more like "take action" or "start to move".

<comment><USER2> Or "take off!" or "launch!". The joke is that, in a lot of animes you can hear the characters uttering this word when a mecha (or fighter jet, or something similar) is about to be launched into action.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I once heard someone quote what was supposed to be a Japanese saying: "Fix the problem, not the blame." I thought it was wise and I started repeating it among professional associates.

Finally it dawned on me that it might have been originally based on a Japanese saying, but the ambiguous meaning of "fix" relied on an English idiom that almost certainly didn't exist in Japanese. I must have repeated it ten times before I realized its clever wording only worked in English.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


California Community Mulls Driving Tax Amid Privacy Concerns - <AUTHOR> http://www.insideline.com/car-news/california-community-mulls-driving-tax-amid-privacy-concerns.html

<comment><USER2> It's OK everybody, the police, authorities, government agencies, insurance companies and corporate partners won't have access to these detailed records without either a warrant, probable cause, reasonable suspicion, a good reason, an ongoing investigation, to rule you out from an investigation, or general curiosity. Also the data is going to be secured using all the latest secure security, so you can be secure in the knowledge it's as securely secure as secure can be. Nothing at all to be worried about. Unless you have something to hide that is. Those who have something to hide can register their complaints in writing in person at the Ministry of Homeland Secure Security, Obedience and Compliance. Be sure to bring your Show Me Card or other sanctioned federal identity documents.

<comment><USER3> Of course, the system will always be used for only its intended purpose, administering the gas tax, and future political bodies will never expand its scope to catch terrorists, child abductors, illegal immigrants, hate criminals like Chic-Fil-A's president, deadbeat dads, Occupy protestors, Wikileaks contributors, people with unpaid parking tickets...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to tax cars more, up the gas tax which already affects people who drive SUVs more than small cars. Risking this level of abuse of the 5th amendment is just not worth the cost.

This type of tax is also about as anti-poor people as you can get. Any big tax that hits all at once is a killer.

<comment><USER5> That was my thought exactly: are gas taxes nothing more than 'per mile' taxes? Just raise those, gas is already cheaper in California than many places. Of course, it would be nice if that money were to go directly into funding full cover public transport for those who will no longer be able to afford to get to their low-paid job 50 miles away.

<comment><USER3> Over the long term, the gas tax encourages a change in consumption patterns. Take a job closer to home, move closer to your work, or telecommute more.

Per-mile tax does exactly the same thing, but with a ton of invasive technological monitoring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It will provide a good example for oppressive governments worldwide. "Sure, we may arbitrarily prohibit you from leaving your hometown, but at least we don't monitor your every move like California."

</comment><comment><USER7> The only way I'm willing to accept further taxes on driving is when California actually has real public transit coverage across the entire state. Until then, driving is the best option for many individuals.

There are large sections of even the more highly populated areas of California (like the bay area) that are not served by public transit, or are inadequately served by it (for example, Gilroy has only three trains per day during the week and none on the weekend/holidays).

<comment><USER8> There are different definitions of "covered" too. I have a bus stop 2 minutes from my home, and next to my work. So I would be considered "covered", right? Only thing it's 20 minute drive and 2 hour bus ride with 2 changes and some of the routes don't operate the whole day, as you pointed out. So if I have choice of spending 4 hours of my life per day in buses and having next to zero mobility (if I need to go somewhere else before or after work I'm out of luck, that may make 2 hours into 3 or 4 hours commute) - against just hopping into a car and be done in 20 minutes, no way I will even consider public transport as an option. It may be fine for a big highly urbanized city (I've always preferred public transport when going to San Francisco, for example) but for something like the rest of Silicon Valley it's not even funny how bad it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This appears so far to be a teapot tempest -- just an item in list of potential options.

For what it's worth, Oregon is much closer to implementing such a thing, with much hand-wringing over the real privacy issues but also (according to one article I read) a bill ready for the 2013 legislature.

</comment><comment><USER10> Putting GPS in a car to measure distance traveled is like putting cameras in your home pointed at your kitchen and bathroom sinks, shower and washing machine in order to measure water consumption.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wouldn't it make more sense to install tamper-resistant odometers on cars, and measure them like gas or electric meters?

<comment><USER12> Actually that wouldn't make sense. The reason being is the tax is only valid in a specific geographic location. Employing GPS based tracking allows the city/county to tax only for the miles driven within its boundaries, which is going to be the only area it has the authority to levy a tax within.

<comment><USER13> This is why property tax makes so much sense at the local level. It doesn't hit people who pass through without making any commercial exchanges, but if they work or buy, then the establishments involved include the local rates in their prices.</comment></comment></comment>