As a NVidia shareholder I'm relieved at this. ARM is clearly less valuable as part of NVidia with all the conflicts of interest that entails than as an independent company. NVidia talked about synergies but they could pursue all of those with an architectural license for far less money. It's actually something of a pattern that most mergers fail to provide synergy and destroy value, it's just that they enlarge the empire of the CEO and so seem attractive from that standpoint.
NVIDIA being a well known hostile company, the industry did not miss the news about its ARM purchase intent. And thus they looked for alternatives. That's RISC-V.
Today, pretty much every company designing microcontrollers or SoCs is involved with RISC-V. They won't cancel those efforts to embrace ARM again.
That's actually an interesting side-effect. What happens to ARM now?
New players who are looking for a long-term strategy are looking at RISC-V (as you note) in part due to Nvidia's reputation. Despite the deal being quashed, they're probably going to continue along that route.
However, it seems like ARM licensees might also be making plans to become less dependent on ARM (the company). The Nvidia/ARM deal was announced September 2020. Qualcomm announced that it was going to buy Nuvia (founded by ex-Apple Silicon people) in January 2021 along with plans to launch their own internally-designed CPUs (rather than relying on ARM reference designs). I think this is a smart plan regardless of the Nvidia/ARM deal, but creating your own cores means that ARM has little-to-no leverage over you. You don't need their new CPUs. Sure, ARM still updates their architecture periodically, but you can happily continue along making your own CPUs under a perpetual license. Qualcomm is making the jump to its own cores so that it doesn't need ARM reference designs.
SoftBank is somewhat souring on ARM since it isn't getting the huge returns it was expecting by owning the CPU that everyone was going to use in the future. Will SoftBank end up short-changing R&D at ARM making their reference cores less competitive with Apple Silicon and future Qualcomm cores?
Even if SoftBank was able to sell ARM for $40B, they bought the company for $31-32B in 2016. Basically, the sale meant only 5% annual returns which is pretty bad compared to the huge gains an index fund would have made during that time. I think there's going to be pressure to find a way to squeeze money out of ARM.
Heck, with Qualcomm moving away from ARM reference cores, that's a lot less revenue for ARM. Even if Qualcomm cores aren't better, Qualcomm is still a huge portion of the mobile CPU market. Every ARM CPU maker that starts making their own custom cores means less revenue for the reference designs and less reason for ARM to invest in those reference designs. If ARM starts reducing investment in their reference designs a bit, that will put pressure on more companies to create their own custom cores.
The sky isn't falling and I don't want this comment to sound like that. I think ARM has a fine, sustainable business. At the same time, it seems like there will be pressure from SoftBank given the lackluster returns even with the Nvidia deal and Qualcomm buying Nuvia puts further pressure on ARM and it's hard to justify a major investment in something that is likely to continue having lackluster returns.
> it seems like there will be pressure from SoftBank given the lackluster returns
If the rumor Softbank wants to IPO ARM is correct, there will be pressure to get all the fundamental metrics of the business pointing up and to the right to maximize the valuation of the IPO. The increased proceeds from a good ARM IPO vs just an 'okay' IPO would likely swamp any potential cash that Softbank might be able to milk from ARM in the short-term.
It will be interesting to see how much of ARM Softbank intends to offer in the IPO vs how much they might continue to hold.
I spoke with ARM employees last summer and although it was not mentioned aloud, it was obvious the process had been started the make the bride pretty for the IPO.
Another concern is which regulators are going to allow such a sale to take place? As noted in the article, the FTC filed a suit against the merger and China was likely to take a similar stance. If NVIDIA cannot buy ARM without running into anti-trust issues, who reasonably could? Any tech company that a) has the capital and b) has the interest would almost certainly run into the exact same problem.
I think an IPO might be the only exit strategy Softbank has for ARM.
I foresee ARM becoming the commodity big box datacenter CPU but who really knows
Apple will probably mess with it for 10 years like they did PowerPC until industry comes up with something totally new and revolutionary and then we will see a convergence on consumer devices across the board to whatever that is.
> Basically, the sale meant only 5% annual returns which is pretty bad compared to the huge gains an index fund would have made during that time.
You talk about the $30b case as if a retail is taking higher risk/return portfolio but putting the entire $30b is not the same as buying something that looks promising with your phone.
If you can't fill the $30b into an asset, it's at 0%.
Everyone that wants an arch license has one (Intel, AMD, Apple, QC, Mediatek, Broadcom, Marvel, Huawei, Samsung, etc) and doesn't have to put down cash, they can just poach ARMs best chip designers away from them. ARM gets to strangle the $10 landfill router market until RISC-V takes over.
Intel has a 5 year plan started last year to take back the number one spot in performance, efficiency, and fab capabilities. Its ambitious, but certainly not impossible. Apple is currently top in efficiency with M1 and TSMC's 5nm manufacturing, but Apple has lost talent and Intel is fabbing with TSMC now too (TSMC is building Intel an entire 3nm plant).
Apple aside, laptop and desktop sales are still x86's to lose, so unless both Intel and AMD take major stumbles, I dont see ARM shipping in much more volume in PCs than it does now.
I wonder if we will see Intel expand big time into more embedded industries (like they already are with vehicles) and then use that additional cash to buy out ARM and make integrated dies with both types of cores. A desktop or laptop CPU with both x86 and ARM cores for different uses (and maybe even high performance virtualization embedded at the hardware level) could be interesting - especially as more operating systems gain good support for both architectures.
Sad memories of Nokia. The N9 debuted to great reviews and was built on a promising tech stack that continues to outlive it today (Qt, etc.). Repeated takeover attempts and intent by Microsoft, and finally installing an ex-MS VP who cancelled the platform internally before an actual sale to Microsoft, was too much of a distraction.
It's hard to survive a bodged takeover attempt, much less an actual takeover.
Indeed. It believe they are a victim of false management decisions (happens). Windows as a mobile system was already on its way out, it seemed they wanted to keep it in the race by buying into Nokia. That said the phones now sold under the Nokia brand are pretty decent.
IPv6 is working so well that people often miss the fact it's being used all over the world. Which is probably the greatest endorsement for consumer side IPv6.
ARM’s business is just fine, they’re a healthy company with fantastic technology and happy customers. Maybe they were overvalued by SoftBank, but that’s Softbank’s problem. It doesn’t mean ARM is a bad business. They’re just not growing spectacularly, but maybe that’s ok.
The British should try to coax Softbank into doing an ARM IPO and work to build up a more significant native semiconductor ecosystem around the company. It might be Britain's last chance at that, a company like ARM doesn't come around very often and you need something integral like that to build around as a core. The US should tandem with Britain on that (investment, political support, whatever is needed), given the close nature of the allied relationship (and since if the US can't own it the next best thing might be for Britain to continue to indefinitely).
ARM has I think 2/3 of it's employees in the UK, mainly Cambridge, and they're expanding the campus there. The Semiconductor Physics Group at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University is at the cutting edge globally with 18 PhD projects currently in flight. Guess where scads of ARM's top scientists are recruited from? ARM and the University are joined at the hip. That company's not going anywhere.
SoftBank wants to do an IPO. They have no financial reason to hold on to all of ARM or even a majority of it in the near to medium future. Likewise, SoftBank def doesn’t want to put any money into ARM any more.
I think it’s reasonably clear SoftBank’s stewardship of Arm has been poor - sure they have invested but the Arm China move backfired badly and this Nvidia uncertainty has also hindered Arm’s development.
I think Apple should buy ARM. Then they will own the entire iPhone and Mac tech stack -- right down to the ISA. It's hard to think of a more competent steward for the technology than Apple.
That would make even more companies bail from ARM to RISC-V than NVidia. While NVidia tends to be hostile and lay out traps for competition, Apple downright shuts down anything external facing of the companies they acquire. Just as the parent is saying, that would make ARM less valuable, for sure.
Only two weeks ago SoftBank / Arm / Nvidia made a submission to the UK competition authorities with a singularly pessimistic view of Arm’s prospects as a stand-alone company [1]. I wonder if this was wise given the where the deal seems to be now.
Whilst this is a bit overdone, it does highlight the challenges that Arm faces. If the Nvidia deal is dead - which seems likely - then floating clearly seems unlikely to offer the prospect of the return that SoftBank was expecting when it paid a premium for Arm.
The key question from an Arm user / customer’s perspective seems to be ‘Can Arm as a stand-alone company finance the investment it meets to stay competitive?’
> As Arm’s CEO, Simon Segars, explained: “We contemplated an IPO but determined
> that the pressure to deliver short-term revenue growth and profitability would
> suffocate our ability to invest, expand, move fast and innovate.”
It sounds like Arm needs a change in leadership to me. Find the capital for long-term investment somewhere and follow a path to improvement like AMD did. Yes, there is pressure to deliver short term profit as there always is today. However, that's not a strategy that works for a company like Arm. Everyone around the world can see the value in what Arm produces. Find someone to invest who isn't a hedge fund manager and still sees that value.
>Find the capital for long-term investment somewhere and follow a path to improvement like AMD did.
They did, it was called SoftBank and now SoftBank needs its money back. The comparison to AMD isn’t comparable; AMD already had a high margin business in a proven market; it’s unclear what ARM is going to be pressured to do; either they will have to put the screws on their licensors or start making their own chips (which would be no different from the concern under nvidia)
We have to distinguish between value created in the Arm ecosystem (a lot) and how much Arm retains (much less).
Nonetheless Arm seemed to do OK as a public company for 25 years but Son thought he saw an opportunity and paid a big premium for it.
I do think there is an issue around Arm as a relatively small player competing for talent with Apple, Intel etc which feels suboptimal for the industry as a whole. Perhaps eg the cloud hyperscalers could jointly and directly fund development of server chips in the same way that firms prepay TSMC for capacity.
> Nonetheless Arm seemed to do OK as a public company for 25 years but Son thought he saw an opportunity and paid a big premium for it.
Softbank tends to have a habit of overpaying. Maybe they just have more access to capital than available opportunities they can intelligently spend money on.
That argument made negative sense to me. 'Don't IPO because public companies are inherently limited to short term growth, therefore we have to be bought by an already public company?'
It is very different to be a subsidiary of a public company than to be public yourself. Take Waymo vs Alphabet. If you are the public company, you need to have your unit economics working such that you generate short term profits.
You can lose money in a subsidiary so long as it is small by comparison to your overall P&L (Waymo losses of a few billion over several years vs Google annual revenue is over $160B and profit over $34B).
If on the other hand, Waymo were its own public company (and not a subsidiary), then it would need to show results on its own.
Don't get me wrong: being a subsidiary of a public company is still worse than say being a private company with a massive warchest or being the subsidiary of a private company with strong cashflow / cash reserves.
I'm not sure that's the case. The markets aren't very keen on missing profit goals, but are very understanding of intentionally not being profitable while you use revenue to invest hard in the business. For instance Amazon has famously not had a focus on yearly profits and regularly has negative profit. The markets are more than accepting of this because they continue to grow and it's information that the market had ahead of time rather than being an excuse for missed goals.
The markets more want you to be honest in your 10-k and S-1 than strictly require short term profits.
Is this about market fundamentals? One way to think about ARM is as a vehicle for R&D, shared amongs competitors such as Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Huawei.
* Do they each benefit from the R&D done by ARM?
* Is that benefit enough to be worth the cost, even shared amongst the recipients?
* Can they "agree" on an arrangement, and can ARM function well enough to stay healthy?
are we pretending that they didn't say that exclusively in hopes the deal would go through?
They will turn around that statement on a dime and not a single investor will blink with "...but you said to the regulators...". No risk in making such a silly statement.
They probably will get a change of leadership though. Often they chose the best-man-for-the-merger, and when it doesn't work out, they then actually search for the best-person-for-the-job.
> SoftBank / Arm / Nvidia made a submission to the UK competition authorities with a singularly pessimistic view of Arm’s prospects as a stand-alone company
They apparently want to sell the company and benefit from it together ... so it this surprising?
Likely Qualcomm bales them out as they have offered to do so and eventually takes them over quietly by osmosis so no one notices until the deal is done.
It seems crazy to me that Blizzard/Activision is worth more than Arm.
I get BA has tons of world-famous games, but almost every phone on earth is Arm. Arm is taking over laptops and servers too.
Arm has an unusually high relevance/value ratio. As Softbank found out, you can't just ramp up the licence costs. It's also not as scalable as software and doesn't have the revenue of the hardware licensees. I wish it would be bought by an open consortium to protect the millenia of engineering hours from snatch-and-grabs like these or the tyranny of uninformed investors but FAANG et al passed up the chance to secure their computing future last time. They've been blessed with another chance, hopefully this debacle has been eye opening.
I wouldn't be surprised if Arm employees create more value for other companies than they do for Arm.
You expect an open consortium to continue to innovate in an industry leading way? An open consortium is how you kill ARM. ARM didn't get where it is now by being sub-par.
I appreciate your intent and it seems like a nice idea, but my experience with community development means ARM would turn into an absolute shit show as various stakeholders fight for control and ram through a mish-mash of their pet personal features.
Is that a consortium? I work at a big tech company and our customers also request features of which we are the final arbiter. Does that make us a consortium?
Without a central arbiter who takes responsibility for producing a consistent and coherent design, you would likely end up with a mish mash of pet features.
If a customer asks for a feature, you can say no if it is a bad choice. You have less leverage to do so when that 'customer' is really a paying member of a consortium.
Everytime I see someone recommend a special interest group or consortium… I think of Bluetooth and it’s literally thousands of pages spec.
Then when they have the chance to almost completely start over… the make BLE with approximately 1/2 of what people want and spend years bloating the spec on that too.
I’ll take a talented lunatic with autonomy over 20 different voices in a bureaucratic community every time.
so your argument against consortiums (bluetooth) is that they work?… but at a higher cost (lengthy specs)?
the historic alternative is a slightly lower cost (most of BT complexity is of the plumbing type, not the PhD type) and much more significant market risks (due to incompatibilities: smaller addressable market and less ability to pivot from one market to a different one).
from the engineer PoV, i agree with you: i’d love for these specifications to be simplified. from the business PoV, i don’t think it actually matters that much.
A consortium of nations interested in maintaining access to reliable compute and innovation might be interesting. As in not bought out explicitly but some kind of direct and regular investment
Great comment and your last para is undoubtedly true. Really surprised that the hyperscalers don’t see the value in investing in Arm to develop competitive server / cloud CPUs.
dang, $20b a year for COD alone? I realize that's the crown jewel in ActiBlizz's portfolio but that does kinda put the acquisition into perspective, you could throw away every single other IP they own (and there are numerous ofc) and Microsoft only paid 2.5y of revenue for COD. $70b is really kinda cheap.
(I realize there's some ongoing development costs there - that $20b a year is conditional on you spending $500m a year to make next year's game - but there's also no reason to doubt that revenue stream will continue either. COD is shovelware (it's AAA but you get my meaning) and if you just don't mess it up (BF2042 says hi) then there's no reason to doubt the customers will keep coming back. And again, that's 2.5y revenue of just one asset of a giant company. Cheap cheap cheap.)
Yes, that's a big reason why the valuations are different. ARM's designs being so central to the products of so many companies has occurred only because of ARM's licensing terms being so liberal, including things like forward pricing caps, MFN clauses, etc. They basically chose to trade away pricing power (hence margin) for ubiquity and longer-term relationships.
"Two weeks ago, at the Code Conference, Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel claimed “the total addressable market of content is infinite.” Netflix is spending $17 billion a year to validate his thesis. So far, they’re both right."
There's really very little "innovation" in the ARM ISA. Or any ISA these days. It is an API. ARMv8 is nice but it's just warmed over RISC -- actually a lot of things that differentiated previous ARM ISAs were removed to make it more like a standard RISC! The value they add is basically nothing except holding the key to being compatible with ARM ecosystem. At this point extracting their tax on their proprietary ISA is close to rent seeking. That drag on the market is why people are looking to real open ISAs.
EDIT: That's not to take away from what architects (ISA designers) do. It's extremely difficult to develop precise and consistent ISAs especially when things like memory ordering, interrupts, pipelined execution, TLBs, etc come in to play. And they are gradually gradually adding features and improving. But this is not value to the tune of over half a billion dollars per year just for ARM licensing (then imagine x86 equivalent numbers for that very locked in ecosystem).
ARM is not in a rosy place with their ISA. Their biggest customers like Apple can and will lift and shift their entire ecosystem if ARM do what it's told. Android could start supporting other ISAs too if someone was motivated enough. And many of ARM's new customers outside the traditional low end embedded world (e.g., in servers) who have been the first ones to move to ARM have done so because their software stacks are very portable. This means they can relatively easily move off ARM as well.
Their logic designs for high performance CPUs don't seem to be top tier either. Not to say that in a disparaging way but for example the PA Semi team Apple bought blew past ARM's high performance mobile designs with their very first ARM core. https://www.anandtech.com/show/6330/the-iphone-5-review/
ARM is pretty decent but behind the likes of Intel, AMD, Apple for high performance cores. So if the ARM market gets bigger and more lucrative especially in the server space, they are vulnerable to other companies selling their own chips and cutting ARM's designs out of the high margin sales. Amazon could be designing their own core right now to use in their ARM servers in a few generations for example. Just as Apple did with its iphone chips. AMD could start making ARM server CPUs if that's where the money is.
> Amazon could be designing their own core right now
Would require an architectural license and lots of talent and time.
Getting stock Neoverse cores is an incredible deal for them, this is probably a big part of the reason they can offer cheaper services from their chips.
Arm cores aren't really all that behind, there are just tendencies for wildly incorrect comparisons (past Arm cores vs upcoming competition cores, scale-targeted configurations vs workstation-targeted ones, etc.)
Of course, the ARM tax. Is there any reason why that would be a problem for them to get?
> and lots of talent and time.
Well just more talent than ARM Ltd.
> Getting stock Neoverse cores is an incredible deal for them,
What's the incredible deal? IP licenses are the other part of ARM's business model.
> this is probably a big part of the reason they can offer cheaper services from their chips.
The problem is when other companies buy the exact same core or customers need single thread performance other designs offer, and then Amazon decides they can make a better design themselves. Like what Apple did.
> Arm cores aren't really all that behind, there are just tendencies for wildly incorrect comparisons (past Arm cores vs upcoming competition cores, scale-targeted configurations vs workstation-targeted ones, etc.)
Traditionally they have certainly been. It was a huge embarrassment that the small PA Semi start up could design their PA6T core in a couple of years from scratch and introduce it at the same time as ARM's A9 (which was a venerable and relatively efficient but pretty poorly performing core considering they had big mobile, PC, and server ambitions).
Things might finally be turning around very recently just with their latest core, but it's difficult to know yet.
This is one of those arguments that the stock market doesn't really align value with social need. Making games is good and all, people like and need entertainment, but from a social perspective we need ARM more than we need Activision.
The stock market (attempts to) align value with future projected cashflows, not social need. I don't believe it's ever been the case that social need was part of the equation, particularly given that it's such a subjective measure.
Microsoft saw how successful sony's strategy of exclusive games was last generation and is copying it to help their SAASification of the gaming market. Microsoft is also well positioned to build a successful VR headset since they control the enterprise productivity software market and can parlay that into hardware employers will buy for their VR meetings. Combining their exclusive games and employer sponsored headsets could lead to Microsoft dominating the VR market.
So really I think the synergy between microsoft and activision is where a lot of the price comes from as opposed to the actual cash flow that activision brings in.
Quick summary on why it matters that Nvidia abandons ARM takeover:
1. ARM doesn't own any factories. Its entire workforce publishes blueprints for making chips (like a software company where the entire asset is intellectual)
2. Buying this type of intellectual asset, means owning and controlling a technology.
3. This also means, all the other customers who depend on this tech (Apple, Samsung, Amazon, pretty much all big tech companies) are now at a disadvantage with NVIDIA as a competitor.
4. China heavily depends on ARM (Huawei, the company's biggest tech manufacturer rely on ARM)
5. This means, the after ARM gets owned by a US company, the US can possibly just cut-off ARM supply to China
6. Since ARM is basically like a software company, it's better to not be owned by a hardware maker. That way, it can prioritize demand from several hardware makers instead of being directed to cater to one market)
(2) "controlling tech" All big players: Apple, Nvidia, Samsung, Amazon, Qualcomm, Intel, .. have so called Architectural license with heavily crafted clauses in them that make them free from Arm control except for some minor details. They use just the instruction set and make their own microarchitecture.
(3) Arm China was robbed from Arm. The CEO stopped taking orders and just kept IP and is running company like their own. Chinese courts did nothing. China does what it wants inside China.
(5) No difference. There are too many cross-atlantic IP and design tool connections. Arm must comply completely to US government sanctions.
(6) Just like Nvidia. Both fabless hw IP companies. Difference is that Nvidia sells chips, Arm sells IP. Nvidia wanted Arm because they want to sell Nvidia IP to others. Nvidia has Arm architecture license, they don't need Arm IP to use Arm.
> (3) Firstly, Arm China was robbed from Arm. The CEO stopped taking orders and just kept IP and is running company like their own. Chinese courts did nothing. China does what it wants inside China.
Did ARM cut off any new IP access from ARM China? Seems like a logical next step. And how is ARM China going to continue innovating? On their own?
> And how is ARM China going to continue innovating? On their own?
Why not?
When I was young, the common wisdom was that Japan couldn't innovate, and once I saw an old bit of early 20th century analysis that said Germany couldn't either.
Both of those were wrong, why is China so different that it would be otherwise?
I'm curious about the origin of the fallacy that intelligence/innovation can only be found in anti-authoritarians/rebels (this is often deployed as "Our Freedom(TM) is why the US will always be number 1!"). Pro-government people can innovate just fine (e.g. GCHQ, NSA & defense industry)
Well we now have a natural experiment, let's see if more innovation comes out of the US or China in the coming years. I'm confident it won't be China, but certainly no guarantees.
> how is ARM China going to continue innovating? On their own?
Yes. Thery may do badly, but this isn't going to be much of a problem for China for ages. They are unlikely to do that badly though - among 2 billion people there will be plenty of good people.
Their much bigger problem though is their lack of access to cutting edge semi-conductor manufacturing technology. I imagine they are on this though, probably through industrial espionage (invading Taiwan would help, but they will face similar issues for acccess to tech long term unless they also get access to ASML work I think).
SMIC is already at 14nm, and ASML is allowed to continue to sell equipment for this process. The more advanced process nodes have several drawbacks; the domestic market could likely adjust to 14nm long-term.
The MIPS processor was copied for production in China (illicitly, until fully licensed), as was the DEC Alpha. There is significant processor design knowledge, and ample ability to copy any new designs produced by ARM-UK, even if they have to be scaled up to 14nm for domestic production.
Oddly enough, I learned recently that Russia prefers SPARC (known as Elbrus).
Elbrus are not SPARC. They are developed by Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies(MCST) though, that's where your confusion comes from(and there were few SPARC machines under Elbrus brand, but that was a long time ago). They were basically design team for hire in the 90s and were named such to attract customers. Then Intel wanted to acquire them in mid-2000s, but ended up just hiring almost everyone and leaving company as an empty shell. Now they are doing their own ISA and it's very different from SPARC. For starters, they are the only ones who are doing VLIW in CPUs nowadays(outside of CPUs I can think of only one other company, Groq).
Thanks, I just saw their association with SPARC from 1993 to 2010, so I assumed it was their main architecture.
On the subject of VLIW, Sophie Wilson was talking up Firepath as late as 2020.
"In 1992 a spin-off company Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies (MCST) was created and continued development, using the "Elbrus" moniker as a brand for all computer systems developed by the company."
"Elbrus-90micro (1998–2010) is a computer line based on SPARC instruction set architecture (ISA) microprocessors."
Arm China is now AnMou Technology. They have "two wheels" strategy. ARM CPU architecture development for local customers and new Core Power architecture.
Technically Soft Bank still owns 49% of arm-china subsidiary, and they could theoretically take control back... but the belligerent CEO of arm-china has supposedly setup private security forces barring access to the facilities, and there is something about a legal seal. So far Soft Bank has opted not to escalate the situation any further. There is of course a lot more to the story.
for those not aware: seals are a big cultural thing in asian cultures (at least Japan and China for sure). I saw some surplus processors shipped from china with a stamp on them, I asked a Chinese friend about it thinking it was some kind of disposition mark (trying to make sure it didn't say "DEFECTIVE" or something ;) and she told me it was the seller's name, and that was his personal stamp, basically like his signature.
That got me looking into it and a signature is a pretty good analogy. In Japan at least it appears you need a seal to do any sort of serious transaction (buying a house, etc). The seals are officially registered and indeed basically like a signature, if you stamp a document that means it's "signed".
For a business, control of the seal is pretty much control of the business, I'm guessing. It's certainly going to be difficult to do any governing of the company without it, even if you otherwise have legal ownership of the company it's going to be difficult to exercise it without the seal.
Bit of an interesting cultural touchstone, seems minor to westerners but it's apparently a big deal to them.
(2) is untrue. Most players use ARM core designs, not just the instruction set.
Qualcomm used to make their own (back in 2014 or so) but hasn't since. Samsung tried after and quit in 2019. The cloud cores are all standard ARM designs (neoverse).
I'm not claiming that all ARM licensees use ARM cores. Rather, if ARM stopped offering competitive core designs (or limited them to just Nvidia), it would have a big impact on the ecosystem.
A few players doing otherwise doesn't change that, regardless of how well they execute.
“They use just the instruction set and make their own microarchitecture.”
Is that really the case? My understanding is that while, yes, they make their own microarchitectures, they rely heavily on IP from ARM to make that happen
Do they write their own instruction decoders, FPUs, etc? I thought they started with the reference designs for a core and then tweaked them to their liking, some companies tweaking more than others
All of the main cores are ARM reference designs. Qualcomm does add proprietary IP, but it is more oriented around their strengths, like integrating their 5G modem into the die, which is something that none of the other big chip manufacturers can do at the moment (to my knowledge)
All of those companies except Amazon have shipped ARM CPU cores fully designed in-house, yes. But all except Apple and NVIDIA have since completely dropped their custom core design, and NVIDIA goes back and forth.
Qualcomm did buy Nuvia though, so they might yet come back with something new.
As uluyol corrected me, most of these seem to se ARM cores today. Few years back Samsung and Qualcomm had their own architectures. But the fact remains, if they have architecture license, ARM can't control them too much.
If they have an architecture license, they can make their own implementations of the ISA.
Certainly, they may choose to derive their implementations from ARM's designs (or use them wholesale), but the license allows them to make their own.
That said, in the mobile space, AIUI only Apple and ARM are nowadays developing their own implementations. In the HPC space, there are others (Fujitsu, Marvell, etc).
(ARM also sells more limited licenses which only allow their cores to be used.)
(2) *I thought Apple had complete control over their Arm(TM) based chips as in they can do anythign they want and pay no licensing fee as long as they keep the Arm branding?
> Chinese courts did nothing. China does what it wants inside China.
Lots of people calling this out as 'a bad thing', but at the end of the day the Chinese government/courts handled in what it thought was in the best interest of Chinese citizens.
For other countries that might look like respecting IP clauses but for China it doesn't seem to be. I think it makes perfect sense and is perfectly moral for a country to do so.
and for 6) I think one of the fears there is that nVidia would use ARMs near de-facto monopoly to force their tech onto the market and push out competitors, like qualcom on the mobile GPU market.
Whether it be trough integrating nVidia tech more deeply into the architectural offerings essentialy forcing competitors to license both techs, or by using the ARM IP to in the future outcompete direct competitors by charging more for the IP that they can now use without any cost. Even if they're not planning any of that, I think the fear that they might in the future is what's giving many people (and regulators) pause.
ARM itself is never in direct competition with its customers _because_ it only sells IP, nVidia sells chips and is in direct competition with others who depend upon ARM for their chips.
>but at the end of the day the Chinese government/courts handled in what it thought was in the best interest of Chinese citizens
In the short-term, you're absolutely right. In the long-term, no one will continue to invest in Chinese businesses if China gets a reputation for banditry like this. Is it in the best interests of Chinese citizens to ruin their reputation for the next generation?
It's likely that China will use illegal or underhanded techniques to get ahead today then clean up their act and claim rehabilitation later. You can see the mental groundwork being laid in the whataboutism rebuttals comparing the US today vs past history.
Of course you can do that but that is not how you do trade. Trade requires trust and a move like this undermines trust. And I find it difficult to argue that it's in the best interest of citizen to undermine foreign investors' trust in the marketplace. In the end it means that less money will flow in.
> Lots of people calling this out as 'a bad thing', but at the end of the day the Chinese government/courts handled in what it thought was in the best interest of Chinese citizens.
If somebody came into my house, ate my food, set themselves up in a bedroom and enjoyed the comforts of my household, then when I told them to leave declared everywhere they had lodged and dined in my house an independent territory, that would be an immoral act. Blatant theft in the eyes of anyone.
Allen Wu was removed from his post. Not only did he decline, he took off a chunk of the company with him. That is a move of douchery in business I've never seen anywhere in the Western world in my time alive.
If the company I work for fires me, I will leave the premises. I may not like the decision but I respect it. And in Denmark we have courts of law that ensure one vacates the premises by the date of termination.
The CCP is playing fast and loose with whatever it likes. That's bad behavior, whether you're a business or a human being.
The article is a very very strange read. ( At least the tone of it, may be under legal threat )
Yes, ARM China didn't steal any ARM UK's IP. But ARM China is also no longer under the control of ARM UK, practically speaking. And the New IP offered by ARM China are also independent of ARM UK. I am wondering if the deal with ARM China and ARM UK are the same as AMD's JV, where China currently has AMD Zen's IP. Given the people involved I would not be surprised.
ARM UK are also well aware of the RISC-V threat, which China is currently pouring all the resources into it. I would not be surprised if you see a free high performance RISC-V IP offered by China just to destroy the ARM market along with some other x86 market. The threat is real. But then again HN will rejoice because it is free and RISC-V.
On the topic of China and IP, I watched an interesting debate on China between two politicians recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEchkn3unl8. Funnily Vince Cable, arguing in favour of China as a friend to the West, defended their IP offences saying this is what lots of Western nations did to each other (and, arguably, though he doesn't make a big deal of it, China) on the way to becoming fully developed.
> Their work is in both cases a mix of design and engineering.
> Both produce goods that are reproducible at zero cost, and are protected (only) by intellectual property laws.
You forgot fabrication. Unlike SW IP where as long as it compiles it's ready to ship but stays virtual, ARM's IP must be manufacturable into physical things you can touch by the major fabs therefore must be grounded in the processes and cell libraries that those fabs can manufacture.
Unlike a SW company, they can't just freely innovate whatever shiny new IP they want without concern for the silicon manufacturing processes, therefore it's closer to HW than SW, as all their IP is eventually manufactured into real things you can touch and therefore must follow the manufacturing constrains.
If you follow their news announcements, they constantly talk about their partnership with Samsung and TSMC to adapt their IP to each of their upcoming process nodes, so their their customer like Apple or Qualcomm can just buy the IP and plop it into their design knowing it's already been validated for Samsung/TSMC and can reliably be sent to the fab. So ARM is still very much a HW IP company.
Well, we can always clarify things for people who don't understand HW as good as SW, but for correctness we have to call a spade a spade and not help spread misinformation just because it sounds easier to understand than the facts, for the less informed users.
I am an NVIDIA employee in an unrelated part of the business and not inclined to comment in depth on these matters and this is not an NVIDIA opinion or official but
i thought it worth mentioning
I don’t see the distinction?
NVIDIA is fabless too??
Nvidia doesn't licence its designs to other companies for incorporation into their own chip designs, ARM does. That is the main distinction I think, and why people want it to be a neutral third party.
They say that now... It could even very well be the case. However, there are plenty of ways to manipulate those licensing agreements to work more in Nvidia's favor than they do today.
AMD spun their manufacturing off as Global Foundries, so yes.
And yeah, I’m not sure this distinction the poster is making between arm as like a software company and NVIDIA like a hardware company makes much sense.
Arm makes IP (in the chip design sense). NVIDIA makes IP and combines it with IP from Arm and others, and produces some product designs based on the chip, which NVIDIA tests and writes software for. But ODMs make the products and fabs make the chips. I really don’t think calling some of this like software and some like hardware is very explanatory, at least partially because NVIDIA writes a lot of software, and because I think the person reading that description might come away with the impression that arm just produces the architecture, and not actual core designs (which NVIDIA, Denver aside, uses).
They also stopped using global foundries and now use TSMC. Global foundries, like pretty much everyone other than TSMC, fell behind in process shrinks. Their primary business is fabricating secondary chips.
Global Foundries is still used as the northbridge chiplet inside modern AMD processors; only the CPU core chiplets are from TSMC.
Global Foundries has sizable operations in Dresden, Germany. Interestingly, this was a major semiconductor supplier of the Eastern Block, prior the fall of the iron curtain. AMD placed their primary foundry in Dresden, likely for the infrastructure and technical knowledge.
Global Foundries has decided that more money can be made at 14nm and above, than what is required for smaller process nodes.
I squinted, but I can’t see any way to draw a moral equivalence between the Chinese justice system and, say, the UK justice system. There’s a fundamental and massive difference in approach to the rule of law.
I initially was going to say that CCP really only cares about its own interests.
Then I thought about my own country's actions and policies for a moment before posting (Guantanamo, labor and privacy laws, the 'medical system', and 'education system').
My revised thought was that the main difference is in whether the country still even pretends to seek justice for its citizens.
I do think there are differences, especially in degree, but the general motivations and actions seem similar enough.
> My impression is that the CCP's idea of justice is whatever benefits the CCP.
Of course, there’s no separation of powers in China, the courts are not independent, they are part of the Communist Party of China. Nor is there a constitution that all court decisions must uphold. The only guidestar of the Chinese court system is to keep the CPC in power, and uphold laws passed by the CPC, nothing else.
> This doesn't differ too much from other nations except in degree and in their ability or willingness to hide that fact.
It differs from Constitutional republics where the court system is independent from political parties and mandated to ensure all laws passed by the legislative branch and actions taken by the executive branch do not violate the constitution, regardless which party is in power at the time.
Yes different political parties will try to pack the court when they can, but that pendulum swings back and forth over time. There’s a social contract with the citizenry that doesn’t exist in Communist countries - adhere to the constitution or be kicked out of power in future elections. You can see the evidence in how often power changes hands between parties.
> There’s a social contract with the citizenry that doesn’t exist in Communist countries - adhere to the constitution or be kicked out of power in future elections
I am thankful for that difference. That said, recent political events in the U.S. have shown how much of that 'contract' is just convention.
Nope. In China, if you have control of the company stamp, you have executive control over the company and can use it to enter legally binding contracts.
Essentially yes. It acts in lieu of a signature, and the company stamp is usually closely guarded by trusted executives.
It’s a problem when those executives go rogue and there are many cases of it causing problems for companies in China, both for foreign and domestic companies.
Arm is a British company, currently owned by Softbank, a Japanese company.
This means that in practice the US can already cut off supply to China.
See for example ASML: they are a Dutch company. So the US government only needed a friendly word with the Dutch government for the Dutch government to ban ASML from exporting certain advanced processes to China.
For the British government I'm sure there would be no need to call... A text would suffice ;)
(leaving aside all the drama with ARM China already because of those issues...)
> This means, the after ARM gets owned by a US company, the US can possibly just cut-off ARM supply to China
But IP is very hard to control the supply of, especially one like this where hundreds of companies have a copy of the IP. If the US won't license it on fair terms, China will just stop enforcing IP laws and allow anyone to copy it for free.
But it's pretty hard to know what devices even contain that IP... Does that Amazon Basics optical gaming mouse contain an ARM CPU? It would probably take weeks of decapping the chip and reverse engineering the CPU to be sure, and even then, figuring out if that CPU is licensed or not is non-trivial. Is customs really going to do that for every item that comes through the border?
Nvidia would be amongst the worst possible custodians of ARM. Their business models are quite strongly opposing:
ARM's is to create a fair, competitive playing field between CPU producing companies and reap licensing fees for the pleasure, Nvidia's is to nakedly leverage all of its technologies for Nvidia's products' benefit and Nvidia's products' benefit only.
While I too was against the NVidia+Arm merger, and am glad it's being abandoned, a large part of me feels like they wouldn't do it just because it could be an antitrust nightmare, with Apple and Qualcomm and LG all suing because of anti-competitive practices, and probably winning. I'm not a lawyer, but that seems like a likely scenario from the very little I understand about US law.
I don't think NVidia would be quite that stupid; I think if they were smart they would keep ARM business as usual just to avoid that, and just reap the licensing fees from the above companies.
Microsoft used to be in the same place, they started growing once they opened up. Instead of rent seeking. VLSI is hard, but with massive investments in fabs and design across the board, Nvidia will be forced to go the MS way.
Nvidia licensing their GPU to ARMs customers will itself be a big start.
No, that didn't deter Nvidia, it's mainly with EU, UK and American regulatory pressures (which might formally stop the acquisition). Additionally, some civil servants within the UK government have said that the ministers are considering to declare Arm as a critical company (and considering the "partygate" has made the Johnson government more populist, it's becoming more likely that pro-Britain moves will be made, at least as perceived by voters).
Yes, this was the insanity, they waved through selling it to Softbank, but then cottoned on to how important it was once they realised it was going to be acquired by Nvidia. They shouldn't have let it sell in the first place, but atleast they're fixing that now, and if they can guide it towards an IPO that would be a very good result.
With an increasing number of countries worldwide using their powers to prevent the sale or merger of companies, will we see a devaluation of these companies? After all, owning something is only of value if you can sell it, and if you can only sell with permission from 10+ country governments, all of whom can say no for strategic reasons, then it isn't such a great purchase.
Owning a company is traditionally thought to be of value because you get a stream of dividend income from the profits the company earns, not because you can sell the company.
what? no. assets/IP have always been highly valued and certainly not on the sole basis of their cost-to-replicate.
(and if you can't sell assets, that's the only valid metric for valuation - "I need that thing and would have built it anyway". Even if it's complimentary to your existing business - the BATNA is "build it myself".)
extremely controversial (if not outright incorrect) statement to be labeling as "traditional wisdom". Says who?Probably not any economics textbook written in the last century.
You are confused or may not have been paying attention to the context of the post you replied to. We're talking about the value of a publicly traded company, Nvidia. We aren't talking about the value of the Mona Lisa, or an NFT of a dancing monkey or even a Bitcoin.
I didn't write anything controversial and you don't need to consult an economics textbook, a basic Investopedia article will do:
"The dividend discount model (DDM) is one of the most basic of the absolute valuation models. The dividend discount model calculates the "true" value of a firm based on the dividends the company pays its shareholders."
An alternative model if there is no dividends:
"the Discounted Cash Flow model uses a firm's discounted future cash flows to value the business. "
The ability of a firm to sell itself to a foreign firm is not a factor is valuing the firm.
I wouldn't use these models to value a Pikachu trading card, but this is stock market 101 type stuff.
Good point from a global view. I'd like to see a little more international cooperation, leading towards a global standard, but we have many hurdles between here and there, especially involving trust between nations.
AMD is increasingly competitive, but still doesn't have good software compatibility outside of gaming. GPUs are not the priority for them. They basically make 10 times less cards and aren't going to make more. Which is sad since we need more competition. Rising TSMC prices aren't as big of a deal for them since they are mostly on samsung right now.
I wouldn't say that things are so bad for Nvidia. They are selling more cards than ever, their "Ultimate Play" to rise the prices across the board will, most likely, be successful in the long run. Sub 200 dollars segment is dead, like sub 100 before it. Since they are going to make monstrous MCM GPUs, the price for an absolute high end is going to rise to unseen heights(performance will rise with them). I hope Intel will stop this madness eventually, but they won't be able to do it fast, even if they try as hard as they can.
China for one won't approve the deal. China is feeling the squeezes of tech cut off. only 3 companies is allowed to make x86. RISC-V is not there yet. the only option left is ARM. huawei's hisilicon was designing top notch ARM cpu for huawei's phone. ARM is just too important for China.
Since when do I care what China thinks? Frankly, it wouldn't kill for global trade (where the west is concerned) to swing back 15-20 deg to more autonomy. To zero? Madness; just a correction.
The salad years of buying almost anything at Walmart, Tesco, Amazon for 15% less than what it'd cost from the west and taking that to the hoop as success are long gone.
The low fruit is increasingly picked for them too. They can't do cheap labor 24/7/365 forever just like we can't do cheap prices for ever. Eventually we'll both need to rebalance price, jobs, security, and so on.
>The salad years of buying almost anything at Walmart, Tesco, Amazon for 15% less than what it'd cost from the west and taking that to the hoop as success are long gone.
Not according to the vast majority of consumers. Look what trouble far less than a 15% rise in costs due to inflation is doing to consumers.
>They can't do cheap labor 24/7/365 forever
The west cannot do expensive labor forever. It's dying faster than cheap labor.
>The salad years of buying almost anything at Walmart, Tesco, Amazon for 15% less than what it'd cost from the west and taking that to the hoop as success are long gone.
Picking a current tangential issue and globbing it on to a needed global trade correction which has been in the making for the last 20 years is opportunistic. Inflation like this hasn't been seen in the US since the late 70s, for which there are many factors including Covid.
>The west cannot do expensive labor forever. It's dying faster than cheap labor.
US labor & regulation (where I am) is medium. Not stupidly high certainly not lowest. I think other places in the west find it harder here than us. Still I am not particularly pleased with US governmental institutional competence in the last 15 years. We are nowhere near our best, and sadly sucking in a few important areas.
I would remind that outsourcing to China did not start the behest of a US politician taking a call from Joe Smoe manager who asked if he should outsource. The move east with consequent impact on labor and larger issues was done by US business people. Further examples are obvious, but let's not dismiss self interest either.
Going back to my original point: I absolutely could not care less what the Chinese think on this particular issue. ARM isn't theirs anyway. China, whenever strategic dependency arises, wants their own lock-stock-and-barrel-stuff. MC/VISA will never be top there. And Intel/ARM/AMD/TSMC will never rule the roost there either. They will not be dependent on the west. So my question for the west: how much and how long are you gonna play a part in their goal? What are the limits? How do we know when enough is enough?
>Picking a current tangential issue and globbing it on to a needed global trade correction which has been in the making for the last 20 years is opportunistic
What you call opportunistic to make it less relevant I call illustrative of what a 15% rise in costs or prices means in reality.
Can you show me a place where such a large class of items went up in price that was not catastrophic? Yet you think it will be some golden return to rose colored yesteryear.
>US labor & regulation (where I am) is medium. Not stupidly high certainly not lowest.
I'm in the US also. US wages are among the highest few countries out of around 200 countries over the world. They're among the highest in the OECD. I'd hardly call that medium. Those countries with a higher average or median wage are barely above the US, so I'd think it's safe to say US wages are just about the highest in the world.
Why does an unskilled worker here make more than around 90% of the world population? Because he so amazing? Or because we have extraordinarily high labor costs? That unskilled work wage is not going to last, no matter how you slice it. Blaming China has pretty much zero to do with it - most low end jobs lost went to automation, and trying to make goods cost 15% more will only add pressure to automate more.
Not a logical reply. I provided evidence that cost increases below the magnitude you think will not cause harm will in fact cause harm.
Please provide an example where the 15% increase you think will not cause harm in fact does not cause harm. This is the second time I've asked for an example, and I suspect again you will not provide one.
Yes and no. China can't, no, but history tells us exactly what will happen. Japan used to be the "cheap and crappy electronics maker". At some point the population has been lifted enough that some other poor country will take over the bottom jobs. Likely somewhere in Africa. It is not as if China at some point will start to fall back to where it once were and even if it did all it would do would be to hold the production in China instead of the next country.
>Eventually we'll both need to rebalance price, jobs, security, and so on.
>It is not as if China at some point will start to fall back
I never said they were. Also babysitting Chinese outcomes is another not-my-problem. There's a whole invasive inflexible CCP state control thing going on there who, by the way, claim it as their problem.
It's also not a feature for China to fall back to some pre-Deng era. Knowing what I care and don't care about it is not equivalent to hoping China fails. Certainly not. Maybe China will rock and roll. Maybe they fall in disinflation like Japan did starting somewhere around the 1990s, from which I'm not sure they recovered.
I am saying the west has got to do a better job at realizing what the end game is for China in some important areas. And know what our concerns are, and do a better job at holding the line. Here, in the US, "show me the discount! show me the cheap!" cannot be the last thing heard.
>Eventually we'll both need to rebalance price, jobs, security, and so on.
Good! I love it when people lay down a hard line. Hard lines are easy to bust.
They're already adjusting their economy. The cheap labor is now found in the rest of SE Asia with east Africa viewed as growth potential for cheap labor by the Chinese.
These days, I don’t know if it makes sense at all to get sold out to anyone. Why not IPO? It’s a free never ending river of money that you can dip again and again. With proper voting structure, you retain full control and never fear dilution. Additionally, no dividends ever which means no worries about returning investor money or any real ROI. Over time, get included in one of the ETF index and you are set to unimaginable market caps. Selling out is for the losers, IMO.
When ARM was bought by SoftBank the main argument for it being acceptable was that SoftBank were not chip manufacturers in their own right. And that because of this, ARM would have every incentive to carry on treating all of ARM's existing customers reasonably fairly under SoftBank's ownership.
That's obviously not the case with Nvidia.
So while, it's possible to imagine that Nvidia wouldn't (at least initially) abuse any ownership of ARM. From a societal pov, why risk allowing a situation that relies on humans behaving well on an ongoing basis not to fail? And two, given the way ARM operates i.e. all customer $$$'s are equal, why would Nvidia bother if they didn't think there was an advantage?
Probably a mixture of both, I think NVIDIA had a chance to push ARM to new heights it would also have forced them to be far more open.
Longer term the market might be in a better position with a public ARM.
I think a lot of the concerns around NVIDIA were driven by hyperbolic statements and memes.
ARM is a good example of a monumental success and relative failure as in their cores and their architecture is in everything but they never have been able to capitalize on their success at the same scale at least as far as it goes for converting it into revenue which sits only at around $2B per year.
NVIDIA on the other hand has mastered capitalizing on every success no matter how small it is.
Overall as acquisitions go on paper it was a good match. It would’ve given ARM access to a lot of capital, engineering resources and a driven management with a strategic vision.
NVIDIA would’ve gotten the ability to set the path for one of the most commonly used CPU architecture and being able to offer a completely vertically integrated solution to both enterprise and end consumers.
Arguably NVIDIA could achieve the latter on its own too at least by licensing ARM I do think it’s a shame that they don’t have an x86 license too. ARM on the other hand would need to undergo a massive change to get into the position they arguably deserve to be in.
> ARM is a good example of a monumental success and relative failure as in their cores and their architecture is in everything but they never have been able to capitalize on their success at the same scale at least as far as it goes for converting it into revenue which sits only at around $2B per year.
ARM got to where it is by not being too greedy. If others perceived them to be making power grab then a lot fewer people would have been willing to stake their own futures on the architecture.
To mix metaphors, ARM went with a 'rising tides floats all boats' approach to grow the pie in general instead of just their own slice of it.
ARM has serious issues with investment their operating margins under SoftBank dropped form 50% to below 10% they can barely afford their current R&D investment.
And the market now is more dependent on their reference designs and core IP than ever.
ARM as a company isn’t in a good position, they need a parent that can actual drive them forward or go public and get the investment they need and honestly deserve.
What exactly has happened to them under SoftBank that caused their margins to drop so much? I have no idea why they can't turn a decent profit, given that, as you said yourself, the market is more dependent on their reference designs and core IP than ever.
My guess is that it was because their revenue relatively remained flat whilst R&D expenses inflated as they always do with more and more advanced SoCs and processors.
If ARM was only about the instruction set and high level IP it wouldn’t be an issue but they develop full designs and those are the ones that get implemented by most users.
Considering the exponential growth in ARM processors and SoCs in mobile devices and IOT/IOE devices since SoftBank acquired ARM it’s really a mystery tbh on how the hell they mismanaged them so badly that they didn’t managed to capitalize on an exponentially growing TAM.
They kinda flatlined before that too but at least they had a steady growth rate in the years prior to the acquisition.
I think it's not a huge mystery, it's exactly what people are talking about higher in this thread or elsewhere in the discussion: the business world has gotten used to treating ARM as an at-cost utility, and there's significant business risk to ARM attempting to shift that model to a more revenue-focused one. Few quotes from around this thread:
> ARM got to where it is by not being too greedy. If others perceived them to be making power grab then a lot fewer people would have been willing to stake their own futures on the architecture.
> No, it shouldn’t. ARM is ARM precisely because it doesn’t charge a huge amount - if it did, it would not be as widely used.
ARM has managed to be successful by becoming a "public utility" that does their work essentially at-cost, which is then monetized by their customers. Everyone agrees that ARM generates a ton of value, but almost all of it is captured by their clients. And the problem is - the customers that were slippery enough to escape other ISAs to ARM are generally slippery enough to do it again if it becomes worthwhile.
You said elsewhere that there's other avenues to raising revenue without customers paying it and I'm curious what you mean, because that really seems to be the problem. I don't really see what you mean - for ARM to make more money, it has to be coming somewhere, and even if it wasn't up-front architectural/SIP licensing fees directly (even if it was, let's say, per-device licensing fees at time of manufacture/sale - like the HDMI Consortium does) those costs are still coming from somewhere and ultimately borne by consumers. It doesn't really matter to me whether I pay $1 a phone for incremental licensing or pay $1 a phone to amortize Qualcomm's license for ARM IPs, it's still the same money either way.
I think you have an oversized understanding of what ARM does, and what value it brings to companies using an ARM chip
It is not intel, it is making the chip or even really designing the chip, though they do have reference designs...
ARM is ARM exactly because companies can take the instruction set and design their own chips around it for their own needs, they are not holding out for the next AMD or intel design..
That however means the individual companies take on more of the design costs, and risk if the design is a failure.
No Arm should not be one of the largest companies in the world right now, not even close.
You would need to provide a source for both those claims
First off, Qualcomm just spent 1.4 Billion on a design firm, for the purposes to bolstering the internal design team [1]
Then there is a 99% claim, is that by sales, volume, etc? Has I know many companies that design their own ARM processor that make up more than 1% of the market, Apple, and Samsung alone would refute that statement
Qualcomm is using reference ARM cores these days so does Amazon in Graviton and Samsung in Exynos for example their latest and greatest SoC uses Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 cores with an AMD GPU, Apple is probably the only big player today with custom cores.
The small players also all tend to use Cortex cores.
You still need a design team to integrate ARM IP blocks with your own IP or within the constraints of a given manufacturing process but almost no one is making their own cores.
Qualcomm used to have custom core, and maybe they bought Nuvia for that after seeing that the X2 cores from ARM won’t be enough to compete with Apple. My own personal bet is that they’ll attempt to dabble with custom again and will eventually give up as it’s too expensive.
Apple managed to make it work because they are designing cores for their own use and they essentially poached an entire development team from Intel.
> You still need a design team to integrate ARM IP blocks with your own IP or within the constraints of a given manufacturing process but almost no one is making their own cores.
To emphasize this a little, I think the headcount needed for the this is quite a bit larger than the additional headcount need for making your own core.
There is a lot of working in making a high performance SoC using Cortex cores, and a lot of work in making a custom core, but I think some commenters here think that so many more custom cores are being made than in reality because they think that the rest is the easy part and the hard part is all cpu design, so if these fabless semiconductor companies are spending (overlapping) years per chip with thousands of employees it must be because everything is custom (regardless of what you can learn just looking up SoCs on wikipedia)
Yeah I would agree, there is ton of work that has to go into getting as much performance from the SoC given all the design constraints and designing your own cores would probably not help to remove enough of the problems you would need to solve to be worth while especially if you need to hit a very wide range of products and use cases.
Apple is in a unique position they both have a world class leading design team and they have complete control over the entire product so they have far more levers to tweak and they don’t need to compete with anyone but themselves.
And you can see that with how the went about with their SoC design. For the most part they had a single design with a few power envelopes for cheaper / less powerful products their solution was always to use SoCs from previous years.
Even for special cases like the Apple Watch etc they tended to repurpose cores from their existing designs. The S series SoC is essentially one or two efficiency cores from their A series further clocked down and sometimes on a more power efficient node to squeeze a bit more battery life out of them.
But beyond that until the M series it was pretty much always you get a new A series SoC for the new iPhone/iPad with the only major difference being the power envelope and everything else would use an SoC form 1-3 years earlier.
If Qualcomm could’ve play this game they might have still be using custom cores too.
more than 1% of what market? I think it is possible apple + Samsung produce less than 1% of all arm cores by volume. But sources for all of this would be nice, there is a lot of speculation in this thread, and most of it seems wildly uninformed (not a dig at you, thinking of elsewhere in the thread where a good portion of comments don't have a great grasp of what arm does).
Another factor to consider: I believe in-house designed core, on an SoC, ends up producing more ARM IP cores than apple/samsung/nvidia/whoever IP cores. 8 or 12 in house designed main cores may be supported by up to 20 cortexes as various controllers, boot processors, audio whatsits, and security widgets. I don't know if Apple made their own small space and/or low power designs for supporting processors, but that's not how other in-house arm core based SoCs I am familiar with worked.
> Probably a mixture of both, I think NVIDIA had a chance to push ARM to new heights it would also have forced them to be far more open.
No way. Even losing the most popular electronics brand (Apple) didn't sway NVIDIA from its course.
> ARM on the other hand would need to undergo a massive change to get into the position they arguably deserve to be in.
Intel has completely botched the last six-ish years, and Apple proved that ARM-based processors cannot just compete with Intel's offerings but outright destroy them, while still keeping backwards compatibility. All that ARM (as an architecture) needs now is Microsoft also offering ARM support and runtime emulation in Windows and a CPU vendor willing to sell decently powerful chips to vendors... and then, snap, Intel is gone.
> Apple proved that ARM-based processors cannot just compete with Intel's offerings but outright destroy them
Your average ARM processor is a Qualcomm Snapdragon or Amazon Graviton, it's not going to win any performance awards. Even the M1 loses out to most Desktop processors once you start talking about multi-threaded performance. It's a great laptop part, proof that a BIG.little architecture is a good idea, and it's massively energy efficient, but it's not 'destroying' Intel parts on raw performance.
ETA: We hear this same rhetoric every time AMD would come out with a part that was better than Intel (Athlon, Ryzen, etc). Intel isn't going anywhere, give them 4-5 years and they'll optimize and sell a part the eliminates the advantages. They've been doing exactly that for 30+ years.
> It's a great laptop part, proof that a BIG.little architecture is a good idea, and it's massively energy efficient, but it's not 'destroying' Intel parts on raw performance.
Raw performance does not matter for 99% of the market (which is PCs for corporate drones shifting data around in Word, Excel and a data warehouse application). Your average Snapdragon is performance-constrained on mobile anyway because of cooling and power usage concerns - put that flagship CPU in a laptop or a NUC-sized case, and you will get more than enough to satisfy said corporate drones. Especially those who have some KPI target for "corporate sustainability" - claiming to have halved your IT fleet's energy consumption will net your average VP/C-level exec quite the bonus.
All the market needs to do is provide the environment for that.
>All the market needs to do is provide the environment for that.
It's already been here and Dell/HP is still an X86 shop. Intel will survive, they've been doing this for 50+ years. With far, far fiercer competition in the past.
> It's already been here and Dell/HP is still an X86 shop
Yeah, because Dell and HP are enterprise vendors - and as long as there is no ARM Windows version that offers x86 backward compatibility, no enterprises (and frankly, most private customers) will shift to ARM.
"Windows on ARM can also run Win32 desktop appps[sic] compiled natively for ARM64 as well as your existing x86 Win32 apps unmodified, with good performance and a seamless user experience, just like any PC. These x86 Win32 apps don’t have to be recompiled for ARM and don’t even realize they are running on an ARM processor."
It doesn't work well for multithreaded applications because of the difference in memory model. It uses some heuristics to try and not issue memory barriers after each memory access, and sometimes gets it wrong at the expense of correctness.
sure, but the market wouldn't value them at $40b, is the thing. At least not without a plan to turn that $2b into a lot more sometime into the future.
if you're uber, or google, deliberately running in the red to grow the business, sure, maybe you deserve a higher valuation than your revenue alone justifies. That's not where ARM is, there's huge headwinds to them attempting to monetize more heavily, even if they wanted to crank revenue it's hard to see how they get there without chasing away their customers.
an underlying problem here is that SoftBank really overpaid for ARM (and then proceeded to mismanage it into the ground) and they want their money back. And sure, that's not the market's problem, but as you can see from NVIDIA or Qualcomm making plays here, there's companies for whom the asset is really worth $40b.
If you artificially restrict what ARM is allowed to do - that mindset in this thread of "the purpose of ARM is to be a public utility providing IP at-cost for their customers to monetize" combined with "they shouldn't be allowed to sell to any customer that might see any synergies from a merger" - then no, it's definitely not worth $40b. Because you're not going to be able to grow that $2b and you don't have any synergies that enhance your own business. But that's the market valuation that the asset could generate in the right hards.
It's kind of unfortunate for SoftBank that they've sort of sleepwalked into a de-facto nationalization of their asset. The synthesis of all of this is that they aren't going to be allowed to sell it at a market price, they are going to be forced to either continue operating it with minimal margins, or sell it to a consortium at a massive discount to the true value of the asset, so that someone else can continue operating it with minimal margins. Even an IPO would result in a significantly constrained valuation as a result of the legal strictures that are being applied - the asset very obviously cannot be sold freely at a market price, and assets are only worth what someone is willing to pay (or in this case, can get the government to approve paying/who the government will approve paying). So even if IPO'd, it will have to operate in the same fashion. Effectively, there is no scenario in which ARM isn't going to be operated as a de-facto public utility going forward.
De-facto I don't see a difference between "the government takes your asset and pays you 1/4th of market rate" and "you need to sell your asset, but the government won't allow you to sell it to anyone except one specific buyer who is only willing to pay 1/4th of market rate". The fact that the asset ends up in the hands of (a trust owned by) Google/MS/Amazon rather than operated directly in the government books isn't relevant to the owner, in fact it actually kind of makes the whole thing more odious. Google/MS/Amazon are now leveraging government power to reduce their supplier costs.
advancement for the sake of advancement is not something to celebrate. I can't imagine a situation where more consolidation in this space is something beneficial for anyone except the company doing the acquisition.
It always blew my mind that Arm is worth that much solely licensing intellectual property. Wouldn't it be more cost efficient for some of their biggest customers to simply hire engineers who can produce similar output? Can someone give me insight into their design team?(size, history, experience, etc.)
Designing a CPU is easy. Very easy, any grad student can do it. So why is Arm worth so much ?
Because it's only part of the problem. If Arm is so successful, it's (IMHO) because of software. Sure, they have world-class CPU designers. But in order to launch a new CPU, you need a full software ecosystem, as RISC V startups are discovering.
One other advantage of Arm is that it has strong anti-fragmentation measures in place. With enough money you can design your own cores, but in order to deviate from standard Arm architecture, you need Arm's signoff. This serves the first advantage: it keeps the software ecosystem value intact.
> But in order to launch a new CPU, you need a full software ecosystem, as RISC V startups are discovering.
You should have seen the state Raspberry Pis were in circa-2011. Everyone online was treating it like the RISC-V of today, criticizing it for a complete lack of software and calling it a novelty board. Lo and behold, come 2018 everyone and their mother wanted a Raspberry Pi for some purpose. Sure, 70% of the software people wanted to use wasn't available, but the things it had were power efficient and performed just about on-par with it's x86 counterparts. RISC-V is between both of those stages right now, the biggest limiting factor is getting hardware into the hands of developers, which is starting to dissolve as manufacturers are catching on.
> This serves the first advantage: it keeps the software ecosystem value intact.
Why do people assume that adding an extension to your RISC-V processor throws the software ecosystem out the window? It's the exact same scenario as ARM, except you're not beholden to arbitrary version updates (eg. v6, v7, v8) that break compatibility. If you want to upgrade your ISA, you just... do. Your base instructions will still run fine, and software compiled for RISC-V will just run. The only way you could fragment like that is if your chip failed compliance tests, which... why would you even ship it then?
I think you misread my comment this as an anti-RISC-V shill. I'm just saying there are challenges which were known in the past 10+ years since RISC-V was invented, and will still be here in the next 20. FWIW I think the direction the ecosystem has taken is not that bad (yet).
> You should have seen the state Raspberry Pis were in circa-2011.
Yeah, I was one of the naysayers initially. And in retrospect the biggest advantage of Raspberry was its price. It sold at a price-point where no one could compete, and that helped overcome most other disadvantages, in a self-sustaining snowball.
And that might very well be the case for RISC-V as well.
Fair enough but they are very much the exception and their impact on the wider ecosystem is minimal. In general Arm’s controls on this happening are much stronger than for RISC-V.
On the x86 side generally one of the vendors makes a new extension and then once it's shown that there's value, their legal teams get together and cross license. The world hasn't fallen apart.
I agree that ARM has more controls, but disagree that those controls have value.
Isn’t x86 situation due to a legally enforceable cross licensing deal arising out of a long history of litigation? No reason why this would apply to any other architecture.
My understanding is that there's no existing cross licensing for new extensions. That's why vt-x and svm are totally different implementions for x86 hardware virtualization; most of the newer supervisor state extensions aren't worth the overhead of cross licensing because it's only kernels and hypervisors utilizing them anyway rather than the orders of magnitude more user code out there.
Also notice how there aren't any Zen cores with AVX512. Even Zen4 is backporting BF16 out of AVX512 to AVX2, and BF16 is just 'use the top 16 bits of a normalizd f32' and was designed specifically to probably be without too much IP overhead.
You probably have better sources than me so I’ll defer to your info on this.
Doesn’t this sort of make the point though that we’re seeing fragmentation in x86 ISAs with only two participants. I may be wrong but I do worry that without Arm like controls every big designer who has a good idea for their niche adds something proprietary on and before long we have a very messy situation.
I just don't see fragmentation as a problem, nor something that can be solved. Even under AArch64, there's close to a hundred FEAT_XXX bits that can even be different for the same microarchitecture, just the integrator was given an option at hardware instantiation time. The only archs without fragmentation are dead archs that no one cares to make new versions of and evolve. What matters is being able to depend on a standard core set so that your tooling can make sense of your code, but if there's cool optional features tacked on the side that's great too. So far RISC-V has been doing a great job defining that core feature set.
Precisely what I was getting at, thank you. At this point, fragmentation is just a built-in part of most ecosystems. RISC-V embraces this nature and gives both hardware and software engineers a huge degree of control over how their code compiles and runs, rather than constraining them to a happy-path scenario that has traditionally encouraged breakage and proprietary extensions.
Sure this is fine but incompatible proprietary extensions, from powerful vendors who can use them to try to differentiate their products seems like a bad destination.
I guess we’ll have to agree to respectfully disagree!
It’s not about a single design team - it’s about a thirty year effort to make available ISAs / CPU designs that SoC designers can incorporate into their products (sharing the costs of their development) and immediately tap into a wider hardware / software ecosystem.
A large company could do it but do you really want to build your own LLVM backend? And the largest Arm customers do design their own CPUs.
Of course RISC-V potentially challenges this model.
Would it be way too cynical to suggest that the reason that this deal was/is not likely to close, is because Intel is influentially and aggressively/successfully lobbying against this?
How would smoothing out the current Intel/AMD machine not be healthy overall?
I wonder how the average ARM employee feels about this. Are they losing out on a windfall from their labors because the deal fell through? I wonder if that will affect retention?
I don't think it's a neither a good nor bad news, actual owner -Softbank- is not the best for ARM, but also ARM-AMD could make almost a monopoly in the GPU market.
Nothing. NVidia still has it's ARM license and as long as they are kept out of the x86 chip business (thanks to Intel and AMD) they are happy to renew the license with ARM.
The regulators should never approve such a takeover or should state that this takeover will inevitably result in a forcaful split of NVIDIA. There will be a conflicf of interest between Nvidia a consumer of ARM and Nvidia provider of IP to competitors (Samsung, Qualcom, Apple, AMD).
Nvidia should play ball (or somehow the regulators should nudge them to play ball ) and invite all big ARM customers to form a co-op.
I would doubt it. They already use both ARM and RISC-V in their products, why would they invent a new ISA? That's not a trivial thing to do, and it doesn't seem worth their time.
In some sense they already have an ISA, denver. But I'd say the odds of this deal falling apart leading them to making SoCs that (primarily) run an ISA besides Arm is exactly 0%. If they eventually do do that, my baseless speculation is it would be because of demands of automotive customers. If it was decided that risc-V was a selling point for automotive, then maybe. (Proprietary ISA? I'd guess never.)
Apple now has that kind of money, but they didn't in 2006 when ARM was selected for the iPhone (which would launch in 2007). Apple was a $50B company back in 2006. A decade later, they have a lot of experience and investment with ARM. For example, how much time has Apple put into LLVM for ARM?
I don't think Nvidia will make their own ISA, but when Apple chose ARM they didn't have lots of money and needed to launch something sooner than later. Even when it came to switching their laptops in 2020, creating a new ISA would have meant a lot of time and effort (and money) over continuing with ARM. Apple was able to use the same Firestorm/Icestorm design for the iPhone CPUs and laptop CPUs.
While Apple has a lot of money, it takes time to bring new stuff to market. Would Apple also move the iPhone to a new ISA and require Rosetta 2 on mobile? How long would it take them to get similar performance from compilers for the new ISA?
Likewise, Apple benefits from large investment in the whole ARM ecosystem. Microsoft wants to support ARM with their stuff because they want Windows on ARM and iOS support for C#. While the Mac is a compelling platform, requiring more work for something custom means less enthusiastic support from third parties and longer times before things are supported.
Money can certainly do a lot, but Apple launched M1 at a very auspicious time when Intel was at a real low point. If they'd chosen to go with a new ISA, does it take an extra couple years? Does it launch with a smaller performance boost because it isn't as mature? Is it harder to get third-party support because there's nothing in it for anyone else?
Apple codesigned AArch64 with ARM. That's how they beat every other vendor to having a 64 bit ARM chip on the market and with a core that wasn't even an ARM design at all.
Developing your own instruction set and getting all compilers to work with it is a pain and very expensive compared to adopting an up and coming open standard.
Bird in the hand versus two in the bush, perhaps. ARM is proven, RISC-V isn't (do you know of a RISC-V chip that is competitive with Apple's M1 ARM-based chip?)
Apple's chips implement ARM ISAs, although Apple creates their own implementations rather than licence ARM's own core designs. How much this affects them depends on the licensing agreements between ARM and Apple, which only they know about, although Apple apparently have a favourable deal. They didn't publicly seem phased by the idea of Nvidia owning ARM, anyway.
The ARM deal would have impacted all other ARM licensees a lot more than Apple. As you note, Apple is making custom cores so they don't need ARM's reference designs.
For example, Google's Tensor processor in the Pixel 6 uses ARM Cortex-X1, Cortex-A76, and Cortex-A55 cores and ARM's Mali GPU. They add some ML cores to the design, but the CPU/GPU is really designed by ARM. Apple, on the other hand, makes its own internally designed cores for its processors rather than using ARM's designs.
While you're right that the general public doesn't know ARM/Apple's deal, we do know that ARM offers a perpetual ISA license. Even if Nvidia bought ARM, Apple could still make current ISA processors forever (it seems unrealistic to think they don't have a perpetual license). While Nvidia might not want to help Apple, it would be in Nvidia's interest to offer new ISAs to Apple at reasonable rates because a) one probably doesn't need updates to the ARM ISA at this point b) Apple not getting on board with a new ISA could impact the rest of the industry getting on board with it given that Apple is so large (and respected) c) Apple puts a lot of time and money into LLVM and having them against an update to the ARM ISA would (at the very least) mean that there wasn't free labor (from Nvidia's perspective) adding compiler support for the ISA update.
It's true that we don't know all the details about deals between Apple and ARM, but at this point it seems like Apple doesn't really need ARM. Samsung, Google, Amazon, and others use ARM's reference designs. If ARM disappeared, they wouldn't get updated cores and would have to build up in-house design teams. If ARM disappeared, Apple would just keep on making new designs. I think Qualcomm is looking to go more custom in the future as they bought Nuvia and are looking to make inroads into things like laptops over the next few years.
In some ways, it seems like ARM getting bought by Nvidia would be good for Apple. If Nvidia becomes really harsh for third-party licensees, it could mean a few years where the costs skyrocket in the Android ecosystem while their costs remain the same. Even after that, it might lower the number of manufacturers for ARM processors. Would MediaTek spin up a custom-design shop? Would Samsung? Maybe, but it would add a lot of cost over re-using reference designs.
Apple isn't really reliant on ARM for anything at this point. The rest of the industry is pretty reliant on ARM's reference designs. If Nvidia ownership meant that those reference designs went up in cost or if Nvidia wanted its best work to go into Nvidia processors and put out weak updates, that would benefit Apple with Android manufacturers scrambling to figure out what to do: buy expensive Nvidia processors, ship weaker updates, invest in the custom-core route?
Yes but Apple's license for ARM v7 allows it to do anything it wants with the tech regardless of who owns ARM. Only 5 to 7 companies have this license and it's very expensive.
Does anyone know why they decided to go for buying Arm in the first place? If they needed tight integration with their GPUs and wanted to move away from x-86, can't they come up with Arm-based solutions like Apple did?
Nvidia absolutely could come up with their own ARM-based solutions like Apple did. Guess where all the people who know how to do that work? Arm. If nothing else, Arm offers a great engineering team to accelerate Nvidia's plans and it also means Nvidia can push new ideas into the latest ISAs much easier. A similar thing happened a few years ago with Imagination Technologies who produced Apple's GPU IP. Except instead of Apple buying them, Apple built an office next door and poached the entire engineering team. Leaving ImgTec as a deeply scarred company that eventually got sliced up and sold off.
Yes, I imagine they could. I wonder if they acted out of fear that someone would come along and gobble up ARM and do them what everyone is now scared of Nvidia doing to everyone else.
Now the question is, who will that "someone" be next? What kind of suitor is fit for ARM?
The curse of ARM being so successful and incredibly crucial to many pervasive industries, yet seemingly unable to go it alone.
I am an NVIDIA employee in a niche of the HPC business. This is not an NVIDIA official opinion.
HPC is nice, but when you hear Jensen getting really excited, it’s not about dominating some niche like that, it’s about a vision of the shiny sci-fi high tech future, and actually delivering the tech to make it real.
So don’t just look at HPC to understand the NVIDIA ambition. Start at edge computing; imagine a world with ubiquitous autonomous robots (cars and drones and otherwise). Think of the onboard chips driving their vision and speech recognition models: That’s a great place for ARM and NVIDIA chips together, whether as one company or two. Watch a recent keynote and see how all the rest of the tech fits into place as part of that: 5G signal processing chips, for instance, something you might gloss over if you’re not in telecom. You don’t need a roadmap to see how it is all connected in support of this world of the future.
(I certainly don’t have the roadmap, either, I just watch the keynotes and help shuffle bits.)
It seems pretty clear that this what they're thinking of. They want to be able to license an integrated architecture that includes power-efficient computing and a powerful ML engine. They've been so heavily investing in this space for a reason.
What I can't figure out is why this is such a big deal to regulators. Nvidia doesn't manufacturer these things (aside from Jetson I believe? Not 100% clear on this). They license IP. And this is IP that I think the world would really like to have.
Currently the only player in this space is Apple. They've built their own integrated silicon with their perpetual ARM license that is now giving them a huge market advantage, and will continue to do so until there is another competitor. The R&D required to compete with a cash-liquid >2.5 Trillion dollar company is just not feasible for any of the other major players at present. Nvidia/ARM opens doors for tons of other companies.
I also think it's foolish to think that Apple won't try to expand this tech offering well beyond personal computers and tablets. They will expand to IoT/Edge devices and services. But the difference is they won't be licensing their IP to other manufacturers, they will be building it themselves (or contracting Foxconn to) and keeping everything in their walled garden.
Guess I'm just frustrated that of all ridiculous acquisitions and anticompetitive nonsense I've seen in the past decade, THIS is the one getting smothered.
> What I can't figure out is why this is such a big deal to regulators.
Because when you own all the IP, you can cut your competitors off by revoking licenses to them, and it'll instantly kill a huge ecosystem from Raspberry/OrangePi to Ampere A1 and everything in between.
I'm not sure nVidia would make such a drastic move, but I'm sure that they'll move strategically to ensure their leadership, which is understandable from a corporate PoV, but it'll be very bad for everybody else.
This is not a big deal, it's a huge deal, and I'm happy that we're here as of today.
nVidia can of course license ARM to embed and/or further improve upon this, or they can use any other ISA or come up with their own. I'm sure they're capable of this, and it'll be much better in the long run for everyone.
> I also think it's foolish to think that Apple won't try to expand this tech offering well beyond personal computers and tablets. They will expand to IoT/Edge devices and services. But the difference is they won't be licensing their IP to other manufacturers, they will be building it themselves (or contracting Foxconn to) and keeping everything in their walled garden.
nVidia's walled garden is not different in any scale when compared to Apple. Considering how friendly nVidia was towards OpenCL, I'm guessing that they'll be at roughly the same distance towards Vulkan for GPGPU applications, keeping CUDA the only possible thing to run with any meaningful performance on their hardware. On the open driver front, they're equally friendly. So it's more like the pot is calling the kettle black here.
At least in the networking side, nvidia’s HW merchant silicon nature is quite evident. They have a very marginal SW stack (at this point still trying to beat the dead horse of cumulus and doing the weakest of investment in Sonic) and basically nothing at all meaningful beyond that. They keep approaching friends trying to sell their ToRs but it’s not happening outside of HPC.
They seemingly don’t see any value in SW. architectures like end-to-end designs (DPU->Network->DPU->pcie) can be great but without SW to make them consumable it’s doa outside of dedicated clusters.
> Nvidia Corp. is quietly preparing to abandon its purchase of Arm Ltd. from SoftBank Group Corp. after making little to no progress in winning approval for the $40 billion chip deal, according to people familiar with the matter.
> Nvidia has told partners that it doesn’t expect the transaction to close, according to one person, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. SoftBank, meanwhile, is stepping up preparations for an Arm initial public offering as an alternative to the Nvidia takeover, another person said.
> The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued to stop the transaction in December, arguing that Nvidia would become too powerful if it gained control over Arm’s chip designs.
> The acquisition also faces resistance in China, where authorities are inclined to block the takeover if it wins approvals elsewhere, according to one person. But they don’t expect it to get that far.
> Both Nvidia and Arm’s leadership are still pleading their case to regulators, according to the people, and no final decisions have been made.
You are correct, but I dislike the tone that what they do is "typically Chinese" or what Chinese do.
* When Chinese were ahead, European stole and smuggled manufacturing technologies from China.
* Industrial revolution in the United States was started by ruthlessly stealing the British innovations. Samuel Slater -- the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" -- is known as "Slater the Traitor" in Britain.
* Japanese stole and copied every design and technology from the US and Europe they could from the start of Meiji era 1868- to 1960s.
Piracy is not a theft in a sense that it's just illegal, not fundamentally immoral. I think it's actually cool historical constant that moves the world ahead.
> Piracy is not a theft in a sense that it's just illegal, not fundamentally immoral. I think it's actually cool historical constant that moves the world ahead.
In as much as the Chinese firms (which in many cases are quasi-state-owned) that do the theft are breaking treaty and contractual commitments, then the piracy is both illegal, and immoral. Not honoring binding commitments is wrong.
I have personal experience with this, with, as it happens, Huawei, who licensed code from the European company I worked for, used it far more widely than the license permitted, and then, when we attempted to negotiate a broader license, simply dropped their license entirely, continuing to use the code until they had reverse engineered it and could generate new instantiations on independently of us. (That much I know to be true; I actually suspect, but don't have conclusive evidence, that employees of our Chinese subsidiary who went to work for Huawei stole source code on their way out the door, making most of the reverse engineering a simple hiring decision for Huawei. I also have reasonable evidence that another Chinese firm did the same with a major American technology company I later worked for, although again, it's difficult to prove).
By your criterion, what Samuel Slater did was also immoral. Yet I'd argue it was actually for the common good. There's an argument to be made that most IP law itself is immoral as it grants monopoly rights whereas in most other context we recognize monopolies as naturally immoral. In fact, it goes against a very natural inclination to share interesting knowledge and stories.
IP law is an attempt to recognize that there's some value in granting limited term immoral monopolistic rights because it net produces a better result longer term. That doesn't mean that IP law itself doesn't open up an immoral land grab and is itself open to abuse. Similarly, we obviously recognize that the commitments themselves may be immoral & thus can be broken (e.g. marriage to an unfaithful spouse) or licenses with immoral clauses should be free to be broken (e.g. you can't sell yourself into bondage).
That's not to say that your experience isn't one where the other player was immoral. I'm just trying to broaden the horizon of the discussion beyond your personal story to how we should think about IP more broadly. It's nowhere near as clear cut as you make it and that illusion stems from how the Western legal and education systems work (which is a whole other topic - passing off another's work in education is "plagiarism" whereas if you do it literature it's "ghost writing").
The amount of mental gymnastics going on to validate IP theft in the GP’s comment is unreal. Assuming the comment is true (and it matches with enough documented cases to warrant that assumption), they had an agreement, Huawei clearly violated it and then usurped it illicitly and immorally. This is not a good thing. It’s even worse that there are no consequences for bad actions because China is playing an extremely asymmetric game. As a result, if the GP’s company went under, you’re still suggesting this is somehow good for the world? It’s good for Huawei, and not many others. Unless you’re Chinese and benefit, know they’re playing for keeps with your losses. This isn’t what trade looks like, it’s not what the WTO agreement was for, and is very zero sum.
I think the commenter would agree with most of what you're saying - I just don't think they care. The argument would be that raising the quality of life of the Chinese citizen through accelerated economic development as brought on by IP theft outweighs the costs of the theft due to the fact that those costs are relatively minor. They'd claim that the precedents being set don't matter, because they were set by all those other counties throughout history already. The claim would be that while China may be breaking the rule de jure, the de facto playbook has already been written by convention.
No, it's wrong for anyone. And in this case, the German company has recourse to actually sue the US military, and with plenty of history backing this up, can actually win!
Good luck trying to sue the Chinese military for contract breach of installing software on more computers than specified...
Further, note that this is an instance of piracy versus IP theft that then directly competes with the original source, as a coordinated playbook with government support to advance local industries. It's pretty much apples & oranges.
As almost all companies that relied on their productivity to get ahead. China does blatantly copy tech in some cases. Companies accepted that risk.
Of course it is good for China to copy the technology, it is not that other nations are exempt from industrial espionage. That they do it so openly is due to the leverage they have.
> By your criterion, what Samuel Slater did was also immoral. Yet I'd argue it was actually for the common good.
I'll start with: I know I can never be unbiased about this.
But I'm much more comfortable with the US (and Europe, and other democratic societies) engaging in this sort of common-good "theft" than a country like China. The US et al. are of course flawed in our implementation of democratic principles, but I do not look forward to living under Chinese global political/economic dominance. I do not believe an authoritarian government in that position would be a good outcome for humanity.
As I understand history, Slater reconstructed technology of which he had gained a robust understanding. That's quite different from theft of an actual constructed artifact, or knowledge that you've licensed. And if he violated patents in the process, they were patents that had force of law only in the United Kingdom.
I think there is room for robust discussion and argument on how long, and for what, patents or other pure ip protection should be granted. I don't believe permanently hiding knowledge, or locking it for indefinite time in the vaults of a single rent-seeking entity is right. But enforcemenbt of time and circumstance limited exclusivity is arguably worth some cost to society, as a means of incenting people and companies to invest in commercializing their innovation. Violating the agreed rules around those things - whether those are contracts, patents, or other forms, is wrong. Specifically, it is theft.
Chinese price dumping from state-sponsored companies also largely wiped out the German solar PV industry[1,2]. Germany was an early innovator in solar, especially in regards to inventing the concept of a feed in tariff when solar PV was still hideously expensive, thereby driving wider adoption. Planet Money did a nice podcast on the history of it [3].
Your comment reads as if there's something wrong with state-sponsored companies but there really aren't and everyone does this including the US and Germany. How they do it might differ but the end result is the same. Directly, tax cuts, giving foreign aid that have strings attached like the US does with almost all its "aid" ("we give you $XXX million and you agree to use it to buy from US defense contractors A, B and C" isn't aid - it is state-sponsoring of companies). It is only seen as a problem in the West when done by a country like PRC and it hurts a company in a country like the US or Germany - never the other way around. I don't know what to call it but it smells like a mix of nationalism and racism.
I think the difference is what the effect is. If China or the US or whoever subsidizes its own industry, people complain but it's not a big deal. I've never really heard any complaints about any of China's state-owned enterprises. Nobody complains that China sells electricity inside China for less than the cost of production; nobody complains about US farm subsidies. What people complain about is when it alters market dynamics. Selling solar panels below the cost of production (I assume that's what happened) upsets people.
Nationalistic flamewar comments like this one will get you banned here, regardless of which country you have a problem with. That's because nationalistic flamewars are among the most repetitive and nastiest discussions the internet has to serve up. This is exactly what we don't want on this site, so please don't do it again.
IIRC Germany, by subsidizing its solar PV industry too heavily, took the innovation pressure out of the latter. This made it way too easy for Chinese companies to take over the market.
This take ignores the history of the development of intellectual property rights, convention signatories and WTO.
Many, many things were unregulated in the past but ARE regulated today.
If they wanted to maintain a policy of ignoring IP, etc., they they should not have joined the WTO and signed conventions that hold them to obligations.
These organization and conventions set the stage or provide the framework and law by which signatories are bound.
Your argument amounts to: hey, the US and Brazil and the Middle East and many other countries used slave workforces in the past therefore it’s okay for China to do the same today, else they are at a developmental disadvantage.
In any event, I'm quite sure any patent [had the concept existed] would have run out by the time they were adopted elsewhere.
I would like to remind that the unequal treaties [0], and other treaties signed during the century of humiliation [1] were also actual treaties signed by the corresponding nations.
Unless they have like a country-wide e-mail address or some kind of HN-exclusive PA system, I don't think this figure of speech really means much other than a childish retort that does not really further dialogue.
The validity of treaties signed under duress on the other hand I think really deserves some questioning.
> The validity of treaties signed under duress on the other hand I think really deserves some questioning.
Historically, a huge number of treaties have been signed under some degree of duress – most peace treaties are only made when one side is clearly winning, but extracting concessions (however painful) from the losing side is more in the winning side's interests than the risk and expense (in blood and treasure) of continuing the war to a complete military victory.
If one took seriously the idea that treaties signed under duress are invalid, the national borders of Europe and North America (among other places) would have to be very different.
They aren't Automatically Awesome Tools Of Civility either.
An entire world war was fought as a direct consequence of one said peace treaty. Nazis wouldn't have been able to gather that much support if the Treaty of Versailles hadn't been specifically designed to aggravate the germans.
If torturing you into selling your assets makes the transaction worth questioning, why would we not question it when whole countries do this to each other?
No doubt some treaties are bad treaties, in that they make the world a worse place. But whether a treaty is good or bad and whether it is legally valid or invalid are two separate questions.
The problem with "questioning transactions" is that if you happen to own any real estate, almost certainly it is land which was stolen from somebody at some point (from indigenous people, or by some invading army, or by some greedy feudal warlord, or whatever). You want to open that can of worms for other people, but do you want to open it for yourself?
Oh my. I just looked, and it turns out in the US there is apparently no such thing as voiding a sale due to it being forced, only 'fraud' understood as misrepresenting the value of the property or the origins of the money haha
So, here's the issue. In other countries, especially over here in South America, this kinds of transactions are heavily frowned upon, and criminal acts resulting in a sale are regularly cited as reasons for voiding some sale or another. This is a bit of a worldview issue, we're not used to thinking about inflicting misery on others as a legit business strategy.
I'm not in the US, I'm in Australia. My wife & I, we own a house. If you trace back the legal chain of title, eventually it originates in a land grant issued by the colonial Governor of New South Wales in the name of the British monarch – and the British monarch's claim of ownership is based on Captain James Cook claiming the east coast of Australia in 1770 in the name of King George III. But, it wasn't unoccupied land – the indigenous peoples lived here, and they saw the land as theirs. In some other places (such as New Zealand or parts of North America), the British negotiated treaties with the indigenous inhabitants to acquire land from them – the fairness of those treaties is often contested, and the British having acquired the land often ignored and violated the other provisions of the treaty – but, in Australia, there were never any treaties with the indigenous peoples, the British saw them as too uncivilised for that, the British Empire just moved in and took over. So, if legal title based on theft is invalid, and our own legal title ultimately originates in the British Empire's theft of land from the indigenous – does it follow that my wife & I don't actually own this house (or at least not the land it is built on), even though we've paid several hundred thousand dollars for it?
Wherever you are in South America, isn't it the same story? The Europeans (the Spanish or Portuguese or whoever) moved in, stole the land from the indigenous peoples, then divided it up and gave or sold it to European colonists, and it has been on-sold and repeatedly subdivided since – so if land titles founded on theft are invalid, land titles where you are must be just as invalid as those over here.
Different legal systems codify different mores differently.
In Argentina and Chile, mapuche people to this day continue to legally challenge the ownership of land that they claim is theirs even after hundreds of years of having lost it to the genocide of their people -and dozens of others- as part of the creation of our nations.
In Uruguay, where I now live, this is very rarely still the case, mostly because the people who would have a right to challenge those lands ownership were very thoroughly murdered and their descendents have long been stripped of that right.
We're just not ok with brutalizing people as a business strategy. Like I said, it's a cultural thing.
> If they wanted to maintain a policy of ignoring IP, etc., they they should not have joined the WTO and signed conventions that hold them to obligations.
Entering into agreements with another party that doesn't share your values or over whom you have little power or leverage is a restatement of the advice to avoid being unequally yoked.
The history of sovereign nations is the history of ‘consequences or not’, as compared to ‘right or wrong’ - for a great many reasons, including that right or wrong is generally a cultural idea that is rarely consistent across cultures, and is often fluid based on trade offs and not as set in stone as we’d all like to believe.
If folks were foolish enough to assume a sovereign nation was going to do what they think is right or wrong (including following a treaty when there are obviously no real consequences despite it benefiting them to not follow it), then they weren’t paying attention to history.
The difference is how the CCP effectively encourage and cover for this type of stealing, for example how the HSR contracts were structured, which was daylight robbery of all of the technologies from the different leaders in the field.
Chinese companies are also aggressive in marketing stolen technologies but because of incomplete knowledge and expertise, end up in sub-standard/broken products, such as the capacitor electrolyte issues around 10-15 years ago.
I don't support the CCP, but have you heard of the Opium Wars? Literal drug smuggling wars waged by outside countries? Countries literally forcing drugs down Chinese throats...
What they're doing is ugly but it pales in comparison to abuses they've suffered. The only redeeming factor is that those abuses happened a long time ago and China should definitely know better than eye for an eye.
That’s largely a misconception, Chinese authorities seazing illegally smuggled opium did spark the first opium war, however France and Britain did not invade China so that they could force Chinese to buy their opium. They wanted to force China to open more ports for trade and to stop persecuting christian missionaries and Chinese christians (obviously mainly due to political reasons, christians functioned basically like a 5th column inside China and allowed European powers to justify their military interventions to their own citizens).
The highly unequal treaties signed between Britain (and other European countries) after the war did not even require China to legalize opium and allow it to be freely imported (that would have been extremely hard to justify politically and the opium trade was not even a primary concern for the British government in the first place). China did legalize opium on their own during the second opium war basically as way to boost tax revenues (because of the Taiping rebellion the Manchu Qing government was near collapse) and Chinese domestic production soon surpassed the imports from British India.
This is a bit like that debate about Confederate states fighting for state rights. The right to own slaves.
China didn't want to trade much except for silver and opium. The Chinese trade was emptying British coffers of silver so the British forced trade of one of the few things the Chinese were willing to trade in exchange for their highly sought out goods.
> China didn't want to trade much except for silver and opium
The Manchu Qing government wanted this, many Chinese considered them to be foreign oppressors not much better than the British and the French and were happy to trade with the Europeans (not only for opium).
> of opium...
Again, opium was only a part of it and it was not that important by the second Opium war. China was falling apart due to internal issues and European powers opportunistically used this to peel of parts of China and to expand their overseas markets (for all kinds of goods besides opium) further increasing internal instability.
I’m not trying to exonerate the British or to downplay their imperialist policies but the ‘Opium wars’ were not merely about the opium trade, they weren’t even widely called that until much later. The modern popular perceptions of the wars is highly influenced by Chinnese civil war propaganda (from both sides) which portrays them as beginning of some western plot to destabilize and destroy China while it’s much more complicated than that.
The difference being the scale and scope of government involvement in the stealing of technology specifically, not colonial antics of forcing the port of Canton open so opium can be imported from British India.
We're not talking about the history and legacy of colonialism. I think that debate has been long settled and traditional colonialism is behind us. The type of colonialism we are now seeing is, for example, infrastructure loans that end up as a backdoor into gaining control of strategic assets in resource-rich but underdeveloped countries, which seems to be the MO of the belt-and-road initiative.
So Chinese companies stealing ip is nothing to be concerned about because of the Opium wars?
The current human rights abuses like forced sterilization of minorities, body part removal of prisoners or the past abuses of chairman Mao are on a much grander scale of evil where do they fit into your worldview?
Hong Kong and Taiwan could be argued as internal affairs, honestly. No matter how much it would pain me that 2 developed and thriving democracies (maybe Macau, too, if you squint really hard at it) are very exposed to nasty regime abuses. "Cuius regio, eius religio" isn't a Chinese saying, it's a Latin one from the Western world. Can't have it both ways.
If you want to go into more unequivocally international affairs abuses, use examples more like the Spratly Islands or the Chinese fishing fleets in international waters.
And regarding IP, I'm kind of torn. China is genuinely developing and innovating and making amazing products for the rest of the world. The UK, the US did the same at the start, also through blatant disregard for IP. Maybe this kind of competition is ok. After all, "If we each trade one apples, at the end we each have one apple. If we each trade one idea, at the end we each have two ideas".
Most people using that phrase don't care much about that, it's about the Great Leap Forward. Plus you could argue that his intervention was legitimized by the North Korean government asking for it.
oblio is the one who brought up the Opium wars as a justification for China stealing IP. That is whataboutism. Responding to whataboutism with examples showing the original whataboutism as invalid is perfectly fine, IMO.
The thing is, that comment by GekkePrutser is not even showing my whataboutism as invalid.
Only wwtrv addressed by direct point and I can say that I only half-agree with him.
But GekkePrutser's reply is something like the OP saying the tram is going straight, me saying that it's going to the right pointing at a 15 degree angle and then GekkePrutser saying that there is no tram, it's a rocket instead and it's actually pointing down and to the left at a 30 degree angle, i.e., waaaaay off-mark.
Anyway, I'm probably breaking a chunk of HN rules continuing this discussion :-)
Gunpowder, modern canal building with locks, porcelain? Just off the top of my head. Porcelain is a particularly relevant example; Europeans experimented with it for about a century, intentionally trying to duplicate the Chinese process, finally having success c. 1700 or so with trade secrets being smuggled out by the Jesuits.
But these days I think it's the immaterial cultural/cognitive tools that came from China which tend to be underrated. For example, the Chinese invented the concept of the civil service and examinations, as we think of them today. Meritocratic experts admitted based solely on an anonymous written examination (duplicated by scribes so even the handwriting couldn't given the applicant away). This would influence the British East India Company, which ultimately led to it being implemented in Britain:
> Even as late as ten years after the competitive examination plan was passed, people still attacked it as an "adopted Chinese culture." Alexander Baillie-Cochrane, 1st Baron Lamington insisted that the English "did not know that it was necessary for them to take lessons from the Celestial Empire."[184] In 1875, Archibald Sayce voiced concern over the prevalence of competitive examinations, which he described as "the invasion of this new Chinese culture."
> the Chinese invented the concept of the civil service and examinations, as we think of them today.
That's a bit of overstatement I think, regarding the civil service I mean. Civil service was known in Babylon, in Egypt and in Roman Empire. From some point Roman Empire also introduced requirements for public servants' education. Not a formalized meritocratic system like in Han China, but we don't have a formalized examination of public servants today either.
It’s often stated that the Chinese invented gunpowder, but we have evidence that it existed hundreds of years before it’s supposed date of invention making the original inventor completely unknown.
That said, people living in what is now China likely invented some of the earliest forms of guns, but again it’s fairly ambiguous. Fire Lances for example where used circa 1132CE which didn’t fire projectiles. Mongols used gunpowder bombs delivered via trebuchet in 1274, but again it’s unclear where those bombs where first invented and if cannons where unknown or simply ineffective. All we can say is over these timescales information was flowing in and out of various nations. Possibly because the actual inventors where also moving around.
By 1350 cannons were in common use in Italy and much of Europe, but there is evidence they existed in some form in 1128. Though if they had been effective it was likely they would have seen widespread use much earlier. What’s more clear is many early advancements occurred in Asia and quickly spread.
All of those things were taken well after any reasonable patent would have expired, so I don’t think they are comparable to the ip theft currently being discussed in this thread. I thought the upstream comment was talking about more recent examples.
Did China try to prevent gunpowder or porcelain from being made by outsiders?
They definitely did try to keep porcelain a secret. As of gunpowder it wasn't stolen by Europeans, rather it seems that it was Mongol invasion that let the knowledge spread.
> All of those things were taken well after any reasonable patent would have expired, so I don’t think they are comparable to the ip theft currently being discussed in this thread.
"IP" is broader than patents that tend to have an expiry date - but even the expiration periods of patents is determined by the host government and not the appropriator. The US has a lot of classified information that would have long since expired had it been a patent, e.g. 1970's nuclear tech, alloys used in submarines, stealth coating on jets. Porcelain and the other examples gp gave would have fallen under the blanket of "National Security" rather than patents.
Gunpowder might have been invented by China, but it was copied and refined by the Arabs.
The Muslim world acquired the gunpowder formula some time after 1240, but before 1280, by which time Hasan al-Rammah had written, in Arabic, recipes for gunpowder, instructions for the purification of saltpeter, and descriptions of gunpowder incendiaries. Gunpowder arrived in the Middle East, possibly through India, from China.
Computers are not "a technology". They're processed rocks.
Insofar as tea involves technique, including selection, cultivation, harvest, processing, and preparation, it's a technology. One that I personally dislike.
The notion of pouring hot water over plant leaves is not something that had to be "stolen" from China. For example it's been known in Ancient Egypt already.
That is a bizarre argument to me. "Stolen"? Plant species spread. Sometimes they're even being spread by animals. Humans have spread numerous plant species across the world. Yet tea plants were "stolen"? Not to mention that even claiming it in the context of Europe is nonsensical to begin with as tea doesn't grow in Europe, where there simply isn't a climate for it. As far as consumption of tea in Europe is concerned, virtually all of it is imports from countries outside of Europe, not something being produced in Europe.
> the context of Europe is nonsensical to begin with as tea doesn't grow in Europe
It does grow just fine in India which was mostly controlled by Europeans at the time. As much as all of this seems bizarre to you it's still a historical fact. The Chinese government (wanting to maintain its global monopoly) banned the export of tea plants. In the 1840's a British botanist Robert Fortune (commissioned by the East India company) travelled to the tea growing provinces of China, disguised himself as Chinese and illegally smuggled several tea plants back to India. After replicating them in greenhouse he introduced them to the Darjeeling region in Northern India.
To be fair tea was already grown in India before 'the Great Tea Heist' it was just different kinds of tea (e.g. Assam) and Chinese teas were more popular and much more expensive (largely due to Chinese monopoly on trade, western ships were only allowed to trade at specifically designed trade ports).
True but the British did steal tea from China. It’s actually pretty interesting it’s akin to espionage the way one British guy secretly went around learning how the tea was grown and taking seeds before setting up shop in India to grow it.
So I recently watched a video on this. Black tea is fermented green tea, Europeans did not know this before getting that knowledge through a spy. Europeans "stole" everything regarding the production of tea, and poached a few Chinese tea masters along with it.
Gunpowder spread to Middle East first, pasta was already being made in Ancient Rome at the very least, and lots of, if not most of "Chinese food" is Chinese-in-name-only.
It is vanishingly unlikely pasta was invented in Ancient Rome. China had been trading with the West since the earliest possible founding of Rome, at the latest. American-Chinese cuisine was invented by Chinese in America, and I doubt any Romans tasted it, ancient or otherwise, but it is possible there was some Ancient Roman analog, but don't confuse who invented with who consumed: a culturally Chinese cook in ancient Rome is not Roman (though not logically impossible, there could have been a Chinese Roman citizen, but I strongly doubt there were any).
- Chinese noodles and Italian pasta have nothing in common save for the shape of some variants.
- Mixing water, flour and egg yolk isn't exactly a massive qualitative leap from simply having flour around.
- Spice were carried over long distances in the ancient world because of their high value density. Food wasn't. Nobody was shipping around noodles. It's still inefficient enough that all process foods are more or less locally made
now.
And finally, I don't understand why you're hypothesizing that Roman pasta would have necessarily been related to Chinese people in Rome. It makes absolutely no sense.
> Chinese noodles and Italian pasta have nothing in common save for the shape of some variants.
While Chinese noodles may be made of rice or wheat flour and Italian pasta is made of wheat flour, the noodles, regardless of what material they're made of, are indeed made in more or less the same way. And indeed, as you have left it, insisting they have nothing in common does not change that it's entirely unsupportable. That the earliest evidence of Italian pasta around the 4th century BC postdates the earliest evidence of China trading with the West, which predates Rome's founding, it is clear when taken in context of the earliest evidence of Chinese noodles around the 4th millennium BC that the recipe for noodles migrated to the West. While it is possible some intrepid Roman chef independently divined the magical process of inducing noodles from wheat flour coincidentally right around the time of the earliest evidence of Chinese trade with the West, it is slightly more complicated than the recipe, a staple of Chinese cuisine for maybe 3500 years by then, being passed along with silk, tea and ivory by traders.
I am completely flummoxed that you can't seem to grasp this, that not only did Romans not invent pasta, they could not possibly have ever made or even tasted pasta sauce, as Christopher Columbus hadn't yet been born when the last Roman died, nor could he have invented the tomato before 1492. Italy basically imported everything, invented nothing, even the Romans themselves were imported and stole most of the innovations attributed to them from the Etruscans, themselves having migrated from S. Turkey, and who the Romans pretty much wiped out within a few hundred years. Italians like to trace their roots in a flattering way because Rome happens to be there, but I don't think there were any Italians before 1946.
By your logic the Jomon culture imported the knowledge of ceramics from Moravia because the Venus of Dolní Věstonice predates the Jomon culture. I'm not quite sure this is how it works.
> they could not possibly have ever made or even tasted pasta sauce, as Christopher Columbus hadn't yet been born when the last Roman died, nor could he have invented the tomato before 1492
You seem to have a penchant for continuously shifting goalposts. What does sauce to have with this?
> It is vanishingly unlikely pasta was invented in Ancient Rome
I never said it was. It's just that by then, it had already been known in Europe. So it certainly wasn't an import from China.
> American-Chinese cuisine was invented by Chinese in America, and I doubt any Romans tasted it, ancient or otherwise, but it is possible there was some Ancient Roman analog
What do these two things have to do with each other? Why are you mixing Roman pasta and Chinese cuisine? I merely juxtaposed them in a list of claims, beyond that they have nothing in common.
This may surprise you, but American Chinese food is not served in China, or a Chinese dish, but actually an invention based on American food that people associate with the Chinese.
Thanks, that is quite interesting, but I was already aware. So let's not confuse which culture invents with which culture consumes. Also should add the stirrup, paper, hand guns, and using petroleum as fuel. I wonder if any of these IP thefts could be successfully litigated, and if so, what the result would be.
You are wildly incorrect. Intellectual property rights were invented by ~500BC by Greek colonists in Sybaris (Italy) predating the invention of movable type and the use of gunpowder in warfare by well over a millennia.
IP is a government-granted privilege, that is why the word "royalties" is derived from the word "royal". In Great Britain of the 18th century, where the concept began, the one who guaranteed your IP rights was the Sovereign and his/her courts. There isn't anything like IP in the Common Law or other traditional legal systems, while ownership of physical property dates at least until Antiquity. Two very different concepts.
I am not against IP as such, but violation of a legally guaranteed monopoly, even though it causes some loss of capturable value, isn't the same as theft/larceny.
Words have meanings and we should respect them. Piracy is legally similar to a non-organized blacksmith setting up shop in a city where every blacksmith must be member of a certain guild to work. This kind of monopoly was routinely granted before by either the Sovereign or particular cities.
What is theft / larceny if not an abstract definition of ownership? How does theft work in cultures where ownership doesn't exist?
Isn't ownership a government-granted privilege as well then?
So if piracy is simply the act of ignoring sovereign privilege in open water (sea, space, internet), then I think the only contention one could make that piracy != theft is by asserting that piracy is not only theft.
People also say that someone stole their heart, but it does not mean that they have a gaping hole in their chest. Casual use of a language for narrative purposes is one thing, speaking about actual criminal activity another.
To be clear, I make some money on my IP (being a self-published author who sells his books) and I encountered people pirating scanned copies of my work. I do not mind on this scale, but I am aware that if someone just started publishing my books commercially and I had no copyright to protect me, I would be in trouble.
But it still wouldn't be theft, rather a foul kind of "competition". My physical books wouldn't disappear from my (rented) garage and readers who like me would still hopefully buy them directly on my e-shop.
The most sold book in the world, by a large margin, for a long long time, is The Bible. If genetic historians and biblical scholars succeed, perhaps someday the unknown decedents of the unknown authors and other known valid holders of IP rights, such as the decedents of Moses and brothers, sisters and cousins of Jesus, could one day be fairly compensated. But it would end up being everyone alive, so we should do that, fairly compensate all the IP holders for the unpaid use of all that IP, including all the movies and TV shows, and including all interest accrued across the centuries, and literally everyone will get rich off the proceeds of past, current and future Bible sales. Crazy idea, but it just might work.
Then you'd have to sue your business competitors if they manage to capture a part of your market. After all you've been deprived by them of the benefit of getting money from that part of the market.
This definition is almost explicitly crafted to make IP seem worthless.
Information that requires investment to gain is considered valuable. This argument is basically "any job that isn't physical manufacturing should not be paid, since the ideas only spread instead of move."
Oh you spent $500m developing a novel cognitive treatment for ptsd and proving it works better than sota? Humanity thanks you! Enjoy your total loss."
Oh you wrote a book? Hopefully it wasn't a book on business building, since you'll be earning nothing for your effort.
You seem to lack the simplest terms when talking of IP laws. Copyright is something you infringe. You don't even say what you are referring to here by talking of "IP". The important stuff is always in details.
There's a large amount of misinformation and people lacking an understanding on the differences between copyright, patents and trademarks. Making these threads repetitive to read. Always such a pointless anecdotes such as yours, truncating all IP systems under "IP laws".
For example. The patent system came to existence to ensure that inventions were not hidden, but published to the public in a form patent. Instead of the inventor hiding the invention, the society grants the inventor sole rights to the invention thanks to them making it public.
Copyright and Trademark are different beasts to Patents, and all these are very linked to the laws of single countries, bar signed treaties. Please distinguish what you are talking about. Otherwise your point is moot.
Saying theft and copyright violation are different morally is not suporting copyright violation. It is to ask as the difficulty of copying wanes, perhaps it is time to rebalance giving up the right to copy in exchange for more innovation. When the right to copy was traded in exchange to protect publishers, it was a lot harder to copy stuff, so relatively less was sacrificed. Now copying things is super easy and crucial to normal work flows.
And yet taking a snap of a museum artifact still is quite distinct from stealing someones pen.
I do not deny the concept of IP (if it is me who you were addressing; see my other comments), but I believe that sloppy nomenclature leads to sloppy thinking.
Fraud vs. theft vs. copyright violation vs. insider trading etc. are all different categories of illegal activity and we shouldn't mix them up by using their names interchangeably.
I admit that as a maths major, I tend to be pedantic about definitions, at least in things as serious as crime.
There is a moral dimension as well. I do not believe that we should cut punishments for theft in half. But I do believe we could well cut copyright protection periods back to the levels where they were in 1960 without causing any major problems or undue hardship to anyone.
> Piracy is legally similar to a non-organized blacksmith setting up shop in a city where every blacksmith must be member of a certain guild to work.
No. It’s legally similar to a blacksmith copying another blacksmith’s designs and putting his trademark mark on their products. IP laws do not inherently restrict anyone from freely practicing their trade nor do they force you to join any trade/industry associations.
> IP laws do not inherently restrict anyone from freely practicing their trade nor do they force you to join any trade/industry associations.
While true, it's a gray area when you get into certain industries. Cell phones, for example, are chock-full of cross licensed patents regarding the baseband chips and radio waves. There's a term in the industry for these kinds of patents (my mind is blanking). Ignoring the necessary industry talent, there's no way in hell one can make a new baseband processor without dozens of NDAs and patents that you yourself can offer up as leverage.
IMHO (and one many here share), IP laws (with regard to software) have gone way too far. The big problem is that the companies with the might to enact change tend to be part of the problem themselves.
How is this any different than saying "Cell phones are too complicated so lets just skip all that research for practical reasons?"
I agree that many patents are held by groups that don't use them how we'd like them to, but they still had to _buy_ the patent. Society promised them that the patent would be enforced and it is. Combating abuse of the courts is a separate matter.
You spend twenty years designing the perfect steel production method, spending millions of dollars, and start selling it as Pessimizer Steel. It's obviously superior. You start making some of your money back. I spend an hour watching you through the window and start selling it as Super Steel and claiming that it's just as good because I made it the same way. I sell it at half price because I'm not paying off any business loans. You go bankrupt.
That's the system you want? Who is going to invest in steel research in that system?
That's not an argument about forging trademarks - it's an argument for respecting patents (if the Pessimizer manufacturers got one) or trade secrets (if they didn't).
You can make an argument for trademark law on the basis of sunk costs to develop an intangible brand with intrinsic value, as opposed to as a consumer protection mechanism, but this isn't that.
In one case, you forbid everyone but the licensees to produce a certain type of nails. In another case, you forbid everyone but the guild members to produce nails at all.
For a claim of theft to be made, someone, somewhere, somehow must be denied property of some kind.
Piracy is infringement, and we have that word because the hard fact is nobody, anywhere, anyhow is denied property.
There is value, and all that, but it's not theft, and it's not simple.
In the case of say movie piracy, or music, some entertainment work, infringement can actually add value back to the creator by making that creator relevant and with that relevancy, a potential buyer of works. Bob likes a band, shares a track with Joe, who likes it and buys an album they would not have otherwise purchased if it were not for Bob...
In the case of a technology, someone learns how to do something other people would rather they not know. No party is denied understanding or property, unless one wants to talk about a physical instance of the understanding, but that's a side show really. The value is in the info, not the piece of paper detailing it, but I digress too.
Here's the interesting thing:
Once more parties have that understanding, and despite originators preferring they not have that understanding, all parties can gain from new understanding that always happens on top of existing understanding, and in the end?
That's how we advance.
Question is what is worth what?
It's not one of theft, but infringement and of what makes sense in economic terms as well as our overall development as beings.
I think the US will be taught a valuable lesson in this regard. In the 70s and 80s the MBAs figured that they could strip industrial assets and rely on "intellectual property". In the 21 century their children will be shown by China how wrong they were.
All wealth is the product of labor. Intellectual labor is labor, and the understanding it brings is wealth, but that inherently leaks out into the body of people, eventually becoming common knowledge, or at a minimum well known, or documented. Some secrets do die with their originators too, but that's more rare.
I changed careers watching those MBA's tear great companies apart, and the example close to home for me was Tektronix. There is a video out there "Spirit of Tek" that kind of gets at the powerful innovation culture once practiced there. In that culture, Joe Bloomstone can walk off the street, get training and advance into product design and even spin off into a company backed by Tek!
It happened a lot and the area was rich with technical understanding, manufacturing, all the good stuff.
Then it got sent over there...
Today, people want it back, many people are taking hard won skills to their graves, leaving current people to climb back to regain what was sold off for a little money in the now, leaving the region doing hair, nails, tires...
The people who can make stuff matter. Physical things matter.
It's not legally, because it is not philosophically. And that's without denying that e.g. copyrighted works, inventions, models, etc., can and often have value.
Great historical perspective. I'm curious how international intellectual "piracy" looks when one thinks of the world as a single place and humanity as a single people.
You are correct, but I dislike the offended whataboutism tone. That other countries did the same 100 years ago, or even some other countries still do today, is not the point.
The point is it's typical of China to steal IP. It's a problem because it gives Chinese companies an unfair advantage as they grow big by stealing all they want from others, but have their own IP protected in other countries.
It would be nice to live in a world without patents, but that's not the world we live in. So if you're ok ignoring reality, might as well go on a tirade how stealing cash is "not immoral" because you don't believe in government issued tender or something.
Acquiring/stealing/conquering techs from competing players via any means necessary in Civilization was a key means to closing the power gap with rivals on upper levels of difficulty.
China has done this to perfection in the real world.
Stealing a tech was a massive diplomatic blow in Civilization. The US just shrugged (because the rich made a huge amount of money and increase of relative wealth status by acquiring a massive slave labor force in China rather than deal with the uppity American middle class).
I just did a light google pass to see if any international relations academics have done anything with Sid Meier's Civ and various other types of games. I expected them to not, because of course academics are STILL "ew, computers" and even worse, it's gauche mass market entertainment.
But the abstraction is, I would argue, more detailed than a lot of academic analyses which are largely bloviation, the game theory quantifiable and measurable, and reduces a lot of complexity that normally would be hard for a garden variety person (aka a gamer) to wrap their head around.
Civ always tried dropping historical tidbits and education into it, but arguably its most potent contribution is simply the more honest treatment of history: civilizations rising and falling, fighting over resources, getting conquered, and getting destroyed, and the roles of economic strength, military strength, and tradeoffs.
> Doing what they always do, stealing without repercussions from innovators around the world.
The US invented this practice, we didn't respect the IP of other countries until we started generating significant amounts of our own. China even stole this idea!
It’s a bigger story for SoftBank than it is for NVIDIA. NVIDIA can do OK without ARM, but for SoftBank it was a way to be able to pay redemptions for the failing Vision Fund.
Back in the day a Japanese businessman who screwed up the way Son did would find a knife in their room and know what they were supposed to do with it. The ARM deal took the pressure off but it is back on again.
