Gaming Nvidia Close To Buying ARM for $40 Billion: Report (OUTDATED)

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In a deal that would undoubtedly change the semiconductor industry for years to come, according to the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia is close to finalizing a deal with SoftBank to purchase ARM Holdings for more than $40 billion in stock and cash. The deal is expected to be officially announced early next week. While the exact terms and final sale price of the deal are unknown, the $40 billion offer would represent a tidy profit for SoftBank, which purchased ARM for $32 billion four years ago.

As part of the deal, Nvidia would likely be subject to regulatory approvals that would compel the company to continue to licence the ARM architecture to existing customers, but it would still gain access to a treasure trove of IP and engineering talent. That could enable the company to quickly develop custom CPU architectures for its own use, which would then further the company's broadening push into the profit-rich data center market.

Nvidia has long held the leading position in AI compute in the data center, particularly in the leading supercomputers. However, AMD and Intel, by virtue of having both CPU and GPU production in-house, can tie the CPU and GPU together in much more sophisticated ways than Nvidia due to their purpose-built designs. As a result, the most important supercomputing contracts from the Department of Energy have recently gone to Intel and AMD, both of which have the advantage of tightly-coupled GPU and CPU designs that will power the world's first exascale-class supercomputers. Derivatives of those same designs will eventually filter out to the broader market.

In comparison, Nvidia's singular focus on GPU compute limits its ability to compete with complex designs that fully leverage the advantages of memory coherency between accelerators (like GPUs) and the CPU. Naturally, custom ARM-based Nvidia CPUs would address that need perfectly, and the company has already paved the way for tighter ARM integration with its recent introduction of CUDA support for ARM architectures.



Read more here. (Tom's Hardware)
 
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