Nvidia is reportedly in ‘advanced talks’ to buy ARM for more than $32B
This is quite concerning honestly. I don&#x27;t mind ARM being acquired, and I don&#x27;t mind Nvidia acquiring things. But I&#x27;m concerned about this combination.<p>Nvidia is a pretty hostile company to others in the market. They have a track record of vigorously pushing their market dominance and their own way of doing things. They view making custom designs as beneath them. Their custom console GPU designs - in the original Xbox, in the Playstation 3 - were considered a failure because of terrible cooporation with Nvidia [0]. Apple is probably more demanding than other PC builders and have completely fallen out with them. Nvidia has famously failed to cooporate with the Linux community on the standardized graphics stack supported by Intel and AMD and keeps pushing propietary stuff. There are more examples.<p>It&#x27;s hard to not make &quot;hostile&quot; too much of a value judgement. Nvidia has been an extremely successful company <i>because of it</i> too. It&#x27;s alright if it&#x27;s not in their corporate culture to work well with others. Clearly it&#x27;s working, and Nvidia for all their faults is still innovating.<p>But this culture won&#x27;t fly well if your core business is developing chip designs <i>for others</i>. It&#x27;s also a problem if you are the gatekeeper of a CPU instruction set that a metric ton of other infrastructure increasingly depends on. I really, really hope ARM&#x27;s current business will be allowed to run independently as ARM knows how to do this and Nvidia has time and time again shown not to understand this at all. But I&#x27;m pessimistic about that. I&#x27;m afraid Nvidia will gut ARM the company, the ARM  architectures, and the ARM instruction set in the long run.<p>[0]: An interesting counterpoint would the Nintendo Switch running on an Nvidia Tegra hardware, but all the evidence points to that this chip is a 100% vanilla Nvidia Tegra X1 that Nvidia was already selling themselves (to the point its bootloader could be unlocked like a standard Tegra, leading to the Switch Fusee-Gelee exploit).