With the ARM deal called off, NVIDIA CEO sees no reason to update the company’s roadmaps
In an interview with VentureBeat, NVIDIA CEO confirmed the company is not making any changes to its strategy after calling off the deal to buy ARM Limited.
Two weeks ago NVIDIA officially confirmed it will no longer pursue the acquisition of ARM Limited after ‘significant regulatory challenges’. NVIDIA has been in a tough spot ever since the deal was announced. A number of regulatory and anticompetitive bodies have expressed their concern about NVIDIA’s $40B proposal to purchase ARM. The deal was simply not going anywhere while Jensen kept saying that he expects the deal to be finished soon.
After it became obvious that NVIDIA that the deal is not happening, the company had no choice but to call it off. But one would wonder if this affects the company’s strategy in any way. Jensen confirms that the company still has its 20-year license agreement with ARM, a license that will be used in CPUs, GPU, and DPUs, and no changes to the strategy are required.
VentureBeat: What is your post-Arm strategy? Do you have to communicate your strategic direction in light of [the Arm deal being called off]?
Jensen Huang: Not really anything. Because we never finished combining with Arm. So any strategies that would have come from the combination were never talked about. And so our strategy is exactly the same. We do accelerated computing for wherever there are (central processing units) CPUs. And so we’ll do that for x86. And we’ll do we do that for Arm. We have a whole bunch of ARM CPUs, and system-on-chips (SoCs) in development. And we’re enthusiasts. We do all that. We have a 20-year license to Arm’s intellectual property. And we’ll continue to take advantage of all that and all the markets. And that’s about it. Keep building CPUs, (graphics processing units) GPUs, and DPUs (data processing units).
Furthermore, Jensen added that his company will take advantage of all three popular architecture (x86, ARM, RISC-V) in their product and will decide which architecture makes more sense for each product.
VB: So it’s your three-chip strategy? Would you consider RISC-V now that the Arm deal is not happening?
Huang: We use RISC-V. We’re RISC-V users inside our GPUs. We use it in several areas. For system controllers, inside the Bluefield GPU, there is a RISC-V acceleration engine, if you will, a programmable engine. And we use RISC-V when when it makes sense. We use Arm when it makes sense. We use x86 when it makes sense.
For NVIDIA nothing really changes, but the deal off, the company loses the ability to shape the roadmap of ARM architecture in any way they might have wanted it to go in the future. However, with both companies working closely together and NVIDIA being the precursor of power-efficient computing and networking solution, NVIDIA should not worry about its future.
Source: VentureBeat
