nVidia and ARM: what it really means for consumers

Some news are big news because of the $$$ attached to their headlines, some are big news because of their importance in certain markets and some are big news because of the future changes they may bring about to everyone’s life. The acquisition of ARM by nVidia checks all three boxes and it really feels like a game changer: the kind of corporate mega-merger that will actually have an impact on a global scale instead of just make a few fat cats even richer. Here are the reasons why.

Basics first: nVidia is buying ARM from Softbank for about 40 billion dollars in a mix of cash, stock and inequity. ARM is the most important chip designer in the world when it comes to mobile devices, as its patented micro-architecture is used by practically every smartphone manufacturer and chip designer from Apple to Samsung to Qualcomm (which supplies the chips found in a large percentage of all Android devices). nVidia does not want to lose those customers and harm a healthy business so it claims that ARM will operate as before out of their headquarters in England. The acquisition will have to be approved by regulatory authorities in the US, Europe, China and the UK before it becomes official (but there is no reason why it shouldn’t).

ARM is known for its smart, versatile, power-efficient chips that are perfect for use in mobile or function specific products — chips that not Intel, not Samsung, not even nVidia themselves were able to compete with, hence the British company’s position in the global market. ARM has also made great progress during the last five years in making its chip designs scalable, meaning that they can be used in a range of devices from a thermostat to a supercomputer while retaining their low power consumption and efficiency.

It’s this scalability that made ARM such an attractive target for nVidia as it complements perfectly the latter’s plans for the future. In the coming years tech and the Internet will be all about AI, processing power through the cloud, smart devices of all kinds and every application that can take advantage of their combined strengths. nVidia already had a towering presence in the scientific computing, datacenter, AI and automotive industries through its multiple, powerful GPU lines. After merging with ARM the company will have access to the CPU-based datacenter industry and the hundreds of billions of consumer devices based on ARM’s designs, becoming the first company that’s able to address the enterprise, professional and consumer markets with services tailored to each.

So, what will this mega-merger mean for the everyday lives of consumers? In the here and now, as well as for the next 12–18 months or so, not much at all. ARM will license its next chip designs to other manufacturers as per usual, smartphones and tablets and media players and other devices will be based on them and released as per usual. It is when nVidia tech will start appearing as part of ARM’s architecture that things will become really interesting: custom GPUs designed by the former in order to perfectly complement the CPU designs of the latter could bring truly revolutionary devices to market in terms of power and battery life — at extremely competent prices to boot.

These devices will be specifically designed so as to take full advantage of the services nVidia will offer through datacenters based on ARM architecture. Virtual computing on the go? Check. Cloud gaming? Check. Digital assistants a la Stark’s Jarvis for cars, phones, smart homes, you name it? Check. The possibilities are endless since edge computing (the combination of cloud computing and just enough processing power on-device) will eventually become the norm in many, many product categories. This is where nVidia was heading anyway and the ARM acquisition will speed things up considerably.

With nVidia pursuing all of the above it will inevitably step on the toes of several current ARM partners, of course: Apple, Samsung and other licensees have all shared ARM’s architecture in peace so far because they were not competing with ARM itself. That will probably change at some point in the future and there might be consequences to ARM’s client list. nVidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, publicly claims that he will not interfere with that part of ARM’s business and that he will go after the datacenter and cloud markets instead. That may be true for now but it would make no sense to not target the consumer market sooner or later, so Huang “testing the waters” in a year or so and adjusting plans accordingly seems to be a more likely path.

Still, exciting stuff. No, not that $40 billion deal: that’s of no interest to us in and of itself. It’s the merging of the top mobile CPU and the top all-kinds GPU designers in the world, right before 5G networks start becoming a thing, that should excite people. If nVidia and ARM play their cards right, this will be remembered as a true highlight in modern tech’s efforts to become ever-present, truly smart, practically invisible but almost indispensable in the lives of billions. A worthwhile vision indeed.