NVIDIA in Talks to Buy ARM ➹

Time to get out your popcorn, folks.

We’re in for a few weeks of armchair commentary concerning ARM licensing, how this will (or not) lead to a schism in Apple/non-Apple ARM variants (think AMD/Intel), if NVIDIA should be the target of an anti-trust probe since it might essentially be competing with its own licensees, and whether or not this is another nail in Intel’s future coffin as NVIDIA clearly prepares to build its own CPU/GPU combos, but starting from the GPU side (whereas Apple has added GPU capabilities to a high-octane, very finely tuned ARM design).

Any which way, Apple can certainly hold its own. I suspect they’ve planned this far ahead and then some, maybe as far as ARM 128-bit.

Note the reference to “data centers” in the PR. This is a play for the (belatedly nascent) ARM server market as well, and NVIDIA is already present in the server space–they acquired Mellanox, for instance, but still have to take Intel along for the ride, and that is clearly not a way to turn enough profit.