On February 8, 2022, SoftBank and Nvidia officially announced that NVIDIA's $66 billion acquisition of Arm from SoftBank's side was terminated. SoftBank and Nvidia said in a statement: "Despite the good faith efforts of both parties, the parties agreed to terminate the agreement due to significant regulatory challenges that hindered the completion of the transaction." Arm will now begin preparing for a public offering. ”
Due to the termination of the transaction, SoftBank obtained a $1.25 billion acquisition deposit previously paid by Nvidia, in exchange for Nvidia to retain the Arm license for 20 years, while SoftBank, which failed to return to blood, began to prepare for the listing of Arm. At the same time, Arm also underwent personnel changes due to the termination of the transaction, and Rene Haas, former president of Arm IP Products Group, will succeed Simon Segars as arm's new CEO.
Regarding the reason for the personnel change, SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son said: "As Arm begins to prepare for re-listing, Rene Haas is the right leader to accelerate Arm's growth. I would also like to thank Simon Segars for his leadership, contribution and dedication to Arm over the past 30 years. ”
Compared to Nvidia's defeat, another chip giant has been much smoother recently. Just last month, China's State Administration for Market Regulation conditionally approved AMD's plan to buy FPGA maker Xilinx for $35 billion. Recently, AMD CEO Su Zifeng said that the transaction plan to acquire Xilinx will be officially completed in the first quarter of 2022.
The two major mergers and acquisitions in the semiconductor field showed a completely different ending at the beginning of this year, and also added a new story to the long-term competition between "old enemies" NVIDIA and AMD.
From GPUs to data center processors, AMD and NVIDIA have been competing in the semiconductor space for decades, making gaming enthusiasts shout "AMD Yes!" Su Zifeng and huang Renxun, the "father of the nuclear bomb", have also been tit-for-tat for their own company's products, and there have been many war of words. Today, Su Zifeng, who successfully won Xilinx, can be described as a sigh of relief, and these two different mergers and acquisitions must also determine the future development path of the two companies.
In this competition, semiconductor enthusiasts also talk about the relationship between Huang Jenxun and Su Zifeng:
According to a widely quoted report, "Both Su Zifeng and Huang Jenxun were from Tainan and were related. Su Zifeng's grandfather and Huang Renxun's mother are brothers and sisters, and she has to call Huang Renxun a cousin."
Therefore, one of the most important competitions in the semiconductor field has also become a competition between "cousins".
The entanglement between the two companies and the entrepreneurs who run them doesn't stop there. As a "cousin", in terms of career, Huang Jenxun, who founded NVIDIA in 1993, looks far more senior than Su Zifeng, who only became the CEO of AMD in 2014, but what is rarely mentioned is that AMD is actually the first stop of Huang Jenxun's silicon valley trip. In 1984, the young Huang Renxun had just earned a degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University, and then went to AMD for two years as a chip engineer, and Su Zifeng had just entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to major in electrical and silicon technology.
No one could have imagined that thirty years later, a key war in semiconductors would be waged over the names of two Chinese american companies. Huang Renxun and Su Zifeng, who each have a vote of enthusiast fans, are also called "Lao Huang" and "Su Ma" by netizens respectively.
There are even foreign netizens who have put the two together. Image credit: Reddit r/AyyMD community
Interestingly, the first confrontation between Lao Huang and Su Mama actually stemmed from a controversial merger and acquisition case more than a decade ago.
AMD's acquisition of ATI in 2006 shocked the semiconductor industry at the time. Since 1995, when AMD won an 8-year-long 386 processor lawsuit with Intel, AMD and Intel have been in a state of catching up with each other in CPU research and development and pushing new products, and the competition is extremely fierce. In 2005, Intel overpowered the former little brother AMD in one fell swoop, and forced Gordon Moore, who was 76 years old at the time, to come out of the mountain again, and formulated the well-known "Tick Tock Plan", which is a cycle every two years, the Tick stage upgrades the process, and the Tock stage upgrades the processor architecture. "Transistors on a chip double every 24 months, i.e. product performance in the semiconductor industry doubles every two years."
With the "pendulum plan", Intel's CPU has thrown off AMD in both process and architecture, and AMD in order to cope with Intel's huge pressure on the CPU side, acquired ATI, which was similar to NVIDIA's market share in the GPU field at that time. At CES 2007, Mario Rivas, then executive vice president of AMD's Computing Products Division, explained why AMD bought ATI. To sum up into three points, first, AMD saw the potential of general-purpose graphics chips, which needed graphics business; second, AMD needed consumer electronics business and the market of up to $2 billion that ATI had at that time; and finally, AMD needed CPU and GPU two-in-one to tap their potential.
The market even rumored that Nvidia was also one of AMD's acquisition targets at that time, and later chose ATI due to high prices and Huang Jenxun's search for CEO. Since AMD has acquired NVIDIA's old rival ATI, this also means that the competition between AMD and Nvidia in the GPU field has officially begun.
However, trying to digest ATI's technology is not something that can be solved in a short time, at this time, AMD is under great pressure, in the CPU field due to the 2010 release of the Bulldozer ("bulldozer") architecture, HD6970 radiator and external power supply conflict, resulting in AMD must manually polish off the corner of the external power supply to solve the heat dissipation problem, resulting in the full name Advanced Micro The AMD of Devices (ultramicro semiconductor) is known as the Agriculture Machine Devices ( Agricultural Machinery Department ) .
AMD, which was originally struggling under the pressure of Intel, was seriously injured after the acquisition of ATI for $5.4 billion, at this time AMD can be said to have continuous losses to the brink of bankruptcy, only the GPU market brought by ATI can barely make a profit, and even many industry insiders said that AMD's acquisition of ATI was a mistake.
At this time, Nvidia is actually not good, before AMD acquired ATI, Nvidia even cooperated with AMD to fight against Intel, and now not only faces the "betrayal" of partners, its own product Geforce series is also because of heat, high energy consumption, so that Huang Jenxun xi mentioned the title of "father of the nuclear bomb", Intel also took advantage of the void, stopped the patent cross-sharing with Nvidia, and also began to invest in research and development in the field of 3D graphics accelerators.
When the PC Yusanjia War was a regiment and AMD was about to withdraw from the battlefield, Su Zifeng came to the center of the stage.
In 2014, at the age of 44, Mama Su took over AMD, which was in danger. Su Mama is a proper god-level figure in the field of semiconductors, just a few years after graduating from MIT, she invented copper technology instead of aluminum-connected semiconductor chips at IBM, which increased the processing speed of the chip by 20%, and in 2002, she was named "Outstanding Innovator Under 35" by MIT Technology Review Magazine.
After Su Mama came to AMD in 2012, together with Jim Keller, a big bull in the field of chip design, spent four years to develop the Ryzen Zen architecture, and planned the development roadmap of the Zen series, which saved AMD's disadvantage in the CPU field in one fell swoop, and Intel gradually became a "toothpaste factory" due to the gradual failure of Moore's Law, and the long-term difficulty in production was at 14nm.
Under the leadership of Su Mama, AMD's GPU field has also made progress, in 2019, AMD released a generation of cost-effective god card RX 5700XT without leaking, although the 5700XT is slightly weaker in performance than Nvidia's graphics card in the same period, but its lower price has also won a lot of market and word of mouth, which also shows AMD's determination to return to the graphics card ring.
However, later developments proved that Nvidia was not Intel. With the rapid development of AI technology and deep neural networks, Lao Huang's investment in the field of technology has gradually blossomed, each generation of graphics cards can guarantee a 20% or even 30% increase, to the Geforce 30 series market has reached the point where "one card" is difficult to find, I have to say that the company that can wrench wrists with Lao Huang is called a real technology company.
Nowadays, the competitive landscape of PC Royal Three shows a situation of staggered teeth, Intel CPU first, AMD CPU and GPU are second, and NVIDIA GPU is first. As for why AMD can live well in the cracks, but also loved by users, a netizen's sentence "Thank you AMD for letting us use a cheaper (better /more core) Intel" and "Intel, Nvidia research and development rely on AMD" may break the truth.
In the past, although AMD has suffered great financial pressure because of the acquisition of ATI, ATI has also opened the door to amD in the GPU field, allowing AMD to open the market in the PC and game fields, and the AMD acquisition of Xilinx is aimed at the data center market, and AMD looks at Xilinx's leading position in the FPGA market.
FPGA is a field programmable logic gate array, it is as a semi-customized circuit in the field of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and appears, which not only solves the shortcomings of custom circuits, but also overcomes the shortcomings of the limited number of gate circuits of the original programmable devices, from consumer electronics to data centers to 5G communications are widely used.
In simple terms, the technology research and development of the data center business cannot bypass FPGAs, and Xilinx has also developed the Versal ACAP heterogeneous computing acceleration platform, which can serve the cloud and edge products of AI computing. Intel occupies 90% of the data center server chip market, and earlier this value is an exaggerated 99%, AMD in recent years has leveraged Intel's corner, occupying nearly 10% of the market share, if you gradually digest Xilinx's technology, it is expected to continue to break through in this field. It is worth mentioning that as early as 2013, Intel acquired Altera, which was then the second largest FPGA market share.
Lao Huang is no longer the "father of the nuclear bomb", and the data center market has surpassed the game to become NVIDIA's first major business. Nvidia's $7 billion acquisition of server end-to-end solutions vendor Mylos in 2020 and the $66 billion acquisition of ARM from SoftBank last year are all laying out the data center business for the future.
At the same time, the arm field of server chips has also become a trend, in recent years, the Internet giants have begun to develop arm architecture server chips, including foreign Amazon, Google and even Intel's old friend Microsoft, domestic Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei, etc. are actively involved, Nvidia has also developed a multi-core CPU based on arm architecture and DPU (data processing unit) for future data center processors.
It is foreseeable that there will be many hard battles to be fought in the field of data centers in the future. Lao Huang lost Arm, while Su Zifeng's Arm (weapon) was more abundant. I don't know if Su Mama, who is holding Xilinsi, has secretly joked about the yellow cousin who lost arm.