What is the impact on Apple if NVIDIA were to buy ARM?

[UtterDisbelief]

@UtterDisbelief,

Back in the day we where using Z80 for years past it's sell by date, everything was coded in machine code and burned into EPROMS (no assembler) which allowed us to have very optimised code for our control systems.

We then moved onto the Motorola 68000 which we programmed in assembler and stuck with to the end of the 80's.

In the 90's the company wanted to use windows as the front end to our control systems which led to me heading up the software design team for the new system, at the time we still had a very close working relationship with Intel which is how we ended up with pre-production Pentium Pro's for the development.

We designed our own PCI card to interface to our existing control systems bus. it was a good system and allowed us to update our customers to a much improved front end without having to update to I/O racks. That system lasted into the mid 2000's ... good times for sure, things where so much simpler back then.

Cheers
Jay

They were simpler for sure. I guess the complication is why pro-coders all seem to use High Level programming languages nowadays. Plus computing power can easily swallow the runtime overheads.

I think I still have my assembler software somewhere. I seem to recall a good way to get in the machine-code / assembler mind-set was to programme a HP or TI calculator. I remember doing it.

I have no idea what a modern ARM dev system must look like. LEGO Creator?

 

[UtterDisbelief]

For me, back in the days, DEC PDP 15 symbolic assembler, Fortran-4, 6502 assembler, Basic, Turbo Pascal laced with 8086 assembler for speed, then C, 68k assembler, C++, some LISP, FORTH...
I slowly switched to using specialised tools made by others, when these became available.

I will occasionally code something in Ruby or Python, or do some DSP coding(not hard if you have a dev kit and some examples) just to flex my aging coding muscles.

6502 indeed

I definitely still have all my Borland Turbo ... compilers. The books/boxes are so big and heavy they are probably the reason this house doesn't blow away in a strong breeze! Oh, and Mix Power C was my ANSI.

 

[jaymonkey]

They were simpler for sure. I guess the complication is why pro-coders all seem to use High Level programming languages nowadays. Plus computing power can easily swallow the runtime overheads.

@UtterDisbelief,

Yes we used machine code so we could squeeze every last bit of power from the Z80 and not waste as single byte of memory. These days PC's have such powerful CPU's and more memory than you could ever possible use that you can use High Level programming languages and not worry about optimising code or memory use.

Its a totally different mind set to what we where doing back in the day.

For sure it has made computers more assessable to the masses and these days you can get an App to do pretty much anything you can dream of where as back in the day you had to create it.

Cheers
Jay

 

[tom111]

What counts is the technology, not the instruction set.
We don't program in assembler anymore, but at least use C/C++ compilers which generate the machine code for nearly all existing cpus.
Nearly all cpus are hybrids of RISC and CISC, even the PowerPC has CISC FPU / Altivec units.
Only the inner cpu core, the Arithmetic Logic Unit is implemented as RISC.
I am not shure if Arm and RISC-V cpus have RISC or CISC FPUs now. That depends on the technological implementation, not on the intruction set.

 

[mutatio]

If this were to happen I don't see Nvidia wanting to lose hundreds of billions in revenue by revoking the ARM licenses of the majority of the current ARM customers. Would make no sense in terms of business practice. Everyone knows they don't get along well with Apple but I'm sure they'd be willing to take billions of dollars in licensing fees from them over the next 5 years.

It'd be a heck of a way to get their GPUs back into Mac OS.

 

[Gogeta-Blue]

too bad apple decided to do what they did
for whatever reason
today nvidia launched their new cards and they are awesome
i'm going for the 3090, really hope it fits on my case

i know those navy cards or whatever they are call
they are going to be good but i doubt
they will better than nvidia

mac os is or was a very good system
but ever since mojave, i have to give up my gpu in order to be able to run mac os

apple has the problem with epic
meanwhile fornite is getting ray tracing and dlss 2.0 in windows

 

[tom111]

It'd be a heck of a way to get their GPUs back into Mac OS.

Apple is using its own CPU and GPU for Apple-Silicon.

 

[tom111]

too bad apple decided to do what they did
for whatever reason
today nvidia launched their new cards and they are awesome
i'm going for the 3090, really hope it fits on my case

i know those navy cards or whatever they are call
they are going to be good but i doubt
they will better than nvidia

mac os is or was a very good system
but ever since mojave, i have to give up my gpu in order to be able to run mac os

apple has the problem with epic
meanwhile fornite is getting ray tracing and dlss 2.0 in windows

Navi 2x will support raytracing.
I will get the Big Navi, because macOS is my main system and I prefer AMD anyway.
If Windows or Linux is your main sysytem, you could run macOS in a virtual machine.

 

[mutatio]

Apple is using its own CPU and GPU for Apple-Silicon.

Not if nVidia stiffs them on an ARM license. ;-)

 

[Gogeta-Blue]

Navi 2x will support raytracing.
I will get the Big Navi, because macOS is my main system and I prefer AMD anyway.
If Windows or Linux is your main sysytem, you could run macOS in a virtual machine.

fair enough
i like mac os and mac os was my main system
but since i couldn't use nvidia then i was forced to move to windows