Wednesday, October 7, 2020

"Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says ARM’s been too specific, needs to be a broad computing platform" (NVDA)

The author of this piece, Tiernan Ray, is probably the best journalist covering Nvidia.

When he was writing Barron's Tech Trader and Tech Trader Daily columns he could get answers out of NVDA's CEO to questions that were an order of magnitude more insightful than anything other scribes or analysts were asking. This was at the time the stock was making its breakout move from $23 to $140 and the analysts covering the situation were still looking at it as a gaming hardware purveyor.

And in press gaggles Ray would pick up on shades of nuance that the other journos missed.

From Mr. Ray's current perch at ZD Net, October 5:

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a press Q&A that buying ARM is about turning its narrow products, based on system-on-a-chip, into a much broader platform, to expand the already sizable market of the company.

Nvidia today held a virtual version of its GTC developer conference, and CEO Jensen Huang took questions from reporters in the afternoon. 

Asked by ZDNet how Nvidia will do better than ARM, which it is buying for $40 billion, Huang said ARM's chip technology has been too narrow, despite enormous success. 

"ARM sold 22 billion chips last year, it's a shocking number," said Huang, referring to the number of processors of all kinds in 2019 that licensed ARM's CPU designs. "Ninety-nine of that are system-on-chip," or SOC, he said, referring to "bespoke" chips that are designed for a variety of applications, everything from mobile phones to utility meters to smart lighting. 

"Therein lies the weakness," said Huang. "The ARM ecosystem is incredibly rich, but it's really rich for a specific device, an SOC," he continued....

....MUCH MORE  

Related, September 30:
"Huang's Law Is the New Moore's Law, and Explains Why Nvidia Wants Arm" (NVDA)