ARM Pioneer: Nvidia Plans to Wage Unfair Competition

Hermann Hauser, one of the co-founders of ARM’s microprocessor architecture, criticized Nvidia’s plans to acquire the semiconductor designer. He argues that, if the deal goes through, the company would engage in unfair competition, reports The Telegraph.

Hauser was concerned about the proprietary interconnect technology linking Nvidia Grace to the CPU via NVLink, which allegedly delivers data transfer speeds up to 900 GB/s. This is significantly higher than the performance of other computer buses. The technology is available exclusively for Nvidia products.

He believes that the use of NVLink could tie Grace users to other Nvidia products.

“Nvidia is intent on unfair competition with other ARM-based server manufacturers, such as Amazon and Fujitsu, rather than maintaining neutrality,” he added.

Nvidia replied that Hauser “does not understand the purpose of Grace.”

“We have been working on Grace, using off-the-shelf technology available to all licensees, long before we agreed to acquire ARM,” the company said.

Representatives of Nvidia did not comment on the criticism of NVLink, which concerned Hauser.

In September 2020 Nvidia announced the acquisition of ARM from SoftBank. Qualcomm, Google and Microsoft opposed the deal, fearing that the new owner would offer unfavourable terms.

In April 2021, the British government intervened in the deal between Nvidia and ARM for $40 billion due to “national security concerns.” In light of the proceedings, experts concluded that the chances of closing the deal are no more than 10%.

In mid-April Nvidia unveiled its first central processing unit based on ARM architecture, intended for supercomputers and “giant AI.”

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