Last week it was disclosed that nvidia is "interested" in the acquisition of the British chip designer ARM from Japan's SoftBank which holds an IP technology treasure. According to Bloomberg, the talks appear to be well advanced already. The graphics and scalar computing giant recently overtook Intel in market capitalization.
With just a few moves, NVIDIA has a real chance to replace Intel as the makers of the world's most popular CPU machine architecture, driven primarily by smartphones, tablets, network infrastructure, wearables, and IoT devices. The Arm architecture is also making great strides in the server space, and Apple recently decided to dump Intel x86 in favor of Arm-based homebrew SoCs. The cost of the operation is staggering, in fact New Street Research LLP estimated ARM's valuation to be approximately 44 billion dollars if its IPO took off in 2021, with an estimated increase to 68 billion by 2025.
