Hurry up and buy Nvidia please!!
I have just bee reading the BusinessWeek article on Apples growing cash reserves here;
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...5000656875.htm
With the recent talk of apple possibly using Nvidia chipsets in updated product lines I had a thought...
Apple have over $20B cash reserves and Nvidia has a current market cap of $6.35B. Apple could pay a 35% premium on todays NVDA price and buy the whole company for $8.57B.
If Apple are about to embark on an all out assault on gaining market share from Microsoft and OEM's like Dell and HP they could really put a spanner in the works of the traditional WinTel players by buying out Nvidia and using all of their top of the line graphics chips EXCLUSIVELY in Apple branded hardware.
Apple already have, through PA Semi, got a whole lot of expertise in low power chip design and could leverage this expertise along with Nvidia's expertise in graphics to create hardware solutions that nobody else in the industry could hope to compete against.
It's clear from Apples technical roadmap of including major advances in GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) usage with OpenCL and Grandcentral in Snow Leopard (Due sometime in early '09) that intensive use of GPU's is at the heart of future hardware changes.
In high end graphics Intel are behind the ball and the only players are AMD/ATI and Nvidia. AMD's roadmap is based around their own CPU design and manufacture and they have huge debt on their books and billions tied up in the on Fab facilities to produce their own chips. Nvidia on the other hand have books in much better shape and like Apple and PA Semi are a Fabless chip maker. (Fabless meaning they outsource the making of their chips to third parties like Texas Instruments, Samsung and the like).
Buying Nvidia and making their chips exclusive to Apple would make a point of difference that nobody could copy. Goodbye Psystar and other potential Mac clone makers. Goodbye companies like Microsoft copying 90+% if the old iPods internals to make crappy Zune media players. Goodbye HTC and other mobile phone manufactures using the same commodity hardware as used in iPhones to mimic Apples user interface and experience.
The cost of Apple going it alone with in house designed and exclusive GPU's and chipsets for Mac's and custom SOC (System on Chip) solutions for iPhone and iPod product ranges would be huge. But at a certain level of sales of Apple hardware economies of scale would kick and make the move profitable.
With exclusive hardware capabilities and OSx OpenCL and GrandCentral being 4-5 years ahead of Microsofts Windows 7 technology on Mac and unique SOC's in iPhone and iPod giving 2x industry graphical performance and 2-3x industry battery life would be unbeatable.
I'd predict that buying Nvidia and using their graphic and chipset solutions 100% within Apple could take Mac to 20-25% world PC market share within the next 4 years, iPhone to 10+% of handset market and maintain Apple's complete dominance in the MP3 player market.
From an industry perspective it would really help AMD get their shit together by reducing competition in the Graphics space. This extra money would help them move the general CPU devision forward and start competing head to head with Intel again like the old Athlon days. For Apple this would put further pricing pressure on Intel's CPU's used in Mac's. This additional feedback loop of cheaper Intel CPU's would help Apples bottom line and help subsidize the Nvidia purchase to a degree in the first place.
OK now everybody shoot me to flames for being crazy ......
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...5000656875.htm
With the recent talk of apple possibly using Nvidia chipsets in updated product lines I had a thought...
Apple have over $20B cash reserves and Nvidia has a current market cap of $6.35B. Apple could pay a 35% premium on todays NVDA price and buy the whole company for $8.57B.
If Apple are about to embark on an all out assault on gaining market share from Microsoft and OEM's like Dell and HP they could really put a spanner in the works of the traditional WinTel players by buying out Nvidia and using all of their top of the line graphics chips EXCLUSIVELY in Apple branded hardware.
Apple already have, through PA Semi, got a whole lot of expertise in low power chip design and could leverage this expertise along with Nvidia's expertise in graphics to create hardware solutions that nobody else in the industry could hope to compete against.
It's clear from Apples technical roadmap of including major advances in GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) usage with OpenCL and Grandcentral in Snow Leopard (Due sometime in early '09) that intensive use of GPU's is at the heart of future hardware changes.
In high end graphics Intel are behind the ball and the only players are AMD/ATI and Nvidia. AMD's roadmap is based around their own CPU design and manufacture and they have huge debt on their books and billions tied up in the on Fab facilities to produce their own chips. Nvidia on the other hand have books in much better shape and like Apple and PA Semi are a Fabless chip maker. (Fabless meaning they outsource the making of their chips to third parties like Texas Instruments, Samsung and the like).
Buying Nvidia and making their chips exclusive to Apple would make a point of difference that nobody could copy. Goodbye Psystar and other potential Mac clone makers. Goodbye companies like Microsoft copying 90+% if the old iPods internals to make crappy Zune media players. Goodbye HTC and other mobile phone manufactures using the same commodity hardware as used in iPhones to mimic Apples user interface and experience.
The cost of Apple going it alone with in house designed and exclusive GPU's and chipsets for Mac's and custom SOC (System on Chip) solutions for iPhone and iPod product ranges would be huge. But at a certain level of sales of Apple hardware economies of scale would kick and make the move profitable.
With exclusive hardware capabilities and OSx OpenCL and GrandCentral being 4-5 years ahead of Microsofts Windows 7 technology on Mac and unique SOC's in iPhone and iPod giving 2x industry graphical performance and 2-3x industry battery life would be unbeatable.
I'd predict that buying Nvidia and using their graphic and chipset solutions 100% within Apple could take Mac to 20-25% world PC market share within the next 4 years, iPhone to 10+% of handset market and maintain Apple's complete dominance in the MP3 player market.
From an industry perspective it would really help AMD get their shit together by reducing competition in the Graphics space. This extra money would help them move the general CPU devision forward and start competing head to head with Intel again like the old Athlon days. For Apple this would put further pricing pressure on Intel's CPU's used in Mac's. This additional feedback loop of cheaper Intel CPU's would help Apples bottom line and help subsidize the Nvidia purchase to a degree in the first place.
OK now everybody shoot me to flames for being crazy ......
Comments
This is not compatible with nVidia's interests to drive the graphics market forwards. Dropping a few billion dollars will have little gain over a solid partnership. If anything Apple should drop a few million dollars on partnership training schemes.
Apple didn't buy Intel but they get some exclusive deals like the 3GHz iMac CPUs and some Mac Pro CPUs. All Apple would need to do is say to Nvidia that they will use 100% Nvidia GPUs throughout their lineup - that alone is good advertising.