I would never want to buy ARM if I were Apple. Here's why.
Apple can design AND manufacture chips based on ARM architecture, essentially without any interference from ARM the company. Just pay a (relatively small) license fee and you're all set.
The article says it well:
> Arm’s licensing operation would fit poorly with Apple’s hardware-focused business model.
> There may also be regulatory concerns about Apple owning a key licensee that supplies so many rivals.
I think it's important not to confuse the success of a specific architecture, with the economic success of the company owning and licensing IP related to that architecture. These two things might not necessarily go hand in hand.
Edit: two very relevant comments in the parent thread, I'll just mention them here for completeness:
>True. As mentioned above, architecture success != economic success
ARM is enormously economically successful, they're just not a manufacturer and thus not remotely a comparable business to the entirety of Intel, fabs and all.
Apple has a perpetual license from ARM, so it doesn't matter who buys ARM, Apple is all set license wise.
There is a risk that a new buyer might under-invest in the evolution of the architecture and future core designs. This is a small but real risk for Apple because they do base their cores on ARM designs. I've seen the argument before that the only thing Apple uses is the ISA, but that's flat out not true. They customise and tune the design sure, but the basic architecture comes from ARM. The secure enclave, for example, is an ARM design. Lack of investment in that core ARM architecture would be a problem.
On the other hand, it would equally be a problem for all the other ARM licensees, many of which are current direct Apple competitors. For this reason such a risk seems manageable from an Apple perspective. They are in a much better position to compensate for under-investment by the owner of ARM that most of their current competitors.
The exception in Intel, because Apple is soon be a direct competitor of theirs in the desktop and laptop CPU space. Hence my use of the work 'current' in several places above. Ultimately though, Apple seems to be on top of their CPU design game. They're already beating the living pants off their competitors on mobile, no threat there whatsoever, and very well placed to beat Intel on desktop/laptop. Underinvestment in ARM would be in inconvenience, but not an imminent threat.
RISC-V is interesting, but I think there's a lot of wishful thinking happening around it. Most of the really interesting RISC-V chips include proprietary enhancements. Theres a serious tragedy of the commons issue going on there that is already a problem, and that issue isn't going away. The sheer amount of talent and money ARM and their licensee ecosystem, including Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon, etc are throwing at the problem simply can't be matched by the ecosystem around RISC-V.
But without buying ARM they might be able to replace ARM with their completely own thing.
But due to regulations around monopolies they likely will have problems if they end up with this after buying ARM.
It also isn't as profitable as Apple, so Apple stack holders might not like it. Even more if Risc-V takes over things might not be that good for ARM so it's another liability for Apple with like not that much benefits.
> I am bullish on Risc-V and think there's a good chance we will all eventually converge to that.
I'm very hopeful for the mill. I think they have a good 15-20 years left to get their stuff together before we can definitively say they've succeeded or failed. Barring that, though, riscv is quite nice. 'Specially the vector instructions—so much nicer than simd.
Interesting article. I wonder what is really happening.
Looking at moves by Chinese vendors and others, I'm going to hypothesize that ARM said to itself:
"We can't compete with 'free' and RISC-V is 'good enough' that its going to wipe out the commodity micro-contoller licensing stream that is over 50% of our revenue. That means we won't have the resources to invest in designing higher end features in the high margin parts and we're going to die. We should sell now, take our cash, and let the buyer eat the future losses."
I don't know of course. I'm an outsider like most people. But I have been part of, and then watching the semiconductor industry since about 1984.I was personally on the "inside" at the development of the SPARC architecture, and watched it grow, and die, as it was mismanaged by Sun. And I've been associated with American high tech companies for more years than I care to remember :-) and have seen a bit about how such companies survive, grow, and fail to grow. A common theme is that there is a "cash cow", a product that has exceptionally high margins relative to its "class" and that revenue funds the R&D that does the "innovation" work. These businesses live or die on finding "the next thing" before their cash cow dies. Failing to find that thing, as SGI did, as Sun did, and as I think Google is in the process of doing, starves the company of the cash to pay the innovators as they focus more and more on keeping the cash cow alive for longer and longer. The company essentially morphs from a mission of doing cool new things, to one that is preserving the 'one thing' at all cost. That thing eventually dies in spite of their efforts and what is left of the company is bought by a healthier company for its assets and maybe a couple of its projects that were cool, but not good enough to replace the cash cow.
If I am correct, this is the right move for ARM, and a really risky buy for anyone who would buy them now. A smart buyer, knowing how this will evolve, will wait for the desperation to set in so that they have maximum leverage in the acquisition.
And another thing that will be true (if I am guessing correctly here) is that RISC-V is going to really take off and have lots of people making them for cheap.
ARM management has historically been anything but clueless, they must have their reasons for putting it on the market and yours is as good as any that I've seen.
RISC-V is a serious threat to their business model. In a way this is good, CPUs and the surrounding IP should be a (free) commodity, just like operating systems and utilities.
I understand the attractions of RISC-V and hope it does prosper but I'm not sure that it's 'free' to the extent that seems to be assumed. Some implementations are open source but others are not and someone has to do the work (and in most cases get paid for it).
Chinese firms may rush to RISC-V but given the geopolitics (e.g. Huawei) I can easily see barriers being put up in the US and elsewhere to cheap chinese RISC-V chips being used everywhere.
Seeing the writing on the wall, perhaps ARM could use their expertise to design and sell proprietary RISC-V instruction set extensions. This is the classic Innovator's Dilemma, a hard pill for ARM management to accept. (See Intel and Xscale.) ARM management would probably need to firewall RISC-V development in a subsidiary company.
The day a RISCV SOC on par with the Raspi 1, is the day I never buy another ARM board. It'd be nice if the whole SOC is open cored like the CPU, but I'll take what I can get.
The antitrust implications of an ARM sale to any one of the tech giant is massive and may drag on for a while. It would be probably be quicker if Softbank floats ARM through an IPO.
"ARM is so widespread that buying it will be a regulatory nightmare, and even the most lenient rubber-stamp regulators around the world must shudder at the idea of an existing ARM licensee buying ARM. "
Practically all of Apple's product line will be powered by ARM in the near future. Buying ARM would put them at a huge advantage while heavily influencing the chip IP of competitors. I can't imagine regulators in the US and EU not raising an eyebrow at this.
I suspect there is a bit of a Catch-22 with any sale.
Purchase by any ARM customer (including Nvidia) potentially reduces the value as it will alienate other ARM customers who compete with the buyer (e.g. AMD holds ARM licenses so how would it feel about using Nvidia controlled technology). Yet who else will be able to generate synergies from the acquistion?
Of course Nvidia may feel that the synergies are big enough to offset the loss of business plus its share price gives it a fantastic acquisition currency.
Plus, the line when Softbank bought ARM was that ARM as a listed company was constrained by lack of cashflow, so a deep pocketed owner would be able to take up opportunities not available to ARM as as stand-alone company.
I wonder if softbank sees the writing on the wall here. Yea they want cash but ARM is rapidly coming under fire from the open source RISC-V architecture. ARM's licencing model in particular is steering people away from their offerings in new designs and I think they're pretty much at peak value right now with Apple's adoption of their architecture.
I know there aren't tons of news articles about new high performance chips being offered but where I work we are seeing a ridiculous level of interest from other companies particularly given our industry...
I am a huge RISC-V fan, like Cathy Bates level, but there is so much that ARM can do over the next 5,10,15 years but it looks like they are incapable of the required transformations. Everything that is good about RISC-V is already at ARM's disposal.
Currently it looks like SiFive was borne out of a solution for the organizational issues that plague innovator's dilemma companies. I am envious of SiFive's position right now. I hope they don't get swallowed by a dinosaur.
The only reason NVidia wants ARM is because they can't have an x86 license.
Apple doesn't care because they probably have an escape/hedge clause on their ARM license and they will soon be shipping an IR. They have ISA hopped so many times it is old hat to them.
I don’t know if this is right. The money seems to be in customized Arm-based chips for now and I think for quite a while still. Apple and Nuvia might take Arm to crazy new levels with their customizations but all their chips will still be Arm at their core, which seems to be a pretty nice place to be in for SoftBank. Surely once Apple blows the doors off everything else more new licensees will follow, no? I think Arm has a lot of growth left in it, even if RISC-V takes off.
I'm curious if ARM sees RISC-V as serious competition. I'm under the impression that the instruction set makes efficient and performant implementations rather difficult.
My understanding is, they design the specification of the ARM assembly language, and the design of the hardware (not individual chip fab but like... abstractly, somehow?)
But if they specify the design of the hardware, why would one chipmaker have faster/better CPUs if they are using the same spec as another chipmaker with slower/worse CPUs?
What's the business model? Do they get paid per ARM chip sold, or yearly for the rights to sell ARM chips, etc?
> Do they get paid per ARM chip sold, or yearly for the rights to sell ARM chips, etc?
Both. Basically at the top end You have licensing that big companies like Apple pay a large one-off sum ( comparatively large from ARM's perspective , but tiny in Apple's view ) for the use of ARMv8. ( i.e You will need to pay again for ARMv9 or ARMv7 ), and do custom design with the Instruction Set as along as it remain compatible with ARMv8. At the bottom end you are simply buying a blueprint from ARM, add some other IP you want and pay per ARM chip.
Anandtech has an article [1] about it and most of it are still relevant.
Since we are taking about business It is also worth mentioning the revenue of ARM before Softbank acquisition was less than the Net profits of Intel.
> why would one chipmaker have faster/better CPUs if they are using the same spec as another chipmaker with slower/worse CPUs?
That's not the interesting thing, really. ARM licensees don't compete on how fast the ARM itself is, they compete on what else is on the same chip that they've designed themself. Radios, high-speed serial interfaces, analog-digital, etc.
(the big exception is Apple, who have their own silicon team improving the ARM implementation)
ARM have a very wide range of price/performance/area/power options. You don't always want the biggest and best.
I don't know exactly how compensation works, but they have basically two products:
- The ARM ISA (the "specification")
- A series of chip designs implementing such ISA (the Cortex series)
Customers can either license the Cortex design to implement in their own silicon or license the ISA and design their own CPU (like Apple did). There isn't one single Cortex core, but many of them at different performance/price points
From what I understand, ARM will give you various different implementations of different ARM cores, depending on the licensing terms. My guess is that this includes:
- RTL optimized for simulation
- RTL optimized for synthesis, maybe with variants for FPGA vs ASIC
- Various lower-level implementations, complete with layout. Just a “block” that you drop onto your chip design. I imagine that these are something like “here’s a block that you can give to TSMC for their 16nm process”
They sell basically three things: rights (and some specifications) to design your own chips with their interface, rights to use their core designs in your SoCs, and services related to those two things.
> What's the business model? Do they get paid per ARM chip sold, or yearly for the rights to sell ARM chips, etc?
From what I understand ARM designs and licenses some chips but also licenses the right to design chips implementing the same ISA. So not all ARM processors are designed by ARM.
Typically fabless CPU/MCU companies design and implement netlists to these CPU designs. It includes all of the logic to implement the CPU. This netlist/VHDL/Verilog design is the protected IP they sell, as well as the rights to re-use, etc.
The IP itself can be placed into semiconductor fabric and combined with many other parts such as peripherals, flash memory, sram, etc.
Some companies (eg Apple) have an ARM architectural license, which gives them the ability to design custom microarchitectures, but using the same ARM ISA.
I've been thinking about this "stock is a bubble" with regard to Nvidia and Tesla. Normal investing logic says to pay attention to P/E.
However, if you look at stock as its own currency, basically dollars*managementskill, putting a dollar into Nvidia or Tesla basically means "if I give this money to someone else, they can do better with it than if I hold onto it. It would also be a way of "investing" in a management team, helping support them financially so they can go out and make acquisitions.
Then Nvidia and Teslas stock price becomes less "a bajillion times their next five years of earnings" and more "what could these great teams buy or build if we pump them full of cash." Youre investing more than just the future of the current company, as it exists right now.
I don't see Softbank wanting Nvidia stock though, unless they intend to liquidate it quickly.
Softbank and Vision Fund aren't exactly looking for Nvidia shares though. They are looking for cold hard cash to plug the massive hole in the failing investments.
Just keep in mind that the major use case for ARM is embedded systems: washing machines, smart refrigerators, car electronics, barbecue thermometers, medical devices, lawn mowers, you get the idea. Mobile phone or computer companies would not be interested in dealing with that part of the business.
Apple license the instruction set and make their own designs, so the interest in all that overhead business, let alone the political fallout (too much power in one company and fuels the Apple TAX headline mantra that will just roll and roll) - Apple don't want that hassel.
But many reasons Apple buying ARM is not a good fit for Apple.
Nvidia may well be good fit and a better fit than Apple by far, though would it be best if ARM is owned by some company or publicly listed?
If I was Softbank, I'd go for IPO route as I do feel out of all the IPOs, this is a mature tech firm. That makes this one that will be popular on many levels, let alone the number of Geeks who will want an ARM share certificate upon their wall.
Whoever controls that company can decide who's allowed to make processors that run consumer facing software (sure, RISC V might present a threat in the long term, but it's a good decade out).
Of course that would be a nightmare for every other licensee (which is why I'm hoping for the IPO), but the potential gain is immense, isn't it? Or are the licenses so nice they're safe regardless of who owns the company?
I realize all the tech companies in the running and ARM are global brands. Recently T-Mobile and Sprint were allowed to merge in the US. Is it really that certain that Apple or another giant purchasing ARM wouldn’t be allowed?
T-mobile and Sprint were allowed to merge because they were both uncompetitive as stand-alone companies: their merger deconsolidated the wireless space, not the other way around.
It's not certain but it is a big risk. Nobody wants to be spending time and money on doing a deal when there's a high risk it'll be blocked at the final hurdle.
ARM should just go public and IPO. Why do companies rely on acquisitions so much? Let the public buy into these successful tech companies instead of having the gains accrue to already rich tech companies or private equity funds.
I'd believe IBM before Nvidia or Apple. IBM has chip engineering knowledge and IP licensing know how, but doesn't have to worry about a conflict with the licensees.
A wide coalition must form: every single OEM acquiring ARM will reduce its value. BTW Apple won’t let Nvidia control a central part of its Long term hardware strategy.
Given how semiconductors are becoming a battleground over national security, trade, and technology between China and the US, what are the chances this would be delayed by Chinese regulators or used as a bargaining chip over trade war negotiations?
The Mellanox deal was delayed for months by the Chinese competition authorities, and ARM is a far larger and more important player in the space.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|5 years ago|reply
Apple can design AND manufacture chips based on ARM architecture, essentially without any interference from ARM the company. Just pay a (relatively small) license fee and you're all set.
The article says it well:
> Arm’s licensing operation would fit poorly with Apple’s hardware-focused business model.
> There may also be regulatory concerns about Apple owning a key licensee that supplies so many rivals.
I think it's important not to confuse the success of a specific architecture, with the economic success of the company owning and licensing IP related to that architecture. These two things might not necessarily go hand in hand.
Edit: two very relevant comments in the parent thread, I'll just mention them here for completeness:
> the revenue of ARM before Softbank acquisition was less than the Net profits of Intel. (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23930895)
True. As mentioned above, architecture success != economic success
> Risc-V (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23930814)
Absolutely relevant. I am bullish on Risc-V and think there's a good chance we will all eventually converge to that.
[+] [-] simonh|5 years ago|reply
ARM is enormously economically successful, they're just not a manufacturer and thus not remotely a comparable business to the entirety of Intel, fabs and all.
Apple has a perpetual license from ARM, so it doesn't matter who buys ARM, Apple is all set license wise.
There is a risk that a new buyer might under-invest in the evolution of the architecture and future core designs. This is a small but real risk for Apple because they do base their cores on ARM designs. I've seen the argument before that the only thing Apple uses is the ISA, but that's flat out not true. They customise and tune the design sure, but the basic architecture comes from ARM. The secure enclave, for example, is an ARM design. Lack of investment in that core ARM architecture would be a problem.
On the other hand, it would equally be a problem for all the other ARM licensees, many of which are current direct Apple competitors. For this reason such a risk seems manageable from an Apple perspective. They are in a much better position to compensate for under-investment by the owner of ARM that most of their current competitors.
The exception in Intel, because Apple is soon be a direct competitor of theirs in the desktop and laptop CPU space. Hence my use of the work 'current' in several places above. Ultimately though, Apple seems to be on top of their CPU design game. They're already beating the living pants off their competitors on mobile, no threat there whatsoever, and very well placed to beat Intel on desktop/laptop. Underinvestment in ARM would be in inconvenience, but not an imminent threat.
RISC-V is interesting, but I think there's a lot of wishful thinking happening around it. Most of the really interesting RISC-V chips include proprietary enhancements. Theres a serious tragedy of the commons issue going on there that is already a problem, and that issue isn't going away. The sheer amount of talent and money ARM and their licensee ecosystem, including Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon, etc are throwing at the problem simply can't be matched by the ecosystem around RISC-V.
[+] [-] dathinab|5 years ago|reply
But due to regulations around monopolies they likely will have problems if they end up with this after buying ARM.
It also isn't as profitable as Apple, so Apple stack holders might not like it. Even more if Risc-V takes over things might not be that good for ARM so it's another liability for Apple with like not that much benefits.
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
Or in memespeak: scenes when nVidia controls Apple's CPU roadmap.
[+] [-] skohan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moonchild|5 years ago|reply
I'm very hopeful for the mill. I think they have a good 15-20 years left to get their stuff together before we can definitively say they've succeeded or failed. Barring that, though, riscv is quite nice. 'Specially the vector instructions—so much nicer than simd.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|5 years ago|reply
Looking at moves by Chinese vendors and others, I'm going to hypothesize that ARM said to itself:
"We can't compete with 'free' and RISC-V is 'good enough' that its going to wipe out the commodity micro-contoller licensing stream that is over 50% of our revenue. That means we won't have the resources to invest in designing higher end features in the high margin parts and we're going to die. We should sell now, take our cash, and let the buyer eat the future losses."
I don't know of course. I'm an outsider like most people. But I have been part of, and then watching the semiconductor industry since about 1984.I was personally on the "inside" at the development of the SPARC architecture, and watched it grow, and die, as it was mismanaged by Sun. And I've been associated with American high tech companies for more years than I care to remember :-) and have seen a bit about how such companies survive, grow, and fail to grow. A common theme is that there is a "cash cow", a product that has exceptionally high margins relative to its "class" and that revenue funds the R&D that does the "innovation" work. These businesses live or die on finding "the next thing" before their cash cow dies. Failing to find that thing, as SGI did, as Sun did, and as I think Google is in the process of doing, starves the company of the cash to pay the innovators as they focus more and more on keeping the cash cow alive for longer and longer. The company essentially morphs from a mission of doing cool new things, to one that is preserving the 'one thing' at all cost. That thing eventually dies in spite of their efforts and what is left of the company is bought by a healthier company for its assets and maybe a couple of its projects that were cool, but not good enough to replace the cash cow.
If I am correct, this is the right move for ARM, and a really risky buy for anyone who would buy them now. A smart buyer, knowing how this will evolve, will wait for the desperation to set in so that they have maximum leverage in the acquisition.
And another thing that will be true (if I am guessing correctly here) is that RISC-V is going to really take off and have lots of people making them for cheap.
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
RISC-V is a serious threat to their business model. In a way this is good, CPUs and the surrounding IP should be a (free) commodity, just like operating systems and utilities.
[+] [-] klelatti|5 years ago|reply
Chinese firms may rush to RISC-V but given the geopolitics (e.g. Huawei) I can easily see barriers being put up in the US and elsewhere to cheap chinese RISC-V chips being used everywhere.
[+] [-] cpeterso|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfuclusion|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Google234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starfallg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snapetom|5 years ago|reply
"ARM is so widespread that buying it will be a regulatory nightmare, and even the most lenient rubber-stamp regulators around the world must shudder at the idea of an existing ARM licensee buying ARM. "
Practically all of Apple's product line will be powered by ARM in the near future. Buying ARM would put them at a huge advantage while heavily influencing the chip IP of competitors. I can't imagine regulators in the US and EU not raising an eyebrow at this.
[+] [-] sitkack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klelatti|5 years ago|reply
Purchase by any ARM customer (including Nvidia) potentially reduces the value as it will alienate other ARM customers who compete with the buyer (e.g. AMD holds ARM licenses so how would it feel about using Nvidia controlled technology). Yet who else will be able to generate synergies from the acquistion?
Of course Nvidia may feel that the synergies are big enough to offset the loss of business plus its share price gives it a fantastic acquisition currency.
Plus, the line when Softbank bought ARM was that ARM as a listed company was constrained by lack of cashflow, so a deep pocketed owner would be able to take up opportunities not available to ARM as as stand-alone company.
[+] [-] AWildC182|5 years ago|reply
I know there aren't tons of news articles about new high performance chips being offered but where I work we are seeing a ridiculous level of interest from other companies particularly given our industry...
[+] [-] sitkack|5 years ago|reply
Currently it looks like SiFive was borne out of a solution for the organizational issues that plague innovator's dilemma companies. I am envious of SiFive's position right now. I hope they don't get swallowed by a dinosaur.
The only reason NVidia wants ARM is because they can't have an x86 license.
Apple doesn't care because they probably have an escape/hedge clause on their ARM license and they will soon be shipping an IR. They have ISA hopped so many times it is old hat to them.
[+] [-] jagger27|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaze|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 2bitencryption|5 years ago|reply
My understanding is, they design the specification of the ARM assembly language, and the design of the hardware (not individual chip fab but like... abstractly, somehow?)
But if they specify the design of the hardware, why would one chipmaker have faster/better CPUs if they are using the same spec as another chipmaker with slower/worse CPUs?
What's the business model? Do they get paid per ARM chip sold, or yearly for the rights to sell ARM chips, etc?
[+] [-] ksec|5 years ago|reply
Both. Basically at the top end You have licensing that big companies like Apple pay a large one-off sum ( comparatively large from ARM's perspective , but tiny in Apple's view ) for the use of ARMv8. ( i.e You will need to pay again for ARMv9 or ARMv7 ), and do custom design with the Instruction Set as along as it remain compatible with ARMv8. At the bottom end you are simply buying a blueprint from ARM, add some other IP you want and pay per ARM chip.
Anandtech has an article [1] about it and most of it are still relevant.
Since we are taking about business It is also worth mentioning the revenue of ARM before Softbank acquisition was less than the Net profits of Intel.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-h...
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
That's not the interesting thing, really. ARM licensees don't compete on how fast the ARM itself is, they compete on what else is on the same chip that they've designed themself. Radios, high-speed serial interfaces, analog-digital, etc.
(the big exception is Apple, who have their own silicon team improving the ARM implementation)
ARM have a very wide range of price/performance/area/power options. You don't always want the biggest and best.
[+] [-] Kipters|5 years ago|reply
- The ARM ISA (the "specification")
- A series of chip designs implementing such ISA (the Cortex series)
Customers can either license the Cortex design to implement in their own silicon or license the ISA and design their own CPU (like Apple did). There isn't one single Cortex core, but many of them at different performance/price points
[+] [-] klodolph|5 years ago|reply
Keep in mind that I am NOT well-informed about this and I may say some wrong things.
https://www.arm.com/why-arm/how-licensing-works
From what I understand, ARM will give you various different implementations of different ARM cores, depending on the licensing terms. My guess is that this includes:
- RTL optimized for simulation
- RTL optimized for synthesis, maybe with variants for FPGA vs ASIC
- Various lower-level implementations, complete with layout. Just a “block” that you drop onto your chip design. I imagine that these are something like “here’s a block that you can give to TSMC for their 16nm process”
[+] [-] microcolonel|5 years ago|reply
> What's the business model? Do they get paid per ARM chip sold, or yearly for the rights to sell ARM chips, etc?
Either or both.
[+] [-] catalogia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beefok|5 years ago|reply
The IP itself can be placed into semiconductor fabric and combined with many other parts such as peripherals, flash memory, sram, etc.
[+] [-] deepnotderp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Despegar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] H8crilA|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] basch|5 years ago|reply
However, if you look at stock as its own currency, basically dollars*managementskill, putting a dollar into Nvidia or Tesla basically means "if I give this money to someone else, they can do better with it than if I hold onto it. It would also be a way of "investing" in a management team, helping support them financially so they can go out and make acquisitions.
Then Nvidia and Teslas stock price becomes less "a bajillion times their next five years of earnings" and more "what could these great teams buy or build if we pump them full of cash." Youre investing more than just the future of the current company, as it exists right now.
I don't see Softbank wanting Nvidia stock though, unless they intend to liquidate it quickly.
[+] [-] starfallg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jupp0r|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evilelectron|5 years ago|reply
ARM should fit well with them, plus it would give them a way to enter the mobile space again, this time by owning the IP and not making hardware.
[+] [-] Zenst|5 years ago|reply
But many reasons Apple buying ARM is not a good fit for Apple.
Nvidia may well be good fit and a better fit than Apple by far, though would it be best if ARM is owned by some company or publicly listed?
If I was Softbank, I'd go for IPO route as I do feel out of all the IPOs, this is a mature tech firm. That makes this one that will be popular on many levels, let alone the number of Geeks who will want an ARM share certificate upon their wall.
[+] [-] laurencerowe|5 years ago|reply
ARM is definitely mature, it originally IPO'd in 1998 and remained public until it was bought by SoftBank in 2016.
[+] [-] solarkraft|5 years ago|reply
Whoever controls that company can decide who's allowed to make processors that run consumer facing software (sure, RISC V might present a threat in the long term, but it's a good decade out).
Of course that would be a nightmare for every other licensee (which is why I'm hoping for the IPO), but the potential gain is immense, isn't it? Or are the licenses so nice they're safe regardless of who owns the company?
[+] [-] fischert|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wronglebowski|5 years ago|reply
I realize all the tech companies in the running and ARM are global brands. Recently T-Mobile and Sprint were allowed to merge in the US. Is it really that certain that Apple or another giant purchasing ARM wouldn’t be allowed?
[+] [-] smabie|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] WhatTheFrick|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ETHisso2017|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smallnamespace|5 years ago|reply
The Mellanox deal was delayed for months by the Chinese competition authorities, and ARM is a far larger and more important player in the space.