frankie_baby
Member
Expanding the staff maybe, to generate even more profit for their new foreign owners, wouldnt be surprised to see a bit of tax dodging thrown in too, look at cadbury since they got taken over havent paid bugger all in tax
SoftBank acquires ARM for $32B+
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Expanding the staff maybe, to generate even more profit for their new foreign owners, wouldnt be surprised to see a bit of tax dodging thrown in too, look at cadbury since they got taken over havent paid bugger all in tax
Does it matter? I'm not sure how change of ownership in this instance will affect the British economy (as I don't see plans of redundancies or relocation being mentioned). There will still be British people working at ARM. It's not a company of national strategic importance either I don't think.
andythinkpad
Member
You don't need to recompile stuff. Android already run on plenty of intel machines.
It may be less power efficient.
frankie_baby
Member
Its one of the few british companies that absolutely dominate the world, if thats not national strategic importance i dont know what is
Even Bloomberg called it a Brexit deal for SoftBank:
http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-07-18/softbank-s-post-brexit-arm
SoftBank is paying 24.3 billion pounds, or 3.395 trillion yen.
If they paid 24.3 billion pounds on June 23, it would cost them 3.886 trillion yen. They saved 500 million yen from Brexit.
The yen gained 21 percent against the pound. Even though ARM's stock increased 15% after Brexit, SoftBank still got a better deal due to Brexit.
They already do. Companies like Qualcomm and Apple, among others, already design and manufacture their own custom CPU and GPU architectures. The only thing they're licensing from ARM is the ISA, which itself isn't that special. Why don't they use another ISA? There hasn't been a need to. As of now, I doubt SoftBank's acquisition changes that calculus.
Well I guess it would be good to establish what we mean by strategic importance. I meant from a national secuirty/cultural importance perspective. From economic perspective it is difficult for me to evaluate the impact of the balance of payments or the long term job security of ARM's employees (and associated support businesses). I would think though that the new owners are driven by the same motivations and incentives as ARM's previous management.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
The ISA is as special as dictating your toolchains, which, in turn, dictate your ability to produce software for the actual chips. ARM's greatest value is not in the ARM CPU designs (which apple et al have traditionally surpassed), but producing those designs while simultaneously maintaining and expanding a viable ISA. Heck, if an outdated ISA like x86-64 can hold so much ground, imagine what a proper modern ISA can do. So the ISA is not just special, it's paramount for the valuation of such a deal.
andythinkpad
Member
Why does it have national security importance? In time of war any powerful nation can ignore the patents and fab whatever they want as long as they has a fab inside the country.
frankie_baby
Member
ARM is basically the only thing to survive from the early 80s british computer/tech boom, I'd actually say it is important from a cultural perspective
I'm not disputing the ISA's foundational value. But it's not something that other hardware makers can't match on their own if needed, as the poster I was replying to was asking about. And the software toolchains are not so daunting as it is/was in the x86 world, since Android can run on multiple architectures and Apple can force a transition (recompile) like they have in the past. They just really have no need to since ARMv8 does what these vendors need at a reasonable cost.
BlazinSkatinAxel
Member
Softbank armed and dangerous.
I was saying that it is not of importance to national security.
michaelius
Banned
I'd say that having control over server viable procesor architecture which can be produced without input of American or Chinese companies has plenty of strategical value.
RoadHazard
Gold Member
That's a nice chunk of change.
This is yet more bad news.
Since the 90's the various Governments have been reluctant to rule against take-overs, especially takeovers by foreign companies.
The Government should largely not interfere, but the problem is the most other countries do take some action to limit foreign ownership ... except the UK.
We are at the stage where very few large companies operating in the UK are wholly UK owned, and it is very much a matter of concern for our future prosperity.
Had Brexit not occurred, then not only would UK corps been on a 'discount sale' but also I very much doubt the Government would dare to interfere because of the risk to business operations / investment / foreign investments.
The Government should oppose this takeover without a doubt, but they are too weak at the moment to do such a manouvre.
I really fucking hate how my country has been sold down the water for the past 3 decades.
Since the 90's the various Governments have been reluctant to rule against take-overs, especially takeovers by foreign companies.
The Government should largely not interfere, but the problem is the most other countries do take some action to limit foreign ownership ... except the UK.
We are at the stage where very few large companies operating in the UK are wholly UK owned, and it is very much a matter of concern for our future prosperity.
Had Brexit not occurred, then not only would UK corps been on a 'discount sale' but also I very much doubt the Government would dare to interfere because of the risk to business operations / investment / foreign investments.
The Government should oppose this takeover without a doubt, but they are too weak at the moment to do such a manouvre.
I really fucking hate how my country has been sold down the water for the past 3 decades.
Auto-Reply
Member
LMAO at the wiki entry to this on the ARM page...
There must be a huge market for this and I'm absolutely unaware of it.
There must be a huge market for this and I'm absolutely unaware of it.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Surely ARMv8 does that. But you largely underestimate the effort maintaining a good ISA takes. For reference - see Intel Itanium and how AMD64 saved Intel.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Via extensions, yes. And it's mostly been an effin mess.
Will be interesting to see what they do with it. Statement by the CEO:
http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/18/s...d-chipmaker-arm-to-target-internet-of-things/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/18/s...d-chipmaker-arm-to-target-internet-of-things/
GamerMax73
Member
As I Brit, and an IT pro and geek, this news makes me kinda sad. Well done to the company and all, and I understand more investment will be pumped into the UK company which is a very good thing, but it feels like we're loosing part of our heritage. Like when Ford bought Jaguar and Aston Martin
The company dates back to our early 8-bit glory days. Sinclair Research and the MK14, the BBC Micro, the Amiga competing Archimedes.
One news story highlighted that more ARM based processors were produced in 2015 than Intel have made in their entire history!
Pretty much any buyer will promise pretty much anything to get over any political issues. Softbank's promises aren't at all binding. I don't see why ARM would need to double it's UK workforce, a lot of the areas in which it is looking to improve (GPU's etc) are currently designed by satellite offices from previous acquisitions (their GPU design is done in Norway for instance, DSP in France and Belgium)
HP was all for expanding Autonomy when it took over, just saying.
HP was all for expanding Autonomy when it took over, just saying.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
The thing is, the world has moved on from x86 years ago. It's mainly windows users* and large organisations who've been keeping it afloat - all for the venerable BC. And if it wasn't for the massive margins of intel chips, the revenue generated by ARM-based products would have dwarfed the x86-based revenue long ago. Anyhow, this thread is about ARM Ltd, so I'll stop here.
* mainly gamers
They sold a stake in Alibaba and Supercell, which covers most of the cost just between those two.
Otaku Coder
Neo Member
Sure, ARM is closing in on x86 in the server space too, but if you want a high performance server today for Windows/Linux servers x86 is the best architechture.
PowerPC and Itanium are dead and ARM does not have the single core performance that Intel Xeon has.
Supercomputers etc use ARM or other architechtures but Amazon and Azure are mostly x86.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
MS see xbox as the living-room win10 machine - of course it will be stuck with x86 for a while, perhaps through the end of the architecture. Sony are a wildcard - outside of BC reasons (not particularly strong with that company), next ps could go either way. A hypothetical Zen falter (I hope not, but one never knows with AMD) would make sony abandon x86 for the ps5, as intel chips are expensive and intel will be reluctant to play again that subsidize-into-oblivion game they tried with the mobile makers and that got them billions into the red for the respective division. The reality is x86 just doesn't have a healthy supply landscape, as simple as that.
Servers are intel's strongold - ARM has yet to prove themselves there. But I was referring to something else.
That's the thing - the majority of people don't use xeons in their daily routines - they use ARMs. Even those who spend hours in front of desktops spend about as much on their phones/tablets during the rest of their day. That is the base of the pyramid and thus the bulk of computing needs we as a civilization have. On the top of the pyramid are the supercomputing users with their massive throughput requirements, who get more and more GPGPU oriented (unsurpassed FLOPS/watt), and thus get less and less mindful toward the CPU architectures. Case in point - the newest POWER9/nvidia supercomputer design wins.
Azure needs those windows VMs so they'll be stuck with x86. Google have been on the search for x86 alternatives for a while now, and their GPGPU and ASIC forays indicate they might have found an alternative, at least for some of their Machine Learning purposes, which might put google strictly in the supercomputer camp sooner than later.
MrCunningham
Member
There are more ARM CPU's active on earth than there are X86 CPU's. They are in almost everybody's mobile devices.
Bloody foreigners. Coming into our land. Stealin' our companies and football clubs with their filthy oil/gas/bitpenny money.
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