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Apple To Buy ARM?
gyrogeerloose writes "An article in the London Evening Standard claims that Apple has made an $8 billion offer to acquire ARM Holdings. For those few Slashdotters who don't already know, ARM makes the processor chips that power Apple's iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. However, ARM processors are also used by other manufacturers, including Palm and, perhaps most significantly, companies building Android phones. This explains why Apple might be willing to spend so much on the deal — almost 20% of its cash reserves. Being able to control who gets to use the processors (and, more importantly, who doesn't) would give Apple a huge advantage over its competitors."
You do know the company was jointly founded by Apple, Acorn and VLSI in the first place?
ARM was founded by Apple and Acorn (of BBC Micro fame). During the 90s when Apple was in danger of going bust it sold off its stake in ARM. Now that Apple has a few quid in the bank, it wants ARM back. Assuming the rumours are true. Anyway, it's not so strange.
How is this an antitrust goldmine? Apple doesn't sell the most phones and it doesn't sell the most dollars from phone sales. Your comment makes no sense.
Almost all smartphones use ARM processors. Nexus one, HTC desire, HTC incredible, Sony Ericson Xperia x10, iPhone, iPad etc, the list goes on. Even Nintendo DS and Nvidia's Tegra chip uses ARM processors. If Apple bought ARM, they'd have control over prices and royalties.
Some of the phones use Qualcomm's Snapdragon which is not ARM based.
Yes it is. Qualcomm buy the most expensive ARM license, which gets you all of the sources for the design and the ability to change anything. The Snapdragon is a modified Cortex A8 (reworked FPU pipeline and a few other changes). It uses the ARM instruction set and is based on a design licensed from ARM.
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Its a quite accurate statement to say Apple is a founder. ARM originally stood for "Acorn RISC machine" and was developed internally at Acorn. When ARM was incorporated as an independent entity it was done so with Acorn and Apple as 40% owners and VLSI technology (at that time the sole manufacturer) as a 20% owner. At that time the name was changes to "Advanced RISC Machines". Apple had more than Newton in the big picture at that time including laser printers. The ARM610 was indeed developed specifically for the Newton, with a special MMU by ARM as one of its earliest projects. ARM cpu's (in many case multiple ones) are in every cellular handset I'm aware of in the last decade not just smartphones. ARM cpu's are being used by most of the next wave of startup companies in low power server design..look at Smoothstone for an example. And of course they are making serious inroads in Netbook design, both NVIDIA's Tegra and Qualcomm's Snapdragon are giving Intel plenty sleepless nights right now. The last ARM design I did put an ARM7n in every electricity meter...in other words our entire tech world is already built around this architecture.
The royalties on the older designs are tiny and not going to be affected by an acquisition, don't expect any significant cost changes to be noticeable at retail even if it were possible to renegotiate the royalty schedules. After some stagnation in the last decade where ARM struggled to break out of the the low cost embedded space the company is suddenly looking strong again and it could be quite possible that Apple wants to go this way as an insurance policy, because they fear other big stalkers might acquire a company they are increasingly strategically reliant on.
Most currently marketed phones use ARM, perhaps. This is FAR from a monopoly on production however. In fact, if it was, ARM would already likely be under investigation if there was any fishy stuff since Apple is so small comparatively.
So, here's the current line-up:
- ARM (11, Cortex A8, ARMv7, etc)
- nVidia (tegra, Tegra 2, which has existing license on the ARM core architecture set that can not be taken away by a merger with Apple).
- Marvell XScale (also ARM based, but licenses only instructions, not the core architecture).
- Qualcomm Scorpion (an ARM clone, also licensed, combined with ATI graphics
- Intel Atom
- Moorestown MeeGo.
- Samsung. yet another licenses ARM core design, but using alternative architecture.
So, not exactly a monopoly (not even a duopoly) but, there's more...
Don't think for a second ATI is not designing their own. Rumor has it Big Blue is also...
Then, there's other issues, most notably FRAND. ARM is a reference architecture, and is already open licensed. That license must be offered to ALL comers provided fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory pricing, or Apple would be in a world of shit.
Then, there's the idea that it is COMPLETELY LEGAL to be a monopoly! It is only illegal to ABUSE monopoly position to unfairly stifle competition or emergent alternatives. Since they're already covered by FRAND, it's pretty hard for Apple to do anything aggressive that way.
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