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SoftBank Completes $31 Billion Acquisition of ARM (theverge.com)
Roughly two months later, SoftBank announced today that it has completed its $31 billion acquisition of British chip designer ARM Holdings. The Verge reports: "SoftBank's purchase of ARM is the latest in a line of acquisitions in recent years for the Japanese company, including the $20 billion Sprint acquisition, and a $15 billion investment in Vodafone's Japanese division. ARM is well known for designing chips and licensing them to companies like Apple and Samsung, and ARM-designed chips dominate mobile computing in phones and tablets. 15 billion ARM-designed chips shipped last year alone, and around half of those were in mobile devices. SoftBank is expected to use the ARM deal to bolster its Internet of Things plans."
I wish we'd tax these mega corps more. Ever since the 50's we started dropping the tax rates on the 1%. They've got all the money now and nothing better to do with it besides buy up every company in existence. It makes me laugh when people think a boycott has the slightest difference. Gonna buy from company A instead of B? Go ahead. After 50 years of giving all the money in the world to 1% of the population they own literally everything.
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The interesting bit will be if they have a long term investment strategy.
Chip Design and sales are multi year and do they have the ability....
little sad that ARM are removed from the FTSE
John Jones
If Britain loses open access to the EU, how long do you think SoftBank will stay in the UK? SoftBank had made noises about doubling the ARM workforce in the UK in the years after purchase. But with the uncertainty of Brexit, they might want to open a second branch on the Continent where they can maintain EU access.
Man, I've read to much Niven - without context, my first thought was ARM = The Amalgamated Regional Militia, from the Gil "The ARM" Hamilton stories that pre-date Ringworld.
Tinkering with microcontrollers and small ARM devices is fun and all but I've yet to see any products come along that were half as interesting as my own creations, which are satisfying in no small part due to the thought and effort that goes into creating them. IoT ends up feeling like a concept fishing for users. Sure plenty of people can be fooled into thinking they needed wifi lightbulbs after the fact but how many are really ever starting out thinking, gee I wish my Device X could receive commands from my office PC or from my phone while I'm out and about?
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
wow, that really cost an arm and a leg...
15 billion sounds a little high, but not by much. 15 million would absolutely be too low considering the worldwide market, and the wide range of arm processors out there (not all go into phones or tablets.) You probably own dozens of arm processors that you didn't even realize because they are embedded in everything.
15mil? you daft? whats in your pocket?
also this makes ms linkedin buy look even more stupid.
You have a company that evidently doesn't know jack shit about technology, buying the #1 technology disrupter in a generation. Softbank knows how to make money in the short term, which is at complete odds of growing a standard to make money long term.
Actually if I understand this correctly. Arm shipped zero chips. But the companies that licensed the architecture shipped billions of them.
>15 billion ARM chips a year?
Yes, that is correct. They are not all fully fledged CPUs and SoCs though. I do doubt the 'half of them on mobile'. There were about 1.2 billion smart phones last year and probably the same number of dumb phones. 6 chips per phone? I doubt it.
How they gonna get back 31 billion? Since 1 in 7 people will buy a smart phone or gadget every 2 years. That means they gotta get $30 from every smartphone owner just to cover their cost? That's F'd up to say the least. If they increase the cost of an ARM license even slightly it means the smartphone will cost dramatically higher because of the increase in risk capital needed. Basically this deal is terrible for the consumer and probably SoftBank too.
It seems to me that this acquisition is harmful to everyone. ARM should not be owned by anyone any more than Intel or AMD. To do otherwise would present a monopoly on chip technology that could be hamstrung by "the corporate meddlers"
Sure Alpha, MIPS, RISC/PPC/Power, SPARC and such other designs may still exist, and are still alternatives should Softback decide to screw everyone who has licensed ARM tech in the future, but these chips aren't popular because they are expensive and single-source. x86 is not single-source.
There are other technologies out there. MMIX (no known implementations), RISC-V, and OpenSPARC. Nothing else. RISC-V and OpenSPARC can be used royalty-free and work on existing BSD and Linux operating systems with no substantial re-engineering. Then there is OpenRISC which tries and fails to apply the GPL to a chip ISA and thus no known implementations exist.
"around 15 billion ARM-based chips in 2015" is what the annual report says
ARM was a shining light of the the UK tech industry - its clever strategy of licensing its designs without manufacturing them made it a stellar company. Now it's been sold off to a Japanese company-swallowing mega-corporation, so is there a UK-owned equivalent to ARM left in the tech industry? It's a sad say, even if Softbank overpaid somewhat.
ARMs processor designs are in pretty much everything low powered at this point from Servers to Barcode scanners. 15b ARM based chips doesn't sound off by much
Japanese companies want out of the UK after the nation vote for freedom from the EU. But wait! Japanese companies are buying UK industry leading tech after the UK voted for independence. The sky is falling, the sky is falling.
AMD's new x86 Zen CPUs contain an ARM based coprocessor.
Zen added the support for AMD's Secure Memory Encryption (SME) and AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). Secure Memory Encryption is real time memory encryption done per page table entry. This is done utilizing the onboard "Security" Processor (ARM Cortex-A5) at boot time to encrypt each page, allowing any DDR-4 memory (including nonvolatile varieties) to be encrypted. AMD SME also makes the contents of the memory more resistant to memory snooping and cold boot attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Then there are the new ARM-based Opterons.
http://www.amd.com/en-us/produ...
ARM presumably makes more money on the big ones, especially if they also license the GPU; but the 'Cortex-M' low power/small size microcontrollers ship in heroic quantities compared to the 'Cortex-A' application processors that actually get mentioned on the spec sheets of various cellphones and tablets. There are also the 'Cortex-R' designs aimed at tasks with hard real time constraints; those are rarely mentioned but ubiquitious in cell modems and the like.
Then you have the 3rd party designs that are ISA compatble rather than directly licenses of ARM designs, Apple and Qualcomm certainly ship a fair few of those.
15 billion may be a bit high; but 15 million probably doesn't even cover a year of new cellphones.
That said, it's exactly this ubiquity and versatility that makes me wonder what SoftBank is thinking in actually buying ARM. ARM does licensing, so if you want a CPU for your application with more customization than just buying a reel of somebody's ready-to-go silicon, they'll sell you a license on pretty favorable terms. Definitely cheaper than paying ~45% over market price to buy out the whole company. If you want the right to do your own thing with their ISA, or want them to design something to fit your particular niche, that'll cost more than a cookie-cutter license; but still substantially less than buying them out.
Plus, since their business is licensing, buying them out is more or less assured to make all their existing customers nervous: what is the new management going to do? Are they going to plunder ARM's design talent for their own pet projects? Start monkeying with license fees, release schedules, etc. to gain competitive advantage for their own products in other markets?
I freely admit that I'm no genius of the silicon supply chain; but my impression was always that ARM's success was a kind of 'for profit development consortium': They aren't running a charity; but they offer solid engineering and reasonable prices to basically everyone who comes knocking, which has made ARM a de-facto standard for a wide range of situations where a company needs a CPU to embed in their product and doesn't want to DIY a proprietary freakshow; or invest the resources necessary to deliver a competitive, updated, SPARC core or the like. Since ARM sells to everyone, they amortize engineering costs across a zillion units; and their licensees can mostly rest easy knowing that ARM, who doesn't have any real direct involvement in selling SoCs or phones, or products in other markets, isn't going to start turning the screws on their licencees in an attempt to boost their own product lines.
This laid-back attitude probably contributed to having a stock price low enough to be an acquisition target; but it also helps them make all the sales they do. If people wanted to deal with an arrogant, dangerous; but very skillful single-source, they could buy Intel silicon. If they wanted to go it alone, SPARC is free for the implementing and MIPS is practically begging people to use their ISA. So far, ARM's combination of greater engineering support than the do-it-yourself options, and greater friendliness and better prices than the Intel options have proven very popular. Now that SoftBank needs to recoup a substantial investment and do whatever they had in mind when the purchased ARM, though, is that state of affairs going to persist?
Not a good thing. They'll screw it up.
u see
And the USA is giving control of the ICANN to other nations, like UN. Do not complain when ARM chips get tagged as leaving the market and you cannot find substitutes... What are you going to complain about with?
If you do a search with "Softbank Microsoft" you will quickly realize that Softbank is in a very close relation with Microsoft.
I hope to be false, but I am afraid that the ability to install a free Linux on any ARM devices will be a thing of the past in less than 10 years.
John Connor: Bullshit? There's a keiretsu war going on. A Japanese corporation never stands alone. A keiretsu is a united front of hundreds of powerful companies, all acting in partnership to win.
Web Smith: To win what?
John Connor: Whatever's there. You ever hear "business is war"? The war is never over.