I don't think ARM would be a great investment. Once the clients who have licensed ARM is pretty much mature (where we are starting to be at now), they aren't going to have a lot of large licensees handing over wads of cash. Sure, some small companies or new entrants will get into it.... but Apple, Qualcomm, AWS, etc already have their licenses.... as a potential investor, I'd not see a bunch of upside. Its probably also why Softbank is looking to cut them loose. Not sure if ARM gets a recurring payment based on # of chips produced by Apple in addition to the upfront licensing fee.
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Nvidia in 'Advanced Talks' to Acquire Arm
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I don't think ARM would be a great investment. Once the clients who have licensed ARM is pretty much mature (where we are starting to be at now), they aren't going to have a lot of large licensees handing over wads of cash. Sure, some small companies or new entrants will get into it.... but Apple, Qualcomm, AWS, etc already have their licenses.... as a potential investor, I'd not see a bunch of upside. Its probably also why Softbank is looking to cut them loose. Not sure if ARM gets a recurring payment based on # of chips produced by Apple in addition to the upfront licensing fee.
I agree with you completely.
I would not buy their stock for all those reasons and more.
IMO IBM’s focus is services, not technology. I don’t think Xerox can afford to buy ARM.
Diversification in a field of expertise and experience. Having said that, I have no idea how they would get a return on their investment anytime soon. But obviously they have a plan if they are pursuing this.
It would be an Apple-like thing to do, but I don't see it happen for at least five years. The messaging of "hey guys, remember how we just told you in 2020 to compile for ARM64? about that…" just wouldn't be great.
They have had various microarchitectures you can target like arm7s for A6 and arm7k for S1 through 3. Presumably, the compiler internally uses ISA extensions on those?
1970s' Xerox (who did very broadly-scoped computer science research, and then didn't seem to want or know how to turn most of that into products) and 1990s' IBM, sure.
Today's IBM seems to treat POWER/PowerPC and mainframes as mostly a cash cow.
Why would they?
AMD proves there's nothing wrong with x86. Intel simply has an execution problem.
That's just a terrible terrible terrible joke.
ARM's limitation of being IP licensing business doesn't particularly look promising for its long term prospect.
The first ARM ISA is from the 1980s. But that's not the point. Similar to x86, the patents never really expire. This is because there is a never ending stream of new features and new patents that designers adopt. Nobody wants to adopt x86 nor ARM features introduced 20 years ago.
Unless you're the kind of person who wants a portable device that's power-efficient. Which, y'know, is almost everyone these days.
AMD does do slightly better than Intel (right now; we'll see in a year or two), but an iPhone beats a 105W Ryzen 9 3950X at single-core tasks. At multi-core? Well, it'll be interesting once we see Apple Silicon with a few more cores in there.
Arm is a competitor. It'd be tough to get regulatory approval.
Once again, nothing fundamentally wrong with the x86 ISA. People are confusing Intel's execution problem with the x86 ISA.
If Intel wanted to optimize for power and die size, Intel could strip the 16- and 32-bit features from x86, the way Apple did with their implementation. But x86 is all about backwards compatibility, while Apple only cares about the last 5 years.
All I want is for Nvidia GPUs to come back to the Mac. Hopefully this helps make that happen.
Engineers 😅🤷♂️
Whenever there was some new feature being worked on (e.g. some new video encoding tech or whatever), the company would be shopping around for licensees who might be interested. From what I heard, Apple was basically never interested - they just did their own thing. Their chips are technically “ARM cores“, but they are nothing like ARM’s own designs. Really, they’ve been “Apple cores” for a long time already.
I don’t know any of the specifics, because ARM is very tight on information security, and it was roughly 8 or so years ago anyway.
Why?
All Apple does is license the instruction set. They build their own silicon and implementation.
They already get everything they need from ARM. Buying them would do nothing except give them other customers who are competitors of theirs to either service (nope) or shut out (also nope).
There are lots of things fundamentally wrong with the x86 ISA - and this also affects AMDs ability to compete.
Has also nothing to do with Intels execution problem, as Ryzen cores are not really any better than Intels latest SunnyCove cores. Its just that AMD can put more of them into a smaller package using less power - thats the process advantage.
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Apple doesn't need to license anything else with their current SoCs as those are under an existing ARM ISA license that is in force in perpetuity.
Only if ARM develops an all-new ISA (that I expect would have to be fundamentally different from the existing ARM ISA) that Apple would be interested in using to develop their own SoCs on would they then need to secure a new license.
But I expect this would be unlikely considering the huge installed base of devices that use the existing ARM ISA. It would be kind of like when Intel tried to move everyone from x86 to Itanium and we know how well that worked.
Apple's existing ARM ISA license cannot be terminated.