I love it. Apple is just like “naw we’re good”. Nobody but Apple knows what they’ve got, but I bet it’s damn good.
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SoftBank May Be Selling Arm, But Apple Isn't Interested
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1. ARM offers perpetual licensing for their ISA.
2. Apple uses ARMv8-A ISA (see #1). But they do not license processor core designs. Apple designs their implementation in-house.
Very likely. Finger pointing is valuable too, when all the blame goes to a third party when ARM development stalls. Just as Intel has encountered several times.
I believe Apple has a perpetual architectural license.
SoftBank: ARM is for sale.
APPLE: Not interested.
Apple (secretly): we are so interested. Shhhhhh.
APPLE: Not interested.
Apple (secretly): we are so interested. Shhhhhh.
Apple is no longer dependent on the ARM architecture since the A9 chip. In addition Apple can make their own Instruction Set if needed because Apple's ecosystem is unique. There are no obstacles anymore.
When SoftBank bought ARM in 2016, it was for $30 billion and most analysts thought it was overpriced.
Everyone who wants a license to the ARMv8-A ISA already has one. That ISA is good for at least another decade or two. It's the design and implementation of the ISA that costs billions.
While ARM powers all the Apple devices of the future, most of the cost has little to do with the processor.
The money is always in high margin services and products. Beyond developing to the instruction set, I imagine Apple has no interest in the other aspects of ARMs operations or designs. It would be a distraction for an Apple that in some cases already does too much.
The money is always in high margin services and products. Beyond developing to the instruction set, I imagine Apple has no interest in the other aspects of ARMs operations or designs. It would be a distraction for an Apple that in some cases already does too much.
How profoundly you misunderstand things. Apple doesn't want to buy ARM because they'd likely then be forced to license their own innovations. Every innovation they made to an ARM chip would result in a lawsuit because, as owners... well the rest should be obvious.
I am just curious. Let's say the licensing fee quadrupling does happen and Apple needs to develop its own architecture or go with RISC-V, then it still requires years of development and transition right? It's not going to be ready in a month or two. It will be yet another transition no?
You think Apple didn't negotiate a long-term contract with ARM on terms which has clauses designed for exactly this and other kinds of eventualities? I trust a company the size of Apple wouldn't align itself almost entirely to one technology provider without some very thoughtful and iron-clad legal provisions.
US/EU government antitrust watchdogs will be aggressively against Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung for this. AMD/NVIDIA seem to be the best positioned. TSMC makes logical sense if they want to own the licensing rights to what they build. Broadcom, Huawei offers would be shut down right away by US Gov't.
NASDAQ listing seems most plausible.
NASDAQ listing seems most plausible.
As long as they have license agreements in place, they will be ok.
Apple would love for the big players like Microsoft to develop full versions of windows for ARM. (for virtualisation capabilities or boot camp for Apple silicon.
So if Apple owned Arm, it would be a barrier to that.
There are plenty of arm based linux variants out there.
Who knows, maybe if Microsoft did develop a full ARM based windows, it might be a back door for them to get back into the phone/tablet space again...
It's not medicine, so I don't think you can do that in the US.
Obviously, if the business was raking in the bucks then they wouldn’t be selling it. I don’t doubt its profitable, just that SoftBank may have been overly optimistic with many of their acquisitions and in aggregate of them.
And the business now seems like a utility with the same concerns of your water company raising the monthly fees while dealing with regulatory mandates and having only a handful of paying customers for it’s services. With RISC-V as an open standard waiting on the wings with open ARMs
And the business now seems like a utility with the same concerns of your water company raising the monthly fees while dealing with regulatory mandates and having only a handful of paying customers for it’s services. With RISC-V as an open standard waiting on the wings with open ARMs
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this would be the common sense move for Intel and give them a major jump into the Windows home and laptop / tablet PC race before Qualcomm gets further in.
yet this may be a problem, the same potential anti-trust problem as well, don’t forget Microsoft will release two dual screen android and Arm based smartphones in 2021
The buyer would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Any company (including SOC CPU core providers) without a long-term or perpetual license would likely just start switching to RISC-V and thus eventually stop paying any license fees. Any differences in compiler back-ends, power, and performance would likely rapidly become small to none (and possibly in favor of RISC-V). For Apple, it would be just another slice in a fat binary that users wouldn't notice.
Intel already has a RISC architecture, Itanium, but it failed in the marketplace, in part because of the silicon process improvements x86 (but not Itanium) received which massively improved its speed, and in part because the required compiler improvements never materialized.
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Neither does Intel buying them. Intel would have far more of a monopoly position than Apple would.
Judging from the support of SVE in Apple LLVM. I think Apple already have all the important piece of ARM technology licensed. The only thing that is missing would be ARMv9 which I think Apple may already have signed up as well.
The most logical outcome would be ARM remain on Softbank's book because no one is willing to buy it at a price Softbank see fit.
The most logical outcome would be ARM remain on Softbank's book because no one is willing to buy it at a price Softbank see fit.
Lol, Apple inexplicably hates Nvidia. So if Nvidia buys Arm, hopefully Nvidia will tell Apple they can only use Arm architecture if Apple brings Nvidia GPUs back to the Mac. That would be the dream. Haha.
Huh? Why would the government allow TSMC, a Taiwanese company, to buy a UK company over Broadcom, an American company?
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Itanium isn't RISC, it's VLIW. It wasn't an issue of compiler improvements, its an issue of making scheduling decisions at runtime versus at compilation time, particularly on a large general-purpose computer.
It was also an issue of Intel entering the mission critical server market at the exact time it was being killed by x86 and cloud-style scaling.
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Maybe Apple, Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia, AMD, and Intel should create a consortium to buy it out, akin to the Rockstar Consortium formed to buy out Nortel.
No company would be forced to license their innovations, but they could all help shape industry standards with voluntarily contributions or synergy between companies.
No company would be forced to license their innovations, but they could all help shape industry standards with voluntarily contributions or synergy between companies.
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