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I wonder if SoftBank timed this "for sale" talk to coincide with Apple's moving MacOS to ARM announcement in the hope of getting them to seriously consider buying them out?
I can think of several companies I'd rather not see taking control of ARM who'd love to use ownership to make life difficult for Apple. Yes, yes, "regulatory oversight and requirements that would accompany such a deal" should make it safe but then again...
Imagine Qualcomm owning ARM? That couldn't be good for anyone.
Softbank paid too much for ARM, way more than a Fabless design only Semiconductor Firm deserves, Softbank paid 32 Billion USD so now they must be hunting for someone ready to pay more than 32 Billion. Apple would not do it because they only use they only use the ARM ISA which has a perpetual license, so Apple doesn't have to renew it. Also Apple designed all the cores from scratch so they dont depend on yearly Cortex design by ARM. Qualcomm on the other hand actually does not design its cores so it needs to license those Cortex designs every yr. Even if they do buy ARM it won't affect Apple a bit. So its quite pointless for Apple to buy the ARM, Even if tomorrow ARM Decides to create a new ISA or more advanced ISA and Apple doesn't need it doesn't even need to license new one.
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What stops another company from buying ARM and then quadrupling (or more) the licensing fees? What alternatives would Apple have at that point?
Apples license is only for the ISA which is a perpetual license. So they dont buy it every yr. They only bought it once, Also apple designed all their Cores from scratch so they actually dont need the cortex designs by ARM, there is a reason why Apples designs are 2-3 yrs ahead of ARM itself and thus rest of the Industry.
 
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Nvidia is actually a big player in the PC markets, and has a control to a extent over essentially every PC manufacturer except Apple, because they have much stronger GPUs compared to AMD.

Not really. 70% of PCs ship with integrated graphics. The 30% that do ship with GPUs include things like the Radeon R5 430 2 GB that Dell ships in business desktops, which is pretty much the same as integrated graphics.

Between 1/3-1/2 of GPU shipments are in console. When you factor that in, AMD ships more GPUs than Nvidia.

The impression you get that Nvidia is huge comes from PC gaming, which actually isn't the whole story and is really a niche market.
 
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this little thing called Fair Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory Licensing also known as FRAND.

FRAND is done for standardization. For example, companies like Qualcomm get to have patents on cellular technology even to cellular technology should be a common, standardized good and you can't really make cellular phone hardware without infringing on those patents, so the compromise is that Qualcomm is forced to license their patents under FRAND terms.

ARM is not a standard. It's just Arm's proprietary ISA, and it merely happens to be quite popular. You can use any old other ISA, like MIPS or RISC-V or whatever. You can make a CPU without infringing on anything from Arm. So, FRAND doesn't matter.

the same reason why if Apple bought ARM they would have to license it and could keep it to itself. ARM has become an industry standard there for is subject to FRAND.

"Industry standard" is a pundit term. It has no legal meaning.
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my concern is, what stops a company from buying and not improving ARM or dragging the feet to do so.

Competition would stop it. If ARM doesn't improve its CPU designs, then Apple gains an even higher lead, and companies like Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm will go back to making their own designs. Thus, ARM's new buyer loses on revenues. If ARM doesn't improve its ISA, then RISC-V starts gaining.
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lol - if you think that losing Apple with its measly 5% market share will make Intel irrelevant, think again.

This isn't 1997. The big money in selling CPUs isn't in desktop tower PCs. It's servers (where ARM is a threat) and embedded (where ARM is a threat).

Losing Apple also weakens Intel's prestige. And if there is any purpose to the Surface Pro X at all, it's to point a giant yellow alarm signal from Microsoft to Intel.

I hope Intel buys ARM and then charges Apple double of what they wanted for the Intel platform before.

Why would Intel do that?

In all honesty: I find it extremely short-sighted of Apple to pass on this opportunity to completely control the processor market for mobile devices and their own hardware.

Oh, so now Apple is a CPU vendor? Apple doesn't have to do literally everything and the kitchen sink.

don‘t worry, Apple‘s „what goes around, comes around“ strategy will ensure that by 2028, they‘ll ditch ARM and go back to PPC. And three years later they‘ll switch back to Intel. You gotta keep your devs nimble and your customers‘ purses open, don‘t you?

You do realize that Intel Macs lasted a decade and a half, right? Macs were on Intel longer than they were on PowerPC, and longer than they were on 68k. What makes you think they'll now suddenly switch faster?
 
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A consortium of Apple, Qualcomm and others should buy it and open source it like risc-v. That way nobody could charge license fees, and it would make it more appropriate for educational institutions as well.
 
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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.

Moving to its own ISA would probably take years, and if Apple wanted to do that, this WWDC would've been a good moment to announce it. Instead, they're now having all Mac developers target the ARM ISA.
 
Nvidia is eyeing ARM and I hope they acquire them. Imagine Apple and Nvidia both pushing powerful ARM processors for mobile, PC, workstations, datacenter, etc.

With only Apple pushing ARM for MacOS isn’t enough. We need a giant like Nvidia to do that as well on the Windows side so the entire industry can migrate to ARM ASAP.
That might actually be good, NVIDIA is a D*** head company and it would rent seek on all Android devices once it buys ARM. Not a bad thing for APPLE.
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Moving to its own ISA would probably take years, and if Apple wanted to do that, this WWDC would've been a good moment to announce it. Instead, they're now having all Mac developers target the ARM ISA.
Designing a new ISA doesn't get you anything there isn't any technical advantage to designing a new ISA when the current is already the most optimised it already is RISC.
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A consortium of Apple, Qualcomm and others should buy it and open source it like risc-v. That way nobody could charge license fees, and it would make it more appropriate for educational institutions as well.
Haha So you are saying a consortium will spend 40+ Billion dollars and make it open source and what will they tell their Investors?
 
RISC-V is anything but old.

Yes. I don't take "any old" to literally mean "old".

Who's to say Apple is not already working on their own architecture? ;)

But why?

I'm sure they have prototypes of their own ISA, at least on paper. They might also have some prototype hardware running on it. But they clearly don't have any near-term plans to do that. If they didn't, they wouldn't ask, just this year, for developers to target arm64. Maybe ten years from now.

I would also expect they have prototype hardware running macOS and/or iOS on, say, RISC-V.

The question is: why? ARM is flexible and forward-thinking enough, at least for now.
 
Nvidia is eyeing ARM and I hope they acquire them. Imagine Apple and Nvidia both pushing powerful ARM processors for mobile, PC, workstations, datacenter, etc.

With only Apple pushing ARM for MacOS isn’t enough. We need a giant like Nvidia to do that as well on the Windows side so the entire industry can migrate to ARM ASAP.
Now that's funny.
 
A “giant” like Nvidia? Nvidia is a gnat flying around Apple’s behind. They are nothing compared to Apple. “Apple pushing ARM... isn’t enough” What planet are you from?
In the PC/server/gaming world Nvidia surely isn't a gnat.
 
Nvidia is eyeing ARM and I hope they acquire them. Imagine Apple and Nvidia both pushing powerful ARM processors for mobile, PC, workstations, datacenter, etc.

With only Apple pushing ARM for MacOS isn’t enough. We need a giant like Nvidia to do that as well on the Windows side so the entire industry can migrate to ARM ASAP.

Could be. There was a time when Nvidia dipped their toes into becoming more integral, with nForce… they lost interest in part because Intel made more and more portions of the former chipset part of its CPU package. It'd be funny if Nvidia's revenge, a decade later, would be to also compete on the CPU.
 
Cost. Softbank isn't selling the #1 mobile processor for pennies. Also to screw Apple you need to screw all the other ARM customers. Where Qualcomm and Nokia failed in their licensing of their radio patents is that they wanted to make Apple pay more just because they are successful. They join and contribute to a consortium, agree to a price schedule. They don't get to pick and choose who gets charged more. Samsung is probably the biggest seller of BluRay players on the planet. Apple nor MS ever decide to charge Samsung more for their patents that are part of the BluRay consortium.

What's interesting about that is Samsung isn't even making BluRay players anymore, at least not for the U.S.
.
 
No way - the ARM deal was a steal!
Total Revenue of ARM is around $1.5 Billion, Soft bank bought it for 21 Times that. At this rate it will take 21 yrs for them to recover the investment alone. Who knows if we would still be using Von Neumann architecture after 20 yrs or not. I highly doubt that because we are almost running out of Nanometers, TSMC has already said the next tech they will be rolling out soon would be 3nm , which is like 15 Atoms of silicon , may be 2 or more cycles and we dont really know what to do next.
 
Soft Bank is turning into an unmitigated disaster starting with the scam that is/was WeWork. I did not realize they massively overpaid for ARM as well. The guy who founded WeWork is the ultimate shyster, just read any article about him and his bizarre business practices. The whole concept is dead in the water now that many people who went to offices now work at home. They are holding a ton of real estate they overpaid for that has been tremendously reduced in value.
 
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When SoftBank bought ARM in 2016, it was for $30 billion and most analysts thought it was overpriced.
I agree. I don’t think Apple will spend billions on anything like that.

The purchase price Beats surprised me. Apple is usually very much on the low end of purchase prices. But they get their money’s worth when they do.
 
cool if nvdia and aapl cooperated on fanless discreet gpu for aapl products
gpu minimum specs - gtx 2070 power, easy integration in all new aapl computers
 
Something fishy here, why buy a company when Apple is about to switch to ARM that might make a wave of switching to ARM architecture through the industry?

Or maybe RISC-V is about to take over...hmmmm
 
Berkshire Hathaway should make a bid if the price is right. This is a Buffett type investment. A company that does nothing except license a technology is a great place to be. Buffett loves gate-keeper type investments that generate cash.
 
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.
Remember the Nvidia graphics chip bug that haunted many MacBook Pros years ago. I'm sure there are other more recent irritants but that one was a big reliability and thus a image problem for Apple.
 
Soft Bank is turning into an unmitigated disaster starting with the scam that is/was WeWork. I did not realize they massively overpaid for ARM as well. The guy who founded WeWork is the ultimate shyster, just read any article about him and his bizarre business practices. The whole concept is dead in the water now that many people who went to offices now work at home. They are holding a ton of real estate they overpaid for that has been tremendously reduced in value.
WeWork guy a conman plain and simple. He sold real estate as technology, and stole money directly from the investors into his personal account.
 
If Apple did drop ARM for some weird reason MIPS would be my sentimental favorite for replacing it.

I wonder when, if ever, Apple will go ARM9.
 
It's not clear what your objections are. Why do you think that? Perpetual doesn't mean free, if that's your concern. It just means the terms are set in stone, subject to certain conditions. It would mean the license fee schedule would be set in perpetuity. There's no way Apple would commit to any license if the licensor could arbitrarily change the terms at some point in the future. Also, why are you talking about third party companies in general? This is a technology license, which is a very specific thing; it's not in any way like a component supply contract. It's a right to use intelligence property only. And yes, sometimes those are perpetual; or of such long term (like 99 years) that they are effectively perpetual.

name one? This is just not done in the business world anymore and most certainly not in the extremely fast-pace tech business.
 
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