ARM is sold

MIPS Open Source?

I didn't expect this to happen.

We will have watch how the new investor intends to extract the return they'll be looking for and whether ARM expands or shrinks as a consequence.

$32 billion will require lot of return.

Its hardly rocket science!

The instruction set and general architecture wouldn't be hard. But to be viable it would need compilers, debuggers, Linux, drivers, a generalized bus interface, peripherials, and some fabless design houses that would put together actual chip designs.

I am surprised at the price paid for ARM. There is too much speculative money sloshing around these days. ARM's net annual income is about 1% of that purchase price.

Another metric is the price per employee: about 8 million dollars.

Given about 15 billion ARM cores built per year, and ARM's annual revenue of a bit under $1 billion, the average license costs around 6 cents.

Hi !

The ARM machines are not at the moment an "open source" architecture. In fact the ARM business has nothing to do with any open hardware designs, AFAIK.

As many you thought that if GNU gcc supports ARM machines therefore the profound hardware ARM architecture are open ... which are not and will probably never be.

Habib.

I know that. But an open-source RISC would be great.

I never thought that. But the basic MIPS and ARM and Alpha patents are expired or close to expiring. And a new open architecture makes sense.

Thanks for those numbers.

Like Microsoft's buyout of LinkedIn, it doesn't make financial sense to me unless the license costs are going up by an order of magnitude.

There have been similar moves in the pharmaceutical industry, where established low costs drugs have been purchased by a third party and the price hiked by an equal amount.

There are many companies out there with a healthy bank balance just wanting to spend it!

John,

Bless you heart John. I know you are an experienced designer and those aspects are well known by you ... apologies.

I thought more likely on designers who are not familiar with open hardware micro-architectures.

BTW please John explain me (us) on what patents are close to be expiring ? Don't know much about patents and business laws .

Hab.

Look at the list of members:

Cheerio! Kr. Bonne.

Gonna suck in a couple years when Apple decides to take mobile iOS x86.... 8-)

On Mon, 18 Jul 2016 20:39:04 +0200 kristoff wrote in Message id: :

Rambus? I thought they died years ago. (remembering that fiasco in the early 2000's...)

And google, HP, AMD, IBM, microsemi, MS, NVIDIA, Oracle, Qualcom, WD, ...

And this is not all. E.g. the pulpino (a small single-core soc, designed by ETH-Zurich) is developed together with STMicroelectronics.

Now, I do not know if these companies do this because they actually want to use this, or just as a way to put pressure on ARM, but -to me- it sure looks like quite an interesting project.

Cheerio! Kr. Bonne.

That is cool. The ARM acquisition could give that project a boost.

The instruction set is weird, but RISC opcodes aren't intended to be people-friendly.

The acquirers are also firmly betting in hard cash that the scare stories; the supposedly negative implications for global GDP growth as a consequence of Brexit will turn out to be just a lot of hot air.

Considering that ARM gets most of its money from royalties and not goods shipped I don't see how Brexit would have any impact at all. Their biggest risk is exchange rate changes, but GB doesn't use the Euro, so there has always been a risk which won't change from before to after Brexit.

Don't forget the consequences of "free" money from central banks. Borrowing a *lot* doesn't cost very much if the interest rates are ~0%. Plus, if the loan "fails", who picks up the cost of the failed loan?

In the "new real", financial investors are *paying* governments for the privilege of *loaning* them money. Yup, negative interest rates mean they *expect* to

For an amusing commentary on all things financial, see the Alex cartoon, in this case

Why, the taxpaying public of course, you silly man! But I'm guessing you knew that, anyway. :-)

Which is why the future for bullion looks bright. Gold and silver pay no interest, so they give a better return than sub-zero coupon bonds. Plus there's no counterparty risk with bullion - *physical* bullion in allocated accounts, anyway.