Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

group.softbank

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 134 posts

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#71

Post by _huayra_ »

jsheard wrote: post #55
alberth wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t Ampere essentially the only company making server grade ARM chips. And all the rest of ARM customers are making mobile/desktop. So Ampere is going after a completely different segment that the rest of ARM customers aren’t addressing.

They're the only company selling server grade ARM chips but others are rolling their own for internal use, such as Amazons Graviton line. That's Ampere's problem really, their biggest potential customers are so big that they can afford to cut out middlemen like Ampere.

Even if Ampere could afford to undercut the internal development of these hyperscalar ARM chips (which to my knowledge they cannot), there is more value in in-housing ARM chips like Amazon / Microsoft are doing: you can more easily try out wacky ideas in chip / firmware design.

Often times these companies might have an idea for how to save power / tweak cores in a weird way on a CPU, but have a chicken-and-egg problem with not knowing exactly how much it'll reduce COGS. Not knowing that and having to negotiate with a vendor (who will often want to charge more for the feature) means that it's difficult to do unless it's an obvious slam-dunk.

By bringing chip development in-house, adding new features skews more towards a political decision that requires less rigorous financial calculations (e.g. "how much power will this save relative to the vendor_cost++ and our own developer cost?" for 3rd-party chips). It basically allows these cloud providers to ship new features more quickly in their CPUs.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#72

Post by MangoCoffee »

lvl155 wrote: post #56

Are we peak ARM yet? Jokes aside, with coming decline in x86, why is AMD so slow to introduce ARM products?

>with coming decline in x86

What indication is there that x86 is on the decline? Intel might be on the decline, but AMD seems to be doing fine, and Windows on ARM looks to go nowhere, even with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#73

Post by lotsofpulp »

DeathArrow wrote: post #58
radicalbyte wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel have National Service so pretty much every working there is ex-Army.

These people are from an intelligence agency, not just army.

Wouldn’t it be expected that those most capable with technology and software be routed to the intelligence agency, rather than the front lines or something?

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#74

Post by burnte »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #8
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #2

Ampere is still the only people making a decent purchaseable ARM server. Not loving the idea of there being a bunch of new debt hovering over them now.

What about https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack#

Apple products are not server grade equipment.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#75

Post by downrightmike »

alephnerd wrote: post #32

A lot of people are ignoring the fact that SoftBank Group is also one of the largest players in the telco market globally (that's how they started) [0] and that played a role in their Arm strategy and Eutelsat OneWeb strategy. It's useful to look at the Ampere acquisition from the same lens, as Ampere is heavily used for telco usecases [1] SoftBank Group has heavily invested in O-RAN to act as the base technology for…

Is anyone happy with telco price gouging? In spite of whatever else they are doing, they always price gouge and allow spam/ransom calls.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#76

Post by siavosh »

Can someone knowledgeable explain SoftBank? Is it partly a Japanese sovereign fund...I've become less and less interested in its investments as it seems to simply act like a giant government money channel with questionable investments that don't seem to make sense from a typical VC/PE perspective. Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#77

Post by bionade24 »

alberth wrote: post #53
klelatti wrote: post #5

So Softbank now competes with Arm's customers and (unless I've missed something on new governance arrangements) also gets access to confidential information on Arm's customers' businesses (plans, volumes etc). Hmmm.

Isn’t Ampere essentially the only company making server grade ARM chips. And all the rest of ARM customers are making mobile/desktop. So Ampere is going after a completely different segment that the rest of ARM customers aren’t addressing.

Isn't Marvell/Cavium still in the ARM server business, too?

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#78

Post by alephnerd »

siavosh wrote: post #76

Can someone knowledgeable explain SoftBank? Is it partly a Japanese sovereign fund...I've become less and less interested in its investments as it seems to simply act like a giant government money channel with questionable investments that don't seem to make sense from a typical VC/PE perspective. Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?

It's an investment company that primarily specializes in Telecom and telecom adjacent industries (eg. Internet companies, Energy, Space Tech, Hardware).

Most people on HN have only heard of SoftBank's Vision Fund, but that's basically an autonomous organization within SoftBank staffed with Deustche Bank alumni who left in droves in 2017-2020.

> Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?

Yes. Their goal is profit.

> I've become less and less interested in its investments as it seems to simply act like a giant government money channel with questionable investments that don't seem to make sense from a typical VC/PE perspective

This investment is part of their strategy for 6G and IIoT, which is synergistic with their telecom focus.

There has been work over the past 4-5 years to become the leader for creating the standards for 6G, and SoftBank is trying to position themselves to be that player.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#79

Post by re-thc »

siavosh wrote: post #76

Can someone knowledgeable explain SoftBank? Is it partly a Japanese sovereign fund...I've become less and less interested in its investments as it seems to simply act like a giant government money channel with questionable investments that don't seem to make sense from a typical VC/PE perspective. Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?

> Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?

This isn't the vision fund or any of those VC initiatives from SoftBank.

I'd see this as SoftBank who owns ARM is now buying something useful in the same group / segment to consolidate.

Having said that interest in Japan is at record lows (compared to the rest of the world) so financing is a lot easier.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#80

Post by terinjokes »

robbiet480 wrote: post #65
terinjokes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No BMC, severally limiting remote management, so operations teams responsible for physical servers don't want to touch it. JetKVM is a remote KVM, not remote management. It does not have the same integration into the internals of a server.

Apple has a BMC on the Mac mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro. It's called Lights Out Management (LOM). https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/lights-out-manage...

AFAICT LOM only has three commands "PowerON", "PowerOFF", and "Reset", a far cry from what other BMC provide. It also requires another Mac in the same LAN to be the controller, and you cant use static IPs (which is pretty common for BMC VLANs).

Also it seems unsupported for the Mac Pro (2023) this thread is about?

Post reply on HN