111–120 of 134 posts
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
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Yeah, Ampere's only customers appear to be Oracle Cloud and some hobbyists. I was kind of expecting Oracle to buy them.
Hetzner offers Ampere boxes too, but they're not exactly a hyperscaler.
I use Hetzner ARM machines myself and they're great, and something something i THINK there's less abuse and noisy neighbors on ARM since it's slightly less skiddie friendly (can't run random x86 binaries)
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…
MunichRe is trying the same strategy. You'll see their name in the next 10 years just like SoftBank ;)
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SoftBank was founded by Masayoshi Son. It was originally a tech company that resold software (imagine Steam but for desktop apps), but very quickly it morphed into something like a PE firm that would do continual leveraged buyouts of existing firms. They've bought companies that run conferences, tech magazines, one of their more formative M & A deals was to buy the Japanese Vodafone arm. Many of these deals actually…
And it's so un-Japanese. See what the Japanese government (or old power in Japan) has been spending the money on recently: - Honda-Nissan merger (failed) - Seven Eleven counter buyout https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/the-fight-for-7-eleven-i... Masayoshi Son is in a different league, for good or bad.
Investing in SoftBank.
MUFG, the Custody Bank, and Master Trust all have significant ownership stakes in SoftBank, and most Japanese conglomerates like NTT, NEC, etc tend to work closely with SoftBank on strategic deals
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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.
https://mikrotik.com/product/rds2216
Interesting enough Mikrotik announced a co-development with Ampere last year. https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/blog/2024/09/24/27...
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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.
Mikrotik some how got a hold of Graviton cpu's for their Flagship router and now their new NAS/Router/Container Server. https://mikrotik.com/product/rds2216 Interesting enough Mikrotik announced a co-development with Ampere last year. https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/blog/2024/09/24/27...
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> Run by Masa who many consider an oracle because his placed massive bets years before other people and those bets have paid of big. I'm not sure how many folks these days would consider him an "oracle". He clearly did fabulously well with some early Internet investments, but he also was famous for folly after folly of overpriced investments in the 2010s (the Softbank "Vision Funds"). I'd be curious if there is a sim…
They've made close to $100B on ARM (which they acquired in 2016). This dwarfs the $14B they lost on WeWork. Of course WeWork gets far more attention because it's a such an entertaining story.
The Vision Fund lost on tons more companies than just WeWork though. But your overall point is correct - there were a couple outsized winners (also just found another article that they made a huge gain on DoorDash) that I'm guessing took care of the majority of their losses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SoftBank was founded by Masayoshi Son. It was originally a tech company that resold software (imagine Steam but for desktop apps), but very quickly it morphed into something like a PE firm that would do continual leveraged buyouts of existing firms. They've bought companies that run conferences, tech magazines, one of their more formative M & A deals was to buy the Japanese Vodafone arm. Many of these deals actually…
And it's so un-Japanese. See what the Japanese government (or old power in Japan) has been spending the money on recently: - Honda-Nissan merger (failed) - Seven Eleven counter buyout https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/the-fight-for-7-eleven-i... Masayoshi Son is in a different league, for good or bad.
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.
Got a chance to play about with the Altra Max to do some batch jobs last year. 128 cores going 100% in htop was fun!
We were doing some testing and > 96 cores at 100% caused a massive degradation in performance. We ended up going with dual 32C/64T Epycs (which cost twice as much) as a result. If they fix it in the Altra One chips they will be back on the table though because they were very good power wise for our workload and quite price competitive in a supermicro chassis.