SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B • Hacker News Board

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#131

Post by makeitdouble » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 7:10 AM UTC

caycep wrote: post #119

flakiness wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think he is Korean, that may account for the cultural differences

Japan has a weird split between Japanese nationals, Korean special residents, and actual foreigners (including "normal" Korean immigrants).

It's a whole can of worm I'll only leave here for any else to open, but Son Masayoshi was born in Japan from parents who might have formerly been Japanese (Korea was a Japanese colony) depending on the circumstances.

Many people in similar cases are basically undistinguishable from regular Japanese nationals culturally speaking.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#132

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 7:26 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #117

jonas21 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks very much, I had forgotten about ARM. 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.

[deleted]

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#133

Post by hustwindmaple1 » Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 12:42 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #84

alberth wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a VC. But it's so big (maybe biggest in the world), so its reach and influence is immense. And as a result, it has raised money from nations and other enormous entities. Run by Masa who many consider an oracle because his placed massive bets years before other people and those bets have paid of big.

> 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…

His Alibaba/Arm bets are legendary. Both made $100B+

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#134

Post by lambda_foo » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 11:36 PM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #42

bayindirh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given Oracle's tendency to use pillows on processor architectures and bury them at night, Softbank is possibly the better of two evils? Jokes aside, I don't believe Oracle would evolve the A1s beyond what they need, and stagnate them for years instead.

I’d love for someone more informed to provide some insider detail, but by appearances Oracle really, really tried to make SPARC a differentiator for them after the Sun acquisition. They were shipping new systems (M8) based on a consistent in-house evolution of SPARC almost 8 years after the acquisition, a veritable eternity in tech time. Eventually the market just said, no, we want x64 and a path to Cloud. One wonder…

Even if Oracle tried, SPARC performance was terrible and their value for money was too. We benchmarked a finance system (Transaction Processing) where we needed 3x the SPARC hardware to keep up with Intel/Linux. Once they bought Sun I couldn't see any future where they made it work with keeping SPARC alive. Best case was keeping Solaris on x86 since that had genuinely better features (Zones and DTrace in particular).