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How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

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Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#71
post #42
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cortex-M4 is the goto low-power CPU.

Depends on your audience. M4 is decidedly midrange to me. Modern low power would probably be an M0, to others it still means 8 bit AVR.

Normally I'd say M0+ is the king and offers good debug facilities over the M0 despite the slightly larger die size.

However, @rurban is probably correct purely because Ambiq is building their portfolio around the M4 (and M33), and they seem to be working hardest in pursuing and patenting IoT layouts/technologies that reduce energy usage.

I love AVR for teaching/learning, but the fact that you can* get a more powerful, larger memory Cortex-M at a much lower cost than, say, an Atmega... I don't know why anyone would choose AVR for a new design outside of niche uses.

(* - pre-2020)

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#72
post #23

This article is garbage. Dude bought ARM at 31bn and was going to flip it for 66bn until anti-trust regulators intervened. SoftBank did nothing wrong, other than accept the risk of regulatory intervention.

He pushed the company in the wrong direction. The company could've been worth a lot more if it hadn't been investing in IoT nonsense. Sure, the valuation went from 33 to 66bn, but could've done a lot better. Just because you made money doesn't mean you didn't do something stupid.

This is only true in retrospect. When IoT was hot, everyone was eating up that story. A lot of people are still eating up IoT story because of rise in 5G.

Also, competing in server market is very very hard. If they had exclusively focused only on server market for past 5 years, they probably might still have been just minor player because of massive Intel legacy that needs to be overcome but no one knows how.

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#73

This article is garbage. Dude bought ARM at 31bn and was going to flip it for 66bn until anti-trust regulators intervened. SoftBank did nothing wrong, other than accept the risk of regulatory intervention.

During the same time that ARM went from 31 to a possible 66 (dependent on a quite absurd acquirer). Nvidia went from 15Bn to 600Bn.

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#74
What I find particularly interesting about the ARM acquisition is that it was always hard to see how it was going to continue to grow. The industry is littered with IP companies that get squished by their big customers (see also: Imagination Technologies). It's very difficult to keep a competitive advantage with IP because it'll always leak and people will always catch up, and since all your customers know that the marginal cost of your IP is 0, it's very difficult to extract marginal profit. So there's massive downward pressure on your margins, meanwhile, if your customer is using your IP at a massive scale, they'll either want to pay you a fixed cost for the IP or it becomes cheaper for them to either acquire you or poach all your engineers and replace you (which they naturally want to do anyway since they like owning the IP and having exclusive use). So the natural tendency in this market is for IP companies to pop up with a competitive advantage, grow by selling IP to larger businesses until they finally reach a scale where one of the bigger customers decide to eat their lunch. ARM is well past that point. The only real way to mitigate this is to vertically integrate and become your own biggest customer (like Nvidia) but even then you're going to face challenges (Large cloud providers moving to explore manufacturing their own chips, TPUs etc)

This just seems like many of Softbank's acquisitions where they went in to the deal with a really weird strategy for success and then 5 years later it turns out they aren't smarter than everyone else in the room. It's also not like ARM was some early stage start up at that point, they weren't taking some long bet knowing it had high risk.

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#75
Are there any opinions that harm has come to ARM while it's been under the ownership of SoftBank? What might have happened to them if they had remained independent all these years? Might SoftBank have been the perfect shelter all this while, or might ARM have ascended to even greater heights if they had gone it alone?

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#76
> When Son spearheaded the $31bn purchase of Arm, he saw it as a wager on the future of the entire technology industry, which was crystallising at that time around the IoT concept. He proceeded to push the executive team firmly on the course to designing chips for this future of machine connectivity.

Son did not push anyone, ARM was IoT crazy before it was purchased: http://web.archive.org/web/20151006082751/http://www.arm.com...

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#77
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your audience. M4 is decidedly midrange to me. Modern low power would probably be an M0, to others it still means 8 bit AVR.

Normally I'd say M0+ is the king and offers good debug facilities over the M0 despite the slightly larger die size. However, @rurban is probably correct purely because Ambiq is building their portfolio around the M4 (and M33), and they seem to be working hardest in pursuing and patenting IoT layouts/technologies that reduce energy usage. I love AVR for teaching/learning, but the fact that you can* get a more powerful…

I love it all. Cortex-M0, M3, M4, M7, and A7 all together span several full orders of magnitude in performance. Every one of them has their niche. Unfortunately for ARM, all of those designs are many years old and they are still nearly optimal in their niches. ARMv8-M parts are starting to show up, but they aren't exactly revolutionary compared to their predecessors.

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming that the Saudis are being rational with their money. Given that they are currently trying to build a city that's a straight line[0], and a "shape based" floating octagon city[1], that assumption might not be correct. It's entirely likely that the real answer has less to do with Softbank's performance and their need to diversify, and more to do with MBS liking Masayoshi Son. 0 - https://www.architectur…

The line one actually looks brilliant. It has the appeal of letting any new growth easily happen and keep transport options simple. Though most likely there will be uneven development even on this design.

It's genuinely the dumbest city design I have ever seen, and it makes transport an absolute nightmare assuming you're interacting with real technology and not magic.

Cities are generally round for a good reason. You put the important stuff in the middle and your average transit trip remains as low as possible. Straight lines do the opposite, as you guarantee that each new resident is in literally the worst possible position for transit possible, and you over tax the center’s transit in order to move people to the ends of the line.

Oh, and consider the cost for things like sewage and water. They’re a bit component of a city’s cost, and here they’re laid out as inefficiently as possible.

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great idea ... for industrial processes and machines. Unfortunately this is not where the hype is, nor where continual profits are. Industrial customers have a nasty habit (from the seller's perspective) of buying stable stuff that they can run for decades, which tends to rule out planned obsolescence based profits.

There are few to no compelling use cases for consumers creating a true network of internet connected things, because they don't have distributed physical things. If all your stuff is nearby, and isn't in large quantities, then the internet, or computer networking in general, is not the path of least resistance to control/monitor/utilize it to some greater application. Controlling X with your phone is novel at first,…

I know, that's why I was talking about industrial use cases....

Re: How SoftBank’s costly bet on the ‘internet of things’ backfired at Arm

#80
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still skeptical that anyone will win that space. The core problem (instant delivery logistics in a dense urban area) is just too expensive for the average consumer to bear. Right now every player is VC subsidized, but what happens when that money dries up?

Why do you think it’s (eventually) too expensive? Do you think distribution is too expensive?

No, the labor is too expensive. Ultimately you are paying someone for a couple hours of work, plus spending on vehicle deprecation, gas, parking, storage, all to deliver someone a packet of chips.
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