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 what will become 6G, and they have been making a number of partnerships, investments, and acquisitions specifically around this [2][3].
SoftBank has been working on a 6G/Beyond 5G strategy for several years now [4] - primarily targeting embedded usecases such as autonomous vehicles [5][6]
[0] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/
[1] - https://amperecomputing.com/press/ampere-accelerates-expansi...
[2] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/news/press/sbkk/2024/2024022...
[3] - https://www.o-ran.org/membership
[4] - https://www.suasnews.com/2021/08/softbank-corp-unveils-6g-co...
[5] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/051...
[6] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/069...
Later on the would move away from leveraged buyouts and start investing in startups more similar to how a VC firm would in the US. He notably invested early in Yahoo and Alibaba.
The company is not a sovereign fund - it's really run at the behest of it's founder. If you want to read more about the story, there was recently a great biography that chronicled the story: Gambling Man (https://www.amazon.com/Gambling-Man-Greatest-Disruptor-Masay...)
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
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.
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.
MunichRe is trying the same strategy. You'll see their name in the next 10 years just like SoftBank ;)
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.
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 simple accounting list of Softbank's major investments ranked from biggest winners to biggest losers. I guess it pretty much highlights the dynamics of the VC business model - you only need a few giant winners to offset the boatload of losers. In Softbank's case, I'm guessing their biggest winners are Yahoo Japan (which was the dominate site in Japan for a long time, and long after the US Yahoo fell into irrelevance) and Alibaba, which saw their early $20 million investment balloon into billions.
But did Softbank have any winners from their 2010s spending spree (along the time where they shoveled good money after bad into WeWork)?
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.
YC does the same thing at the very early stage, A16Z and Sequoia do the same at later stages, and arguably Softbank made their money doing the same thing at a later stage again, although all the lines are a little blurred.
(Though he sold too soon and missed out)
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.
So combining ARM and Ampere operations doesn't hurt any current big customers in the mobile field (apart from perhaps Qualcomm but they're in lawsuit mode there anyhow).
They also make sure to make the ARM alternative available to smaller customers (As an option besides AMD and Intel servers) instead of being gobbled up by f.ex. Oracle (making the big server ARM implementations inhouse to 2 of the big platform operators).
Not to mention the silver lining, combining the ops will give it more credence in the enterprise market that seems to have damn good margins (some have attributed AMD's resurgence and Intel's troubles to Intel slipping in server sales).
And to be fair I think Rene Haas has been fairly upfront about changing their approach.
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.
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.
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...
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)
There's a distinction that has to be made here.
Different in that ARM only 'designed'. It's more like a framework / library / tool (a very feature complete 1).
The Nvidia case is more similar to having a self-install and then a cloud hosted version of the same software.
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.
https://www.supermicro.com/datasheet/datasheet-NVIDIA-MGX-1U...
Or there are some specific workload on web that their CPU benefits and get filtered across ( DB hosting for example ) rather than going into a separate market for general usage.
JetKVM is a remote KVM, not remote management. It does not have the same integration into the internals of a server.
[0]https://www.igen.fr/accessoires/2015/11/non-la-magic-mouse-n...
Also it seems unsupported for the Mac Pro (2023) this thread is about?
24 CPU cores and 192 GB of memory might be enough for a small company's single on-site server, but those will likely want lots of storage and not want to deal with an exotic platform. Anyone who's willing to deal with ARM and macOS on a server will likely want a lot more performance per 1U.
Side note: I'm curious where this 1:8 ratio of cores:memory came from. Everyone seems to be standardising on it, even at VM levels
You won't run general purpose server apps on this.
Does Apple prevent their users running applications which listen to outside connections?
[0]: https://jetkvm.com/
it's not that you can't -- it's just inefficient: you're spending more money for less features.
Compare that to a bare metal install of Proxmox or similar.
Either way, it wouldn't be a good fit when Ampere exists.
For low power modular compute, the way GitHub and Amazon re-package Mac Minis is not the moest efficient way to get Apple hardware in a rack with remote management (and still no ECC), but it does have a performance per watt and compatibility for macOS CI workers that you can't get any other way.
Ideally, this stops being an issue when the ARM64 ecosystem can build those apps natively. We're pretty close on that one, and it means you can use Ampere and Graviton for that.
I think the primary use for a rackable server like this is automating building and testing of macOS native, or macOS specific applications you develop, or build them. Or as a shared remote desktop host for specific tasks.
Also we had (recently deprecated) macOS Server package for quite some time. So it's not unsuitable for servers. It's more suitable for specific jobs as a server.
Installing Linux servers are too easy now, so I don't think macOS should evolve a "server-specific" version either.
Macs remain completely horrendous to remote-administer.
I love my macs but apple will never be a cost or reliability solution to computation unless they do a complete 180. They're a boutique/luxury firm that can choose which markets they want to dominate. If you think there's not a small horde of people at Apple trying to figure out how to pitch bringing the xserve back, I have a bridge to sell you. But unless they can convince CTOs to become sysadmins it'll never be a viable way for a company as large as Apple to drive hardware development.
Then again, the more I think on it, the worse an idea it is. Too locked-in and out for being able to run the likes of Jellyfin, etc. It could be a good option for a "Server" mac.. but would still make more sense for it to run Linux as a base.
Is hardware so much less valuable?
Margins and TAM.
Those 1000+ customers at Wiz have 7-8 figure TCV deals (I have personally seen a couple of those contracts), and have pipeline in multiple industry verticals - Tech, Telecom, ONG, Healthcare, Finance, Insurance, etc
An embedded and telco oriented firm like Ampere has weaker margins as they have to manufacture hardware, which drastically reduces the amount of money available.
It's also a smaller and more consolidated market with a weaker TAM.
The SB purchase is part of Arm completely restructuring their IP philosophy and business model. Ampere was sold for "so little" because Arm could effectively just cut them off as soon as their contract ran out. This was a cleaner transfer.
Arm is bringing everything back in house, ceding the low end to RISC-V and taking the high end back in and producing their own silicon.
I mean, yes, these people are ex-israeli army, but why would Google want to pay 32B for ex-IDF people? Surely there's more of them out there?
It does gives free technical education and experience for some recruits (not necessarily the top, and that experience isn't always teh best), but of course that affects tech employment - you'd see higher rates of service across tech employees, as that service gave them a jump start on their tech education.
That said, even if the Israeli military decides to draft a person, that person can stand up and refuse. It ain't "free" (may result in imprisonment,) but it's a choice that even if too few make, it is one, and making it is a strong signal about what kind of person they are.
You can scroll down to see the companies founded by alumni.
The Meta CISO is ex-8200.
I'm not sure I understand what reverse merger means, or what OP is implying
And confirmed by the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160116175915/http://data.iana....
Jokes aside, I don't believe Oracle would evolve the A1s beyond what they need, and stagnate them for years instead.
Right now ARM is in a golden position to take server market pieces, higher compute densities with simpler i-set and good software support thanks to years of mobile and now Apple support (most language implementators wants things to run on Mac's so bugs and perf have been getting fixed)
If Oracle would've bought them, third parties (in this case including both Microsoft with Azure and Google) would probably have held back on ARM investments (not to mention smaller operators), Qualcomm being in lawsuit mode would also had sown doubt, maybe some other manufacturer would introduce chips in the meanwhile but they would be small and given time Risc-V might even pop up on the horizon as an alternative hurting ARM on server chances even more.
Now they're "independant", with better software support than ever, guaranteeing availability to smaller parties (at a time when many of those are outside the US and wanting alternatives) and a chance to benefit from vertical integration.
So where are the others that supposedly are better than them?
In this case, Softbank will be having ARM and Ampere.
In that case, we have the CPU manufacturers, which already do this as the business, Google, which is not that interested, or already make their own chips, Apple, which has an in-house CPU/GPU company, and probably IBM, which also designs and builds their own processors.
So, the only interested shopper in the vicinity is Oracle, and they happen to have the money. The others have the money, but not the interest.
I think the fear is that if Oracle was the purchaser, then that would be good for Oracle, but not necessarily the rest of the ARM ecosystem. Given Softbank’s ARM investment, it is in their interest to try to keep the ecosystem healthy.
In the specific case of Ampere it remains to be seen, it wasn't that healthy also.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/26/oracle_ampere_stake_c...
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 wonders if they’d kept at it for a few more years whether they’d have needed to bid for Altera at all, given the gaps opened up by Intel’s struggles.
SoftBank Vision Fund is a separate subgroup of SoftBank targeted at VC, and was largely operated and managed by ex-Deustche Bank alumni due to Rajeev Misra and Colin Fan poaching their colleagues like Ziyad Al-Ashaikh (the guy who helped land the Saudi PIF deal), Akshay Naheta, Munich Verma, Saleh Romeih, etc
And much of Vision Fund's MENA LPs would leave if a couple key Vision Fund partners were to leave - they did the same with Desutche Bank.
Sorry dude!
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
https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...
AMD continuing to have the Xilinx line of FPGAs with some Cortex cores and having Arm management cores that run firmware doesn’t really address this.
amd64 is still the default platform for desktop and server software. You can have arguments about the ISA, but for the most part that doesn't actually matter; amd64 is good enough, upstart cpu makers choose ARM not because it's better than amd64, but because it's at least good enough and licenses are available.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-we-stand-ready-to-make...
Adapting Zen to a simpler-to-decode architecture would cost more than licensing a core from ARM. The Zen 5 front-end is adapted for working around deficiencies of x86 with dual-decode SMT craziness.