Apple to acquire ARM?

It would be unusual for Apple to spend that amount of money to essentially shut down a company. ARM makes all their money from licencing their designs, so this rumor is saying they will close down their income stream and turn them into an in-house chip design company.<p>It would take a while for this to have any effect anyway, because I suspect that most ARM manufactures have licence agreements that protect the upcoming Cortex-A9 designs (NVidia Tegra 2, TI OMAP4 etc). The Cortex-A9 should be good enough for a couple of years.<p>Longer term, there are good alternatives to ARM around anyway. Atom is making good progress, and Loongson (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson</a>) could be an option too. (The idea that Loongson could come to dominate the market is so ironic that I think Shakespeare would rise from his grave and write a play about it)

Buying ARM to stop its cores getting to competitors doesn't seem a good idea. Other chip manufacturers would rush to fill that vacuum. Freescale and the other Power ISA guys would love that kind of boost. I don't see it slowing down Android significantly. GCC will recompile to whatever other platform is chosen; there will be some porting effort but it isn't huge.<p>If Apple is really doing this I see it a play to take on Intel. The ARM instruction set is clean and well-designed, unlike Intel's. This enables ARM chips to draw significantly less power for the same performance. Now, who cares about performance-per-Watt? Anyone who has a cluster does. Anyone building devices that run on a battery does. These two groups are becoming everyone -- it's laptops/tablets and cloud computing all the way, baby. If ARM gets a 64-bit implementation and a fast floating point unit it can compete against Intel in the server market. Apple can fund that with their giant pile of cash. ARM already has the low end market sewn up. Imagine a laptop with 10 hours battery life and Google buying a million 64-bit ARM cores. That's two nice revenue streams to have, and it gets Apple into a big market where they currently have very little presence.<p>I did a blog post about some of these issues here: <a href="http://www.untyped.com/untyping/2010/02/02/is-the-ipad-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-intel/" rel="nofollow">http://www.untyped.com/untyping/2010/02/02/is-the-ipad-the-b...</a>

That'd be a disaster. ARM is running pretty much in everything portable. I don't want to see that in Steves hands!<p>Ironically, if the worst happens (Apple buying ARM, shutting down licensing), Android would become even more the competition as it is already running on Atom and quite portable to other architectures. Intel would lose a major competitor, too.

I'm with the camp that doesn't see an obvious strategic move here.<p>Acquiring ARM only for the chance at an end-to-end vertically integrated design seems quite expensive, albeit not beyond the "insanely great" motivations of Mr. Jobs.<p>It's true that ARM has a compelling and growing market share at the lower end, but continuing the licensing business seems un-Apple-like; at the same time, shutting that business down would only hurt competitors a little - it would mainly serve to make the other CPU makers rush in and try to capture the resulting power vacuum.

I don't believe Apple is dumb enough to buy ARM as part of a grand anti-competitive scheme. Even if that was their intent it wouldn't work legally or technically. If Apple wants to expand their chip designs for their own use, or to sell OEM, they don't need to buy ARM. An ARM license will do and it costs considerably less than $8B. That leads me to believe Apple wants someone to think they're interested in ARM. Kind of makes me think about the AdMob deal and how strange it was Apple just let the clock run out on that deal, quickly turns around and buys another company, and has a unique platform on the market &#60;6 months later. Just makes you wonder if they ever had any real interest in AdMob or just wanted to force Google's hand on it.

This would scream antitrust. ARM chips represent something like 90% of all CPUs in existence; billions of cores manufactures every year by different fabs. I'm not sure it would be allowed to go through.

ARM is a British company. The EU Competition Commissioner wouldn't allow this sale to go through because it would threaten European interests (i.e. those of Ericsson, Nokia, etc).

Didn't Apple finish dumping the last of their ARM stock a few years ago? I recall it getting them through their bad times. It doesn't make much sense to me. They already have a ARM licensed design firm or two. They don't need ARM to get their custom chips.

Apple seems to be everyone's emeny right now. I guess this adds Intel (with their new low power chips) to the list.

They might as well buy AMD while they're at it (<a href="http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&#38;q=NYSE:AMD" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&#38;q=NYSE:AMD</a>).

It seems Apple already holds some kind of ownership over ARM. From ARM Wikipedia page:<p>The Company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Inc and VLSI Technology

I wonder how many patents protect the ARM ISA.<p>Because it's not the ARM implementation we depend on - it's compatibility with its instruction set.

Apple buying ARM doesn't make much sense. Apple taking a large stake in ARM as a diversification move to offset the risk of a decline in sales, on the other hand, might make sense. Some other commenters have noted that Apple's original stake in ARM helped their balance sheet before in the 90s, maybe they're looking to repeat history if there's a downturn.

Now this could be interesting.

Don't really know what apple is up to, but watch the 4 hours on the London Stock Exchange before NASDAQ early hours opens and if it's happy buy a lot of ARMH.

&#62; they could stop ARM's technology from ending up in everyone else's computers and gadgets<p>I really hope the acquisition won't get through, I can see Apple doing just that.

Such a brilliant move it could be!<p>Time to fund chip-design startups? =)