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The UK government never learns. Kraft made similar promises when buying Cadbury regarding jobs,but quietly reneged on them over time. The Kraft CEO was asked to

The UK government never learns. Kraft made similar promises when buying Cadbury regarding jobs,but quietly reneged on them over time. The Kraft CEO was asked to show up before an UK parliament committee, but of course declined, and that was the end of the story.

LoSboccacc 6y ago
it's all posturing unless the government makes the company to agree to punitive severance packages to be put in an escrow account to be released to the company after 20 years or to the people if fired before that.
djmobley 6y ago
Except the Cadbury-Kraft debacle led to major reforms in how the UK regulates foreign takeovers. In the case of Arm, the guarantees provided back in 2016 were legally binding, which is why we’re here, four years and another acquisition later, with Nvidia now eager to demonstrate it is standing by those commitments. Maybe in this particular instance they did learn something?
- bencollier49 6y ago
  They should learn to prevent the sale, period. Promises to retain some jobs (for ever? What happens if profits decline? What happens if the core tech is sold and ARM becomes a shell? Do the rules still apply?) address a tiny fraction of the problems presented by the sale of one of our core national tech companies.
  - tomalpha 6y ago
    I would have liked to see ARM remain owned in the UK. I think it's proven itself capable of innovation and organic growth on its own. But how can we evaluate the whether that will continue? What if ARM is not sold, and then (for whatever reason) stagnates, doesn't innovate, gets overtaken in some way, and enters gradual decline? Perhaps that's unlikely, but prevent the sale, period is feels too absolute.
    - bencollier49 6y ago
      That feels like giving up, to me. We should have the confidence that British industry can development and flourish on its own merits without being sold off to foreign interests.
      - fluffything 6y ago
        What have confidence when we can just look at ARM financials? There are more ARM chips sold each year than those of all its competitors together. Yet ARM's revenue is 300 million $. Why? Because ARM lives from the ISA royalties, and their revenue on the cores they license is actually small. With RISC-V on the rise, and west sanctions against china, RISC-V competition against ARM will only increase, and it is very hard to compete against something that's good / better and has lower costs (RISC-V royalties are "free"). I really have no idea why NVIDIA would adquire ARM. If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu, etc. are built and designed by better teams). ARM cores are used by Qualcom and Samsung, but these aren't world-class and get beaten every gen by Apple Silicon. If they want ARM royalties, that's high risk business, and very low reward (there is little money to make there). The only ok-ish cores ARM makes are embedded low-power cores (not mobile, but truly IoT < 1W embedded). Hard to imagine that an architecture like Volta or Ampere that perform well at 200-400W would perform well at the <1W envelope. No mobile phone in the world uses nvidia accelerators, and mobile phones are "supercomputers" when compared with the kind of devices ARM is "ok-ish" at. So none of this makes sense to me, except if NVIDIA would want to "license" GPUs with ARM cores to IoT and low power devices like ARM does, but that sounds extremely far-fetched, because nvidia is super-far away from a product there, and also because the margins for those products are very very thin, and nvidia tends to like 40-60% margins. You just can have those when buying IoT chips for 0.12$. Its also hard to sell a GPU to these use cases because they often don't need it.
        lumberingjack 6y ago
        Apple mobile beating arm mobile is pretty irrelevant considering they can barely run the same type of tasks it's a miracle they both have the same benchmarks since they're operating systems are totally different. Beyond that it doesn't even really matter which one's faster because you got all that overhead of the os's that are so different. I would also like to say that Apple users are going to buy the newer chip whether it's faster or not. Because of planned obstinance at a software level. I've never heard an Apple user talk about speed or The benchmark of the phones because that marketing segment is clueless to that. My guess is that Nvidia needs arm for their self-driving stuff.
- oxfordmale 6y ago
  Nvidia could still asset strip ARM, and then let ARM decline organically with redundancies justified by the decrease in revenue.
- lumberingjack 6y ago
  Sounds like with all those new regulations it will be a limiting factor for new jobs not going to set up my company there if I got to jump through hoops like that.
bencollier49 6y ago
It absolutely outrages me. I've posted elsewhere on the thread about this, but I want to do something to prevent this sort of thing in future. Setting up a think tank seems like a viable idea. See my other response in the thread if you are interested and want to get in contact.
- Torkel 6y ago
  Get the deals in writing, with explicit liabilities if contract is broken. There, I fixed it.
  - bencollier49 6y ago
    What, and the profits, investments and growth made by the company will stay inside the country? There's a much broader problem here.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lumberingjack 6y ago
  Welcome to vulture capitalism it's been gutting American industry for about 10 20 years used to be four or five paper mills around here but now they're all in China and everyone who worked there is on drugs now
  - fencepost 6y ago
    Welcome to vulture capitalism it's been gutting American industry for about 10 20 years More like 30-40. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity_in_the_1980s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity_in_the_1980s
sgt101 6y ago
What's this "quietly reneged over time"! Kraft simply welshed on the deal instantly! There were explosions and a change in the law.

LoSboccacc 6y ago

it's all posturing unless the government makes the company to agree to punitive severance packages to be put in an escrow account to be released to the company after 20 years or to the people if fired before that.

djmobley 6y ago

Except the Cadbury-Kraft debacle led to major reforms in how the UK regulates foreign takeovers. In the case of Arm, the guarantees provided back in 2016 were legally binding, which is why we’re here, four years and another acquisition later, with Nvidia now eager to demonstrate it is standing by those commitments. Maybe in this particular instance they did learn something?

bencollier49 6y ago
They should learn to prevent the sale, period. Promises to retain some jobs (for ever? What happens if profits decline? What happens if the core tech is sold and ARM becomes a shell? Do the rules still apply?) address a tiny fraction of the problems presented by the sale of one of our core national tech companies.
- tomalpha 6y ago
  I would have liked to see ARM remain owned in the UK. I think it's proven itself capable of innovation and organic growth on its own. But how can we evaluate the whether that will continue? What if ARM is not sold, and then (for whatever reason) stagnates, doesn't innovate, gets overtaken in some way, and enters gradual decline? Perhaps that's unlikely, but prevent the sale, period is feels too absolute.
  - bencollier49 6y ago
    That feels like giving up, to me. We should have the confidence that British industry can development and flourish on its own merits without being sold off to foreign interests.
    - fluffything 6y ago
      What have confidence when we can just look at ARM financials? There are more ARM chips sold each year than those of all its competitors together. Yet ARM's revenue is 300 million $. Why? Because ARM lives from the ISA royalties, and their revenue on the cores they license is actually small. With RISC-V on the rise, and west sanctions against china, RISC-V competition against ARM will only increase, and it is very hard to compete against something that's good / better and has lower costs (RISC-V royalties are "free"). I really have no idea why NVIDIA would adquire ARM. If they want a world-class CPU team for the data-center, ARM isn't that (Graviton, Apple Silicon, Fujitsu, etc. are built and designed by better teams). ARM cores are used by Qualcom and Samsung, but these aren't world-class and get beaten every gen by Apple Silicon. If they want ARM royalties, that's high risk business, and very low reward (there is little money to make there). The only ok-ish cores ARM makes are embedded low-power cores (not mobile, but truly IoT < 1W embedded). Hard to imagine that an architecture like Volta or Ampere that perform well at 200-400W would perform well at the <1W envelope. No mobile phone in the world uses nvidia accelerators, and mobile phones are "supercomputers" when compared with the kind of devices ARM is "ok-ish" at. So none of this makes sense to me, except if NVIDIA would want to "license" GPUs with ARM cores to IoT and low power devices like ARM does, but that sounds extremely far-fetched, because nvidia is super-far away from a product there, and also because the margins for those products are very very thin, and nvidia tends to like 40-60% margins. You just can have those when buying IoT chips for 0.12$. Its also hard to sell a GPU to these use cases because they often don't need it.
      - lumberingjack 6y ago
        Apple mobile beating arm mobile is pretty irrelevant considering they can barely run the same type of tasks it's a miracle they both have the same benchmarks since they're operating systems are totally different. Beyond that it doesn't even really matter which one's faster because you got all that overhead of the os's that are so different. I would also like to say that Apple users are going to buy the newer chip whether it's faster or not. Because of planned obstinance at a software level. I've never heard an Apple user talk about speed or The benchmark of the phones because that marketing segment is clueless to that. My guess is that Nvidia needs arm for their self-driving stuff.
oxfordmale 6y ago
Nvidia could still asset strip ARM, and then let ARM decline organically with redundancies justified by the decrease in revenue.
lumberingjack 6y ago
Sounds like with all those new regulations it will be a limiting factor for new jobs not going to set up my company there if I got to jump through hoops like that.

bencollier49 6y ago

It absolutely outrages me. I've posted elsewhere on the thread about this, but I want to do something to prevent this sort of thing in future. Setting up a think tank seems like a viable idea. See my other response in the thread if you are interested and want to get in contact.

Torkel 6y ago
Get the deals in writing, with explicit liabilities if contract is broken. There, I fixed it.
- bencollier49 6y ago
  What, and the profits, investments and growth made by the company will stay inside the country? There's a much broader problem here.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lumberingjack 6y ago
Welcome to vulture capitalism it's been gutting American industry for about 10 20 years used to be four or five paper mills around here but now they're all in China and everyone who worked there is on drugs now
- fencepost 6y ago
  Welcome to vulture capitalism it's been gutting American industry for about 10 20 years More like 30-40. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity_in_the_1980s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity_in_the_1980s

sgt101 6y ago

What's this "quietly reneged over time"! Kraft simply welshed on the deal instantly! There were explosions and a change in the law.