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Softbank has spent 7 years and a CEO finding out how difficult just raising prices is.
by devnullbrain 3y ago
Softbank has spent 7 years and a CEO finding out how difficult just raising prices is.
- boringg 3y agoEspecially when your lifeline is tied to Apple. No way are they going to negotiate to raise prices in a meaningful way against their largest client. Actually> "Apple (AAPL.O) has signed a new deal with Arm for chip technology that "extends beyond 2040," according to Arm's initial public offering documents filed on Tuesday."
- scrlk 3y agoApple was one of the founding investors of ARM back in 1990 - it's likely they have an extremely generous licence and pricing terms as a result.
- xadhominemx 3y agoApple’s involvement with ARM’s founding has zero impact on their negotiations or pricing.
- devnullbrain 3y agoIt does when that involvement means they're one of the few architecture licensees. Allegedly.
- klelatti 3y agoThey have an architectural license (for Arm v8/9) because they are a huge customer with deep pockets not because of a shareholding they sold a decade before that architecture was announced!
- monocasa 3y agoIt's not the deep pockets per se, but the hand Apple had in designing AArch64. Apparently their relationship with ARM is more like the Intel/AMD relationship, ie. cross-licensing.
- fomine3 3y agoSoftBank has/invests so many business related to Apple (like mobile career), that may affected to negotiation.
- sapiogram 3y ago> No way are they going to negotiate to raise prices in a meaningful way against their largest client. Why not? It's not like Apple will have anywhere else to go for the next 8 years. x86 cores are too slow and power-hungry for the foreseeable future, and building their own risc-V core will take... at least 8 years.
- wtallis 3y ago8 years sounds like an absurdly long time to retrofit a different instruction set onto an existing CPU core design.
- londons_explore 3y agoThe deal with apple is probably 0.1% of revenue from all hardware sales that contain ARM IP or something similar. Which means that if Apple decide to switch to RISC-V to save money, the deal is still in effect, but no money will be paid, so there might as well be no deal.
- boringg 3y agoYou think it's that low?
- londons_explore 3y agoYes. For ARM, having apple as a customer is a massive investor and customer confidence boost. For Apple, they won't offer much because they could develop their own CPU architecture ISA pretty easily (they control all code and compilers for the platform after all, and already employ lots of compiler and CPU developers).