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SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

242 points by geerlingguy 2y ago

jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Ampere is still the only people making a decent purchaseable ARM server. Not loving the idea of there being a bunch of new debt hovering over them now.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  I use their servers in a couple of cloud environments. That little things are snappy, for what I have given them as tasks. Wish them best of luck to the future.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    The same goes for most recent/powerful mini pc options. Been using an R9-5900X based one for a few years now, runs great as a home server.
- jjtheblunt 2y ago
  What about https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack# https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack#
  - Eikon 2y ago
    That's not a server. It is a rackable desktop. You won't run general purpose server apps on this.
    - sitkack 2y ago
      Not with that attitude you won't. Clearly the machine is the wrong color for your workloads.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      What is a general purpose server app? Does Apple prevent their users running applications which listen to outside connections?
      - theshrike79 2y ago
        I think the issue is that you'll have the base macOS system with GUI and all taking up resources. Compare that to a bare metal install of Proxmox or similar.
        bayindirh 2y ago
        Yeah, I know, but given that you leave the user not-logged in and set the items system-wide startup items, the memory pressure on a 64GB system can be seen as negligible with some mental flexibility. 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.
        oneplane 2y ago
        Proxmox runs fine on M-series Macs. macOS also runs fine with no GUI. 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.
      - znpy 2y ago
        have fun when that cheese grater hangs in the datacenter and you have to physically go in there to push a button, connect a display, a keyboard and a mouse to do troubleshooting, because apple in their infinite wisdom has decided that a rackable mac should not have ipmi.
  - terinjokes 2y ago
    No BMC, severally limiting remote management, so operations teams responsible for physical servers don't want to touch it. JetKVM is a remote KVM, not remote management. It does not have the same integration into the internals of a server.
    - ahoka 2y ago
      But it comes with a ... checks notes ... magic mouse!
      - nazgulsenpai 2y ago
        Upvoted to save you, out of pity for this terrible joke. :)
      - indrora 2y ago
        Great, I can still make the HMS Courage[0] [0]https://www.igen.fr/accessoires/2015/11/non-la-magic-mouse-ne-recharge-pas-lapple-pencil-93991 https://www.igen.fr/accessoires/2015/11/non-la-magic-mouse-n...
    - Twirrim 2y ago
      They also won't provide any guarantees about components continuing to work, such as booting over thunderbolt that some clouds rely on. There's an awful lot of financial risk in providing MacOS as a service.
    - robbiet480 2y ago
      Apple has a BMC on the Mac mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro. It's called Lights Out Management (LOM). https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/lights-out-management-payload-settings-dep580cf25bc/web https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/lights-out-manage...
      - terinjokes 2y ago
        AFAICT LOM only has three commands "PowerON", "PowerOFF", and "Reset", a far cry from what other BMC provide. It also requires another Mac in the same LAN to be the controller, and you cant use static IPs (which is pretty common for BMC VLANs). Also it seems unsupported for the Mac Pro (2023) this thread is about?
  - dvdkon 2y ago
    In addition to the problems other people have pointed out, it just doesn't have comparable specs to something like Ampere's Altra or AMD's Epyc. 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.
    - Twirrim 2y ago
      Agreed. Rack density is the biggest thing once you get away from "a handful of servers", be it CPU, memory, or storage density. 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
  - pjc50 2y ago
    SEVEN AND A HALF THOUSAND DOLLARS? No wonder we do all our Mac CI work on Mac minis. Macs remain completely horrendous to remote-administer.
  - ForTheKidz 2y ago
    Bro, come on. Apple hasn't even tried to pretend they're in the server game for at least a decade now. You're paying for dozens of features you'll never use. They don't even have drivers for their own hardware outside of fucking windows, let alone documentation about how their machines are intended to work. 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.
    - tracker1 2y ago
      I think they could be a decent provider for SOHO options... such as the space filled by Synology on the lower end. It's pretty competitive on cost, but Apple could really play it in concert with their wifi/airplay solutions etc. Like a home-base for SOHO. 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.
  - ciupicri 2y ago
    There's no mention of ECC memory.
  - burnte 2y ago
    Apple products are not server grade equipment.
  - mort96 2y ago
    24 cores isn't that much, and you end up with a huge hulking GPU just sitting there doing nothing, you can't run a well-supported server OS on it so it can't really be used as a server, and it's extremely expensive for what it is. I'm not really sure what makes you think it's worth bringing up.
  - pdpi 2y ago
    That's a rack-mounted workstation, not a server.
- hereonout2 2y ago
  Got a chance to play about with the Altra Max to do some batch jobs last year. 128 cores going 100% in htop was fun!
  - tempest_ 2y ago
    The main problem with those is the memory controller starts to degrade a lot when you use all 128 of those cores. 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.
- kcb 2y ago
  You can buy Nvidia Grace CPU only systems. Neoverse V2 is actually pretty solid. https://www.supermicro.com/datasheet/datasheet-NVIDIA-MGX-1U-2U-Grace-CPU-Superchip-and-x86-systems.pdf https://www.supermicro.com/datasheet/datasheet-NVIDIA-MGX-1U...
  - ksec 2y ago
    Nvidia is targeting AI specific or fastest single core performance . While Ampere are targeting general Web CPU usage which is larger number of core per socket. The two are very different. I would have like Nvidia to enter this space as well but they seems to be focusing on everything AI related at the moment. 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.
pjmlp 2y ago
Well, I guess it was either them or Oracle, given previous acquisition rumours.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  Given Oracle's tendency to use pillows on processor architectures and bury them at night, Softbank is possibly the better of two evils? Jokes aside, I don't believe Oracle would evolve the A1s beyond what they need, and stagnate them for years instead.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Might be, but that is the thing, while it is tradition to complain about Oracle, in many cases their are the only ones that show up at the door with the suitcase full of money. So where are the others that supposedly are better than them? In this case, Softbank will be having ARM and Ampere.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      This depends on definition of "better". Maybe your question is better suited as "So, where are the others that supposedly are richer than them?" 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.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        Indeed, which kind of proves the point, in the scenarios where the only shopper at shows at the store is Oracle, the alternative is bankruptcy.
        mbreese 2y ago
klelatti 2y ago
So Softbank now competes with Arm's customers and (unless I've missed something on new governance arrangements) also gets access to confidential information on Arm's customers' businesses (plans, volumes etc). Hmmm.
- HelenGrerne 2y ago
  [dead]
- whizzter 2y ago
  It kinda makes sense though, ARM has been creeping upwards over the years and yet afaik outside of Ampere no ARM server supplier has become serious (outside of inhouse variants such as Amazon Graviton). 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).
  - klelatti 2y ago
    Largely agree. Arm / Softbank is in a tricky place if there are no credible customers in a given market. Does it just sit on its hands or actually get out there and build some chips! It has helped fund or help some startups that were using Arm designs to get into new markets (eg Annapurna Labs) but sometimes that doesn't work out at all (Nuvia!) And to be fair I think Rene Haas has been fairly upfront about changing their approach.
- SecretDreams 2y ago
  Kind of like Nvidia selling GPUs and also offering cloud GPU services?
DeathArrow 2y ago
And Google just spent five times that to acquire a cyber security startup with 1000 customers. Is hardware so much less valuable?
- sitkack 2y ago
  They are totally separate the Wiz thing is a reverse IDF merger. 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.
  - mola 2y ago
    A what?
    - sitkack 2y ago
      https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjfc118vn1e https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjfc118vn1e
      - riffraff 2y ago
        perhaps you think this explains something but honestly it does not. 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?
        radicalbyte 2y ago
        Israel have National Service so pretty much every working there is ex-Army.
        DeathArrow 2y ago
yapyap 2y ago
Softbank is such an odd company.
ksynwa 2y ago
TIL .softbank is a TLD now
- myself248 2y ago
  Opening up TLDs beyond the originals and CCTLDs completely invalidated assumptions about what domains and domain names should mean. A massive disservice to everyone whose intuition was helping them avoid scams and squatting, but hey, at least a lot of money changed hands.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    Yeah... I'm pretty burnt on them too... then again, I own about 20 I'm not actively using. Still not fun when you are just trying to come up with a domain name for an idea and everything is parked and/or they want thousands for the name.
- npongratz 2y ago
  Indeed, since January 2016: https://icannwiki.org/.softbank https://icannwiki.org/.softbank And confirmed by the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20160116175915/http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20160116175915/http://data.iana....
alephnerd 2y ago
A lot of people are ignoring the fact that SoftBank Group is also one of the largest players in the telco market globally (that's how they started) [0] and that played a role in their Arm strategy and Eutelsat OneWeb strategy. 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/ https://www.softbank.jp/en/ [1] - https://amperecomputing.com/press/ampere-accelerates-expansion-into-telecom https://amperecomputing.com/press/ampere-accelerates-expansi... [2] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/news/press/sbkk/2024/20240228_01/ https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/news/press/sbkk/2024/2024022... [3] - https://www.o-ran.org/membership https://www.o-ran.org/membership [4] - https://www.suasnews.com/2021/08/softbank-corp-unveils-6g-concept/ https://www.suasnews.com/2021/08/softbank-corp-unveils-6g-co... [5] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/051/ https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/051... [6] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/069/ https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/069...
- downrightmike 2y ago
  Is anyone happy with telco price gouging? In spite of whatever else they are doing, they always price gouge and allow spam/ransom calls.
brcmthrowaway 2y ago
Did anyone get a haircut?
- wmf 2y ago
  A $6.5B exit on ~$800M invested actually looks decent.
zoobab 2y ago
Softbank is BigOil money.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Wrong. It's telco money - SoftBank Group is primarily a telco vendor and provider, and works closely with NEC, DoCoMo, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and Airtel. 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
  - Havoc 2y ago
    The fund LPs are definitely oil heavy so wouldn’t say he’s wrong
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      In Vision Fund yes, but Vision Fund is just a part of the larger SoftBank Group, and did NOT partake in this transaction. This was a transaction done by SoftBank Group directly. 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.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    ^ Munish not Munich Sorry dude!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lvl155 2y ago
Are we peak ARM yet? Jokes aside, with coming decline in x86, why is AMD so slow to introduce ARM products?
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  AMD has an entire line of ARM chips and there's an ARM in every x86 CPU they make. They've been making ARM chips for a long long time. https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc.html https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...
  - rnrn 2y ago
    I assume the question is why AMD is not making EPYC or Ryzen processors with Arm cores for the application processors. 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.
    - toast0 2y ago
      AMD said in 2021 that they were ready to build ARM chips[1], but honestly, I don't see the market for it. AMD could put an ARM frontend on Ryzen (and various interviews said they've prototyped it), but I don't think it would make a significant difference in compute/watt or whatever other metric, and there's not much in the way of ARM only software that people want to run. Maybe macOS, but you can still run that on amd64 afaik. 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-arm-chips https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-we-stand-ready-to-make...
      - tracker1 2y ago
siavosh 2y ago
Can someone knowledgeable explain SoftBank? Is it partly a Japanese sovereign fund...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. Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?
- alephnerd 2y ago
  It's an investment company that primarily specializes in Telecom and telecom adjacent industries (eg. Internet companies, Energy, Space Tech, Hardware). 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.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    ^ Left DB (not SoftBank) in droves. SoftBank is relatively hands off compared to most Japanese firms. Son's experience at Cal (go bears!) def helped MunichRe is trying the same strategy. You'll see their name in the next 10 years just like SoftBank ;)
- re-thc 2y ago
  > Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit? 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.
- alberth 2y ago
ysabelbristol 2y ago
[dead]
NotYourLawyer 2y ago
Puts on Masa.

242 points by geerlingguy 2y ago

Ampere is still the only people making a decent purchaseable ARM server. Not loving the idea of there being a bunch of new debt hovering over them now.

bayindirh 2y ago
I use their servers in a couple of cloud environments. That little things are snappy, for what I have given them as tasks. Wish them best of luck to the future.
- tracker1 2y ago
  The same goes for most recent/powerful mini pc options. Been using an R9-5900X based one for a few years now, runs great as a home server.
jjtheblunt 2y ago
What about https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack# https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack#
- Eikon 2y ago
  That's not a server. It is a rackable desktop. You won't run general purpose server apps on this.
  - sitkack 2y ago
    Not with that attitude you won't. Clearly the machine is the wrong color for your workloads.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    What is a general purpose server app? Does Apple prevent their users running applications which listen to outside connections?
    - theshrike79 2y ago
      I think the issue is that you'll have the base macOS system with GUI and all taking up resources. Compare that to a bare metal install of Proxmox or similar.
      - bayindirh 2y ago
        Yeah, I know, but given that you leave the user not-logged in and set the items system-wide startup items, the memory pressure on a 64GB system can be seen as negligible with some mental flexibility. 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.
      - oneplane 2y ago
        Proxmox runs fine on M-series Macs. macOS also runs fine with no GUI. 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.
    - znpy 2y ago
      have fun when that cheese grater hangs in the datacenter and you have to physically go in there to push a button, connect a display, a keyboard and a mouse to do troubleshooting, because apple in their infinite wisdom has decided that a rackable mac should not have ipmi.
- terinjokes 2y ago
  No BMC, severally limiting remote management, so operations teams responsible for physical servers don't want to touch it. JetKVM is a remote KVM, not remote management. It does not have the same integration into the internals of a server.
  - ahoka 2y ago
    But it comes with a ... checks notes ... magic mouse!
    - nazgulsenpai 2y ago
      Upvoted to save you, out of pity for this terrible joke. :)
    - indrora 2y ago
      Great, I can still make the HMS Courage[0] [0]https://www.igen.fr/accessoires/2015/11/non-la-magic-mouse-ne-recharge-pas-lapple-pencil-93991 https://www.igen.fr/accessoires/2015/11/non-la-magic-mouse-n...
  - Twirrim 2y ago
    They also won't provide any guarantees about components continuing to work, such as booting over thunderbolt that some clouds rely on. There's an awful lot of financial risk in providing MacOS as a service.
  - robbiet480 2y ago
    Apple has a BMC on the Mac mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro. It's called Lights Out Management (LOM). https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/lights-out-management-payload-settings-dep580cf25bc/web https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/lights-out-manage...
    - terinjokes 2y ago
      AFAICT LOM only has three commands "PowerON", "PowerOFF", and "Reset", a far cry from what other BMC provide. It also requires another Mac in the same LAN to be the controller, and you cant use static IPs (which is pretty common for BMC VLANs). Also it seems unsupported for the Mac Pro (2023) this thread is about?
- dvdkon 2y ago
  In addition to the problems other people have pointed out, it just doesn't have comparable specs to something like Ampere's Altra or AMD's Epyc. 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.
  - Twirrim 2y ago
    Agreed. Rack density is the biggest thing once you get away from "a handful of servers", be it CPU, memory, or storage density. 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
- pjc50 2y ago
  SEVEN AND A HALF THOUSAND DOLLARS? No wonder we do all our Mac CI work on Mac minis. Macs remain completely horrendous to remote-administer.
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  Bro, come on. Apple hasn't even tried to pretend they're in the server game for at least a decade now. You're paying for dozens of features you'll never use. They don't even have drivers for their own hardware outside of fucking windows, let alone documentation about how their machines are intended to work. 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.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    I think they could be a decent provider for SOHO options... such as the space filled by Synology on the lower end. It's pretty competitive on cost, but Apple could really play it in concert with their wifi/airplay solutions etc. Like a home-base for SOHO. 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.
- ciupicri 2y ago
  There's no mention of ECC memory.
- burnte 2y ago
  Apple products are not server grade equipment.
- mort96 2y ago
  24 cores isn't that much, and you end up with a huge hulking GPU just sitting there doing nothing, you can't run a well-supported server OS on it so it can't really be used as a server, and it's extremely expensive for what it is. I'm not really sure what makes you think it's worth bringing up.
- pdpi 2y ago
  That's a rack-mounted workstation, not a server.
hereonout2 2y ago
Got a chance to play about with the Altra Max to do some batch jobs last year. 128 cores going 100% in htop was fun!
- tempest_ 2y ago
  The main problem with those is the memory controller starts to degrade a lot when you use all 128 of those cores. 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.
kcb 2y ago
You can buy Nvidia Grace CPU only systems. Neoverse V2 is actually pretty solid. https://www.supermicro.com/datasheet/datasheet-NVIDIA-MGX-1U-2U-Grace-CPU-Superchip-and-x86-systems.pdf https://www.supermicro.com/datasheet/datasheet-NVIDIA-MGX-1U...
- ksec 2y ago
  Nvidia is targeting AI specific or fastest single core performance . While Ampere are targeting general Web CPU usage which is larger number of core per socket. The two are very different. I would have like Nvidia to enter this space as well but they seems to be focusing on everything AI related at the moment. 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.

pjmlp 2y ago

Well, I guess it was either them or Oracle, given previous acquisition rumours.

bayindirh 2y ago
Given Oracle's tendency to use pillows on processor architectures and bury them at night, Softbank is possibly the better of two evils? Jokes aside, I don't believe Oracle would evolve the A1s beyond what they need, and stagnate them for years instead.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Might be, but that is the thing, while it is tradition to complain about Oracle, in many cases their are the only ones that show up at the door with the suitcase full of money. So where are the others that supposedly are better than them? In this case, Softbank will be having ARM and Ampere.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    This depends on definition of "better". Maybe your question is better suited as "So, where are the others that supposedly are richer than them?" 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.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Indeed, which kind of proves the point, in the scenarios where the only shopper at shows at the store is Oracle, the alternative is bankruptcy.
      - mbreese 2y ago

klelatti 2y ago

So Softbank now competes with Arm's customers and (unless I've missed something on new governance arrangements) also gets access to confidential information on Arm's customers' businesses (plans, volumes etc). Hmmm.

HelenGrerne 2y ago
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whizzter 2y ago
It kinda makes sense though, ARM has been creeping upwards over the years and yet afaik outside of Ampere no ARM server supplier has become serious (outside of inhouse variants such as Amazon Graviton). 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).
- klelatti 2y ago
  Largely agree. Arm / Softbank is in a tricky place if there are no credible customers in a given market. Does it just sit on its hands or actually get out there and build some chips! It has helped fund or help some startups that were using Arm designs to get into new markets (eg Annapurna Labs) but sometimes that doesn't work out at all (Nuvia!) And to be fair I think Rene Haas has been fairly upfront about changing their approach.
SecretDreams 2y ago
Kind of like Nvidia selling GPUs and also offering cloud GPU services?

DeathArrow 2y ago

And Google just spent five times that to acquire a cyber security startup with 1000 customers. Is hardware so much less valuable?

sitkack 2y ago
They are totally separate the Wiz thing is a reverse IDF merger. 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.
- mola 2y ago
  A what?
  - sitkack 2y ago
    https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjfc118vn1e https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjfc118vn1e
    - riffraff 2y ago
      perhaps you think this explains something but honestly it does not. 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?
      - radicalbyte 2y ago
        Israel have National Service so pretty much every working there is ex-Army.
        DeathArrow 2y ago

yapyap 2y ago

Softbank is such an odd company.

ksynwa 2y ago

TIL .softbank is a TLD now

myself248 2y ago
Opening up TLDs beyond the originals and CCTLDs completely invalidated assumptions about what domains and domain names should mean. A massive disservice to everyone whose intuition was helping them avoid scams and squatting, but hey, at least a lot of money changed hands.
- tracker1 2y ago
  Yeah... I'm pretty burnt on them too... then again, I own about 20 I'm not actively using. Still not fun when you are just trying to come up with a domain name for an idea and everything is parked and/or they want thousands for the name.
npongratz 2y ago
Indeed, since January 2016: https://icannwiki.org/.softbank https://icannwiki.org/.softbank And confirmed by the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20160116175915/http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20160116175915/http://data.iana....

alephnerd 2y ago

A lot of people are ignoring the fact that SoftBank Group is also one of the largest players in the telco market globally (that's how they started) [0] and that played a role in their Arm strategy and Eutelsat OneWeb strategy. 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/ https://www.softbank.jp/en/ [1] - https://amperecomputing.com/press/ampere-accelerates-expansion-into-telecom https://amperecomputing.com/press/ampere-accelerates-expansi... [2] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/news/press/sbkk/2024/20240228_01/ https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/news/press/sbkk/2024/2024022... [3] - https://www.o-ran.org/membership https://www.o-ran.org/membership [4] - https://www.suasnews.com/2021/08/softbank-corp-unveils-6g-concept/ https://www.suasnews.com/2021/08/softbank-corp-unveils-6g-co... [5] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/051/ https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/051... [6] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/069/ https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/069...

downrightmike 2y ago
Is anyone happy with telco price gouging? In spite of whatever else they are doing, they always price gouge and allow spam/ransom calls.

brcmthrowaway 2y ago

Did anyone get a haircut?

wmf 2y ago
A $6.5B exit on ~$800M invested actually looks decent.

zoobab 2y ago

Softbank is BigOil money.

alephnerd 2y ago
Wrong. It's telco money - SoftBank Group is primarily a telco vendor and provider, and works closely with NEC, DoCoMo, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and Airtel. 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
- Havoc 2y ago
  The fund LPs are definitely oil heavy so wouldn’t say he’s wrong
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    In Vision Fund yes, but Vision Fund is just a part of the larger SoftBank Group, and did NOT partake in this transaction. This was a transaction done by SoftBank Group directly. 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.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  ^ Munish not Munich Sorry dude!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lvl155 2y ago

Are we peak ARM yet? Jokes aside, with coming decline in x86, why is AMD so slow to introduce ARM products?

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
AMD has an entire line of ARM chips and there's an ARM in every x86 CPU they make. They've been making ARM chips for a long long time. https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc.html https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...
- rnrn 2y ago
  I assume the question is why AMD is not making EPYC or Ryzen processors with Arm cores for the application processors. 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.
  - toast0 2y ago
    AMD said in 2021 that they were ready to build ARM chips[1], but honestly, I don't see the market for it. AMD could put an ARM frontend on Ryzen (and various interviews said they've prototyped it), but I don't think it would make a significant difference in compute/watt or whatever other metric, and there's not much in the way of ARM only software that people want to run. Maybe macOS, but you can still run that on amd64 afaik. 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-arm-chips https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-we-stand-ready-to-make...
    - tracker1 2y ago

siavosh 2y ago

Can someone knowledgeable explain SoftBank? Is it partly a Japanese sovereign fund...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. Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?

alephnerd 2y ago
It's an investment company that primarily specializes in Telecom and telecom adjacent industries (eg. Internet companies, Energy, Space Tech, Hardware). 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.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  ^ Left DB (not SoftBank) in droves. SoftBank is relatively hands off compared to most Japanese firms. Son's experience at Cal (go bears!) def helped MunichRe is trying the same strategy. You'll see their name in the next 10 years just like SoftBank ;)
re-thc 2y ago
> Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit? 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.
alberth 2y ago

ysabelbristol 2y ago

[dead]

NotYourLawyer 2y ago

Puts on Masa.