Apple rumored to buy ARM Holdings - Page 4

Maybe that's the point.

By golly it does. I thought it topped out at 650Mhz.

You mean like how they kept developing Logic for Windows after they bought Emagic?

Apple founded ARM way back. If Apple did not sell all its share since 1999, then Apple still owns about 15% of ARM

http://news.cnet.com/Apple-tries-to-..._3-224373.html

Made me happy. A majority of Logic users were Mac based even prior to the acquisition and the majority of Logic cracks were on the PC version. Emagic was losing money supporting Windows.


Apple did have to sell a lot of their ARM stock when they were under financial duress in the late 90's.

The AI report says: "After noting that shares in ARM had "shot up 8.1p to 251.1p...... [and] ....traders reckon a bid would come in at around 400p a share, valuing ARM at more than £5.2 billion [$8 billion US]."

That implies the current valuation must be $8B*(251/400) = US$5B. Yet, Google Finance shows the company's market cap (it is traded as an ADR on NASDAQ: http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:ARMH), including todays price runup, to be slightly less than US$2B. (Reuters data confirms this: http://www.reuters.com/finance/stock...?symbol=ARMH.O).

What gives? The numbers reported by AI seem really badly off!?

That was April of 1999. I believe Apple continued to sell off ARM stock (dropping their percentage to ~9% in Sept of that same year) until the sold their remaining stock in Jan 2000. They may have since been buying up ARM stock, but at one point they had divested themselves of all of the ARM holdings. I think at the beginning the held 43%.

It would have been nice if they had been able to hold their original position with ARM, but they needed the cash at the time and the profited hugely from the sales.

Perfect! I'd love to see Apple make a big play. This one would certainly give them a lot of leverage in the smart phone industry. Buy em!

The only reason that Apple might buy ARM is so that someone else does not!

ARM has some very desirable tech right now and if someone else buys ARM and says... "too bad Apple!" Apple will be SOL once their current license expires! Right now ARM is the best tech out there for small mobile devices and if someone (Google?, Nokia?) buys ARM, Apple could find itself in a world of hurt!

My $0.02 worth
KRR

Disclosure: I own both AAPL and ARMH stock.

Ironic you say that as some speculate that the A4 is a Power Architecture chip running ARM in emulation and that they are preparing to move all the mobile hardware back to Power because of efficiencies in power use (fitting nicely with their purchase of PA Semi.)

Here's an interesting article:
http://www.technomicon.com/iPad_Saga_-_Week_11.html

Fair enough but are you REALLY trying to equate the desktop publishing and photo imaging / graphics arts markets in the same breath as the mobile electronics market?

One market is expanding faster than the speed of light ...

You tell me which one.

Apple has always tried to play nice with others it's the others that have been screwing it up for them.

Think about how much work Apple has done in open source communities to see what I mean:

KHTML
WebKit
SproutCore
Darwin
CUPS
Open Streaming Server

They're trying to further great technologies but are hindered by freaks who keep trying to sue them or refuse to accept Apple's solutions which are generally well thought out.

If Apple bought ARM and setup their own printing business they could force new technologies onto existing customers without really impacting the other customer's business.

Impossible business model.

You missed the point of my response to him.

Exactly.

To many people are focused Apple kneecapping competitors with this acquisition. When did
paranoia rule the day in Tech land?

Apple is far more methodical. If they purchased ARM they'd license the cores out business as usual. Apple knows they are not beating companies on hardware they're beating companies on integration.

There's no harm in licensing the cores as freely as possible because what makes Apple special isn't hardware but a keen eye for product aesthetic and differentiation couple with savvy marketing. You can't buy that in a core folks. That's company DNA.

Apple has NEVER been a customer of ARM after they discontinued the Newton.

Some of you guys are really messing this up. Apple buys their chips from Samsung. Samsung is a customer of ARM. Apple is a customer of Samsung.

So far, we have no idea whether Apple has licenses from ARM or not. It's all speculation And Apple is far from being the largest customer forARM chips. They are only a customer of Samsung, which produces ARM chips for a number of other customers. Samsung is also one of the largest cell phone manufacturers, far larger than Apple. They use ARM's in their own phones as well.

If you're going to argue this, at least understand what you are arguing about.

If Apple controlled the development of CS5 and other Adobe software, they could do what Adobe refuses to do, which is to customize it to perform as well as possible on Apple's hardware, and to include features of the OS that Adobe won't support.

I've been using and beta testing Photoshop since the beginning, and I've seen the developmental cycles move around from all Apple, to Apple/Microsoft, to Microsoft and ported to Apple, back to Apple/Microsoft.

But ever since Adobe moved to Windows, their mantra was, that as much as possible, their programs should work equally well on all platforms supported. That works well for them, and I can't argue the point They want to be platform neutral.

But that means that they don't support Mac only features to any great extent. They take little advantage of OS and hardware features.

One case in point. Photoshop is uni-threaded in open and saves. Only one core is used. So when we have truly fast RAIDs, most of the speed is wasted. Why is that? Because Windows doesn't support multiple cores in open and save properly. So we're stuck with it as well. I asked John Nack the other say about that question. He said that CS5 still has that limitation, and *hopefully* it will be solved on CS6. Gee, I wonder why?

This is why Apple won't allow the new Flash conversion tools Adobe created. It will homogenize all the mobile OS's to the same feature sets. No good.

So if Apple did buy Adobe, they could fix all of this, and programs would perform better on OS X, and Apple's hardware, giving them an advantage.

But the problems of buying what is mostly a Windows software shop still remain.

Adobe's products are used in professional settings far more than all of those other products put together.

You guys are really funny. Don't any of you understand that the Snapdragon is also an ARM derived chip?

I'm reading this thread with people pointing it out as something separate from ARM when it isn't.

If Apple bought ARM, and killed external sales, Qualcomm would be one of the first affected.

Yes but Adobe isn't the sole reason why people buy Mac Pro. I'm sure there are plenty of iMacs running Creative Suite.

Melgross

I think RichL is well aware that Snapdragon is ARM based. He was responding to my incorrect assumption that all Cortex A8 other than the Hummingbird run at 650Mhz or less. I misread an article which basically stated that extra tweaks are needed to go above the 650Mhz A8 as designed by ARM.

While I sometimes disagree with you, you make sense in your arguments, even if you look at it differently than I do.

But sheesh, too many people aren't even bothering to think this through. We're getting stream of consciousness posting. Whatever comes to mind is typed out without editing.

Most pros use iMacs.

I'm reading a lot of posts stating that if Apple bought ARM, and discontinued sales, that there would always be Intel and Qualcomm. This struck me as one of the same.

Quite possibly. They'd become suppliers to their competitors.


I assume that was put in for me.

If the takeover price was $8b, about half would be a stock swap, meaning that the due bill would be around $4b. Check my math, but Apple doesn't need $40b to make that deal work.

Not that I think buying ARM makes much more sense than buying Adobe.

I've heard the same confusion about Tegra. ARM has dominant marketshare. I'm not sure Apple's looking to acquire them but they could certainly do worse on the acquisition front.

I believe the ADR only represents the value of the stock traded on the NASDAQ.

I believe you are correct. The ADR doesn't "match" the foreign market value, although it may often times appear to be in the same neighborhood.

I dont understand. Someone with more knowledge on ARM financial can tell me more about it.

If its Run Rate as a previous Poster post is 5 billion USD. Then the current price is extremely attractive. However Financial Highlight show it is only 500M. Not 5 Billion.

http://www.arm.com/annualreport09/ov...ighlights.html

2. It makes 150M USD Profits per Year. So P/E is quite high. I suspect when they announce their results on 27th things will look better.

3. Google Finance information are incorrect? It is making as PE with 80. But currently ARM is at 4.5B, 150M Profits fit into 30 PE. Which is very acceptable for its Growth.

4. It is trading like crazy. The amount of Shared trade in one day is more then the total amount of shares issued. Did some one just brought ARM outright? I dont think it make sense.

According to their web site, "ARM has an innovative business model. Instead of bearing the costs associated with manufacturing, we license our technology to a network of Partners, mainly leading semiconductor manufacturers and OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers). These Partners incorporate our designs alongside their own technology to create smart, low energy chips suitable for modern electronic devices."

I admit I know nothing about ARM Holdings, but it sounds like they basically do the same thing as PA Semi. Design, file for patents, then license their IP to others.

Sorta. PA Semi was good at working with existing PPC and ARM cores but naturally ARM is creating these new designs from scratch. While PA Semi could get buy with a few hundred talented engineers and others ARM has something like 1700 employees.

One of the reasons why I think that Apple could be interested in ARM is the sheer speed that we're going to see coming from ARM cores.

ARM is about to get sick with the speeds

• Orion is an 800-MHz Cortex-A9 dual-core processor due to sample in 3Q10 and enter mass production in 1Q11.
  
• Pegasus is a 1-GHz Cortex-A9, single-core sampling in 2Q11 and entering mass production in 4Q11.
  
• Hercules is a 1-GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 sampling in 3Q11 and set for mass production in 1Q12.
  
• Mercury is a 600-MHz single-core Cortex-A5 (Sparrow) due in 2010/11.
  
• Venus is a 600-MHz Cortex-A5 dual-core processor due in 2012/13.
  
• Draco is a 1.2-GHz Cortex-A9 dual-core slated to arrive 2012/13.
  
• And Aquila is a 1.2-GHz Cortex-A9 quad-core also expected in 2012/13.

ARM is rapidly entering a speed zone that's going to allow them to get into bigger and bigger boxes. Amazing

And Apple can get any of those chip reference designs, as can anyone. They can now improve them any way they want without having features they don't need that are put into them so that many manufacturers with varying needs will buy them.

No need to buy ARM for that.

Apple still has an advantage because of their unified hardware and software. They get ONE chip design across their device lines. It makes it much easier to optimize than what Google can manage to do. Or anyone else that gives their OS to different manufacturers, or has many differing lines of phones such as Nokia.

MS is learning this, which is why Win Phone 7 is spec'ed much more tightly as to hardware than was before, or than what Google is doing. Google's big mistake, among others.

True but I'm reminded of a Thomas Edison quote about opportunity here.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.


Apple doesn't have to buy ARM but they always have to be pushing the envelope. That's what good companies do.

That's why they bought PA Semi and intrinsity.