SoftBank Group Corp. today announced that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a leading independent silicon design company, in an all-cash transaction valued at $6.5 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Ampere will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank Group and retain its name. As part of the transaction, Ampere’s lead investors – Carlyle and Oracle – are selling their respective positions in Ampere.
↫ SoftBank and Ampere Computing press release
Despite not really knowing what SoftBank does and what their long-term goals are – I doubt anyone does – I hope this at the very least provides Ampere with the funds needed to expand its business. At this point, the only serious options for Arm-based hardware are either Apple or Qualcomm, and we could really use more players. Ampere’s hardware is impressive, but difficult to buy and expensive, and graphics card support is patchy, at best.
What Ampere needs is more investment, and more OEMs picking up their chips. An Ampere workstation is incredibly high on my list of machines to test for OSNews (perhaps a System76 model?), and it’d be great if economies of scale worked to bring the prices down, possibly allowing Ampere to developer cheaper, more affordable variants for us mere mortals, too. I would love to build an Arm workstation in much the same way we build regular x86 PCs today, but I feel like that’s still far off.
I have no idea if SoftBank is the right kind of company to make this possible, but one can dream.
You should have noted that Softbank already owns ARM so I would assume has some plans.
Probably something similar to what Nvidia wanted to do.
>”Despite not really knowing what SoftBank does and what their long-term goals are – I doubt anyone does”
You mean, besides being one of the world’s largest investment groups, based in Japan? Yeah, nobody knows anything about them Thom. It’s not like they are the subject of endless articles and opinion pieces and speculation or anything.
Good boy! Have a cookie.
SoftBank is a very famous money laundering scheme used by the saudi princes though japan to fund unsustainable and unworkable projects for clean money. a good example is wework and many others.
Unfortunately I am not very optimistic.
A few years ago I looked at SolidRun’s “Honeycomb” 1U ARM servers. They were very intriguing with on board 10GBe ports, 8/16 core ARM processor, and PCIe support.
Just wanted them to drop in price a bit.
Several years later… They have increased in price to $919, and no successor is in sight:
https://shop.solid-run.com/product/SRLX216S00D00GE064H09CH/
Other brands?
Ampere has always been too expensive. It is much cheaper to buy a comparable x86 at a lower price.
Raspberry PI is an excellent choice, and I have a few. They are pushing to the desktop range with RPi 5, and RPi 500. But still not exactly there.
Any other alternatives?
There are unknown (to me at least) Chinese brands with reasonable price / performance tradeoffs like:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807329755027.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2usa4itemAdapt
($139 today w/ discounts. 8 core (4+4) ARM processor, 2×2.5Gbe ethernet, SATA, PCI and nvme support)
Still Ampere is probably completely out of desktop / enthusiast market right now. Even their website is listing partners instead of products in prominent space:
https://amperecomputing.com/products/partners
Why was I searching for one?
I wanted to replace my older ATOM router / hypervisor machine. (Intel used to offer server grade Atoms back then).
What is the bottom line here?
I expect with SoftBank acquisition they might migrate even further from consumer market here. And I really wished to try out one of their workstations… at a reasonable price.
sukru,
Same. Early adopters inevitably have to pay for more less. Lots of us would like to see these alternatives become more accessible, but that may not be a given. it could end up targeting a niche customer base and never be competitively priced.
I got one recently for the kids to do light gaming on….I don’t know what I was expecting but I found the performance on supertux disappointing expect on the lowest fidelity settings. Probably not far to compare it to a desktop PC with dedicated GPU. A lot of reviews recommend other SBCs as having better performance than the RPI5, which uses an older chip. But they don’t hold a magnet to RPI’s biggest advantage, which is broad support.
I’m on the lookout for one too. Spec wise there’s a lot of decent looking ARM hardware, that’s not an issue. But I keep ending up with ARM hardware that’s stuck with obsolete unsupported software. I like alternatives, but the truth is that ARM will take more time and effort to get running and keep running whereas x86 is easy to provision and has excellent long term support.
For example my security system runs on ARM and if ever I wanted to install new OS / packages for it I’d be boned – I’ve never had such concern with x86.