
What
Why would the old investors sell, I ask myself. Baffled.
Japanese tech investment house SoftBank Group has announced its intention to acquire Ampere Computing, the chip design firm that makes server-grade silicon based on the Arm architecture. SoftBank (SBG) is paying $6.5 billion for the privilege. Ampere’s major investors – Oracle and Carlyle – are selling their stakes. Softbank …
My impression is the Altra, Altra Max and One processor designs are slow compared to recent Graviton, Intel, Epyc and likely the next generation Loongson processors. Although slow is not an ideal feature during the transition to compute intensive AI, the conjecture I've heard is Ampere has an engineering team with enough experience to quickly integrate a massive TPU into existing ARM designs.
I think at this point it's clear AI is not a fad that will fade like skinny jeans, but a tool which greatly increases productivity for workers in certain technical and creative fields.
When the dot-com bubble burst, online shopping didn't go away. Neither will the need for economical AI inference go away if the AI bubble breaks. Whether Ampere turns out to be a valuable acquisition for SoftBank is a different matter.