SoftBank Considering Possible Sale of Arm Holdings as Apple Gears Up for Arm-Based Macs
SoftBank, the company that owns chip designer Arm Holdings, is exploring options that include a full or partial sale or a public offering, reports The Wall Street Journal.
SoftBank is working with Goldman Sachs Group as an advisor, and the explorations are at an early stage. The Wall Street Journal says that it's unknown how much interest there would be in Arm from financial or industry players, so there's a chance that SoftBank will ultimately do nothing.
Apple has licensed technology from Arm Holdings for its A-series chips used in iPhones since 2006, and Apple is planning to expand the use of Arm-based chips to Macs, with the upcoming launch of Macs equipped with Apple Silicon.
A potential sale would not likely impact Apple, nor is it known if Apple would be interested in a partial or full purchase of Arm Holdings.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories, according to the Apple leaker and prototype collector known as "Kosutami." In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future. Kosutami has revealed...
Top Rated Comments
From wiki
"... Apple ('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer') was developing an entirely new computing platform for its Newton ('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton'). Various requirements had been set for the processor in terms of power consumption, cost and performance, and there was also a need for fully static operation ('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_logic_(digital_logic)') in which the clock could be stopped at any time. Only the Acorn RISC Machine came close to meeting all these demands, but there were still deficiencies. The ARM did not, for example, have an integral memory management unit, as this function was being provided by the MEMC support chip and Acorn did not have the resources to develop one.[55] ('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#cite_note-lowpowerhardware-55')
Apple and Acorn began to collaborate on developing the ARM, and it was decided that this would be best achieved by a separate company.[55] ('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#cite_note-lowpowerhardware-55') The bulk of the Advanced Research and Development section of Acorn that had developed the ARM CPU formed the basis of ARM Ltd. ('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Ltd.') when that company was spun off in November 1990. Acorn Group and Apple Computer Inc each had a 43% shareholding in ARM (in 1996),[56] ('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#cite_note-jointeduventure-56') while VLSI was an investor and first ARM licensee.[57] ('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#cite_note-57')