It is a reflection of exactly that, but this completely dismissed all the risks: - Maybe new ml-tech is invented that does not require as heavy equipment. - Maybe AI does not grow as fast as expected. - Maybe a competitor comes along and pricing comes under pressure. - Maybe supply chain issues.

Are there really big capital inventors who will say “nope I don’t work on that exchange”?

> A lot of US funds have restrictions as to how much they can invest outside the US.

I'm not sure that's relevant. ARM is listing American Depository Shares, so this is still usually viewed as an international investment.

Why?

The UK has a long intellectual tradition which creates a steady stream of creative and capable engineers. Capital however is predominately held via inherited wealth and its controllers want rentier incomes with low risk. As a consequence there is low appetite for risky new ventures and those that want to undertake them mostly migrate elsewhere. What's left is a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dianosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors and a tiny creative industry that clings on despite suffering through waves of either government neglect, or worse yet, government interest.

Goes all the way back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures and beyond.

The UK has a great engineering tradition, especially from the Victorian and Empire eras, all the way up to WW2, but it seems that after that there was a dramatic and incredibly short sighted turn to economisation and avoiding investment.

The absolute poster child for this was the UK space programme, which was cancelled just before the launch of its first rocket. The director of the programme decided to defy orders and launch anyway, on the grounds that everything was ready and he was in Australia. But this pervades everything. The TBMs for Euston HS2 have been bought, but are going to spend the next year buried doing nothing, because there's a persistent desire to cancel HS2 after most of the work has been done but before any of the benefits are gained.

Concorde somehow escaped cancellation multiple times. The UK developed its own nuclear reactor technology (Magnox) then gave up and let Electricite de France run everything.

I've heard this complaint from several people in Cambridge's "startup" industry too. There are hardly any angel investors. The amounts of money available are tiny. Got an idea? Tough, you'll have to develop it in your own literal garden shed at your own expense. The local capital owners are far more interested in property, which doesn't require any thinking.

UK engineering jobs typically have uncompetitive compensation.

As it's 2am here, I'll rattle off assorted bullet-points in no particular order:

* The UK's sudden deindustrialisation (1970s-1990s) was inevitable but foreseeable and yet still poorly managed by both political parties, IMHO: my perception is Labour was more interested in propping up whatever heavy-industry remained rather than ease the UK into the future - and as for the Tories... probably best I say nothing there.

* Even before deindustrialisation the overarching business-culture in medium to large businesses in the UK was, and still is, tied to the entrenched class system, insofar as the board-level positions, upper management, sometimes even middle-management, and many specialties like legal, are held by a kind of unofficial aristocacy that looks-out for each-other rather than what's best for the business that they run (let alone the country): some combination of Eton, Harrow, having read Classics at Oxbridge, you can see what I'm getting at. This alone explains how Boris Johnson won his party's leadership and remained in-office despite clear evidence of misconduct in office, and so on and so on. Nepotism is rife here: the middling, uninterested, types get to work at daddy's friends's firm if they can't get recruited by the banks when they do their milk-runs.

* For reasons I haven't fully explored yet, despite the UK being the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and of so many inventions we still rely on today, and of great engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel - the engineering profession was never elevated to something Etonians would be interested in - it became a very middle-class occupation. That itself isn't a real problem as far as I'm concerned - the problem comes back to how the layers of management would be literally a class apart from engineering, and that class-divide results in engineering being excluded from management and leadership decisions, no-matter how central or critical engineering is to the company's identity or very purpose - for this reason you won't find many former-engineers being promoted to leadership or management or their experiences and inputs being valued: after all, the board read Classics so of course they know far better about how to run a successful business than a silly engineer from Lancs who plays with his funny slide-rule all day long.

* Even in more progressive companies without the problem of aristocratic management it's difficult to get access to capital, especially for anything remotely risky.

* A small, but still contributing point, that I feel matters slightly, is that different social groups in the UK tend to have differing mental pictures of what "engineering" even is: for many people (possibly even most people? maybe at least oop north...) they'll tell you an engineer is someone who stokes the fire on a stream-train, or fixes their telly when it breaks - MAYBE a civil-engineer - while our preferred answer: "someone who solves problems" would probably be 3rd or 4th down on the Family Fueds survey screen. This is my perception and I hope I'm wrong. As an anecdote, I was in secondary-school and 6th Form during the last of the Labour years when the careers advice service ("Connexxions"[1]) was pushing a very egalitarian view of how careers, further-ed and higher-ed, and professional development should operate - I support their goals, but I feel they got the messaging wrong and misrepresented how many careers operated - for a solid example, I still have my A2-sized full-colour print careers guidebook (with lots of flashy photos to boot) we all got when we were 14 (15? 16?) which certainly contributed towards the perception that (excepting civil engineering) that "engineer" is just another word for "technician": while the book did do justice to civil and chemical engineering, it made no mention of software engineering or electronics engineering, while mechnical engineering was really under-sold to its readers, and electrical engineering was down-right misrepresented. Experiences like these are only going to put-off kids from considering engineering precisely at that age when they're thinking about what they want to do with their life.

* More broadly, I don't think the UK really has many (any?) public-figures who are celebrated as engineering figures - in fact all, of the celebrities I know who have engineering backgrounds got famous for deciding to stop being an engineer: Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) is an elctrical engineer who went to Queen's College, Carol Voderman did engineering at Cambridge, and so on - while the people I suppose we could be celebrating, like James Dyson, clearly act against the interests of the UK's engineering sector (he moved huge chunks of the company to Singapore). Yes, we have Rolls-Royce jet-engines, BAE Systems, and an assortment of luxury carmakers - but I'm convinced they're only still around because they are strategic national interests, and the UK government has had to bail them out of bankruptcy more times than we'd like, so excepting the defence sector, the UK has no real equivalent of NASA with which to inspire its young children, pre-uni students, and mid-career-shifters.

* Another aspect that I think matters, even if only somewhat slightly, the attitudes of those-in-charge (regardless of their class background: Tory or Labour) towards people-on-the-spectrum and those adjacent to it (i.e. us) - it's a nebulous thing I can't pin-down easily - but until 6th Form I was under constant pressure to conform (because if you don't support any footy team at all then you must be a right spesh) - it starts right from Reception year in Primary. Of course this is not unique to the UK, I've heard the exact same stories told from people I know who grew up in Iowa or Idaho - but those states aren't exactly known for their engineering sectors either. This extends to an undercurrent of scepticism of things like ADHD; while paternalism and gatekeeping remain in the medical profession, especially in mental health (though things are definitely better than they were 20-30 years ago) - right down to the anti-trans crap Rishi Sunak is still pushing to deflect criticsm of 13 years of Tory rule, never mind it led to the murder of a teenage girl. At least David Cameron wasn't that bad.

* One of the things that Boris Johnson's government did while in power was to up-end the 6th Form examinations system - I'll admit I don't know all the details, but I understand his changed the system to be much closer to the (almost social-Darwinian) way things were when Boris himself was doing his A-Levels: where your final subject grade depends far more on how you do in your finals exams instead of continuous assessment/coursework, with no or very limited opportunities for resits, and removing choices like a-la-carte module selection - but it is exactly and only because of the flexibility afforded to me when I was at that age that my comorbid ASD+ADHD-addled brain was able to get into university (and a very good one at that), whereas I'm certain that I would not be able to manage today with that level of intense exam-prep in only a 2-month window - and without my degree I would not be able to qualify for the H-1B (where a BSc is an absolute requirement) and eventually get my US Green Card.

* It is true that the UK does, actually, succeed in software in one crucial area: video games: Rockstar, DMA, Rare, Codemasters, Hello Games (No Man's Sky), just to name a few - but as others in this thread have remarked: successive UK governments, again, regardless of party, fail to give the sector the credit and support it needs and the UK's success here is in-spite of everything, not because of it. Crucially, the UK's games sector was built on the home-computer revolution of the 1980s - successive governments have had plenty of opportunities to repeat that success, but so far all I've seen is the 2016 BBC micro:bit project - which honestly felt like a gimmick than something to inspire kids with.

* Things aren't all bad though: I'm happy to see things like Scratch being taught in primary-schools and A-Level Computer Science now being closer to undergraduate level than glorified-ICT than it was in my day - but these things won't address the larger social, cultural, and attitudinal issues at play here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexions_(agency)

I think a simpler answer is that for directors looking for a cash windfall the US markets are currently a more favourable choice.

> Arm exists and is British, after all.

Our current government is indifferent to this.

I'm not sure what that poster was referring to, however in my experience (as a brit), is that the UK is replacing any kind of industry into a service economy aka. people buying shit they don't need. You see this in a number of ways like the physical replacement of industrial areas into shopping centres or the fact the UK can't manufacture rail locomotives - the place where they were invented...

Having said this, there is still a reasonable amount of industry in the UK, the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies but I think this is a remnant of the past. Most of the major engineering companies in industrial estates are Asian or American owned, now.

The fact that they allowed Imagination Technologies to be sold to a Chinese company in this age of GPU powered AI is ......... even worse of an example

It can't be - sentimentality rarely gets in a way of a business-deal this big. But it might explain why ARM themselves (whether employees or shareholders, regardless of country) might not put too much effort into staying in the UK, I mean.

Consumer banking has radically changed. I can't comment on needing a residence to open a bank account to get a residence, because although I ran into the same issue when I first came here it's been a long time since that was a problem for me. In other aspect personal banking is much much easier. Many banks allow you to open accounts online, for example.

Yeah, and to prove your English residence you have to provide a paper bill from a utility company (water or electricity) with your name and address on it. Which adds another 3 month as those utility bills are on a quarterly basis. Crazy stuff...

In terms of personal banking it's definitely gotten easier for new comers with the likes of Monzo and Revolut - I had no problem opening account on arrival. From what I've heard the high street banks have improved a bit in this regard too, probably in response to the challenger banks taking market share.

Finding a place to rent on the other hand is still difficult, particularly without a history of renting in the UK

And if it is a high demand area you need to look more spanky than all the other applicants: great jobs, rental references, no kids/pets, older couple prefered of sharers. In London you also need to make an offer on the spot.

That’s definitely changed. I had little issues with this in 2015 using a letter of proof of employment.

I can confirm that it was the same at least ~6 years ago when I went through the same.

There has to be a catch. Maybe a teaser rate?

because it's the government on the other side of the loan

A lot more mistakes made by Thatcher than that.

We're now in the absurd situation where 4 out of 6 power generating companies are foreign owned and the Japanese own our chip manufacturer.

All because of her policies that originally envisioned that the share holding would be by the British public, not foreigners.

And the latest scandal is that our water companies are dumping ridiculous amounts of sewage into our waterways while giving out huge dividends. And there's nothing anyone seems to be able to do about it.

True but the driver before the world wide web would have been cable TV over fibre to the home.

She decided it was better to open the market to foreign cable TV providers and so barred BT from selling TV access.

Without TV there was no driver for fibre investment.

Where BT would have had a requirement to provide universal access to fibre, as with phone provision, Telewest and NTL just did geograhically limited roll outs of legacy coax and the rest is history.

Arm would definitely qualify for the Nasdaq 100 index. I don’t know where you’re getting the $400B market cap minimum, but the current index includes Zoom (19.7B), Walgreens (23.3B) and eBay (22.8B), among many other companies well below $40B (let alone $400B) market cap.

> The most prominent index on NASDAQ is the QQQ, the top 100 stocks,market cap weighted.

QQQ is an index fund:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invesco_QQQ

That follows the Nasdaq-100 index:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasdaq-100

There are other funds that track it too from companies other than Invesco.

If I remember one of the original conditions put on the acquisition of ARM by the UK gov was that HQ stays in the UK. So I doubt that will change. Can't say I'm familiar with the tangible benefits, but I assume is exposes ARM to UK law and regulation more than if the HQ was in another country. And retains some jobs in the UK.

There must be some benefit for governments to make such a request.

Most people who can afford it do. We still come out and cheer for the national religion once in a while though since we are told repeatedly it is the envy of the world.

If it was too successful on its own it wouldn't be in all those devices. Whether or not it has the best chip designers its ARM that has changed the world.

It seems a bit like Linux to me - you could say Linus Torvalds is disappointing because he's not as rich as Elon Musk and yet one might argue both that he has done more and that if he had tried to get super rich out of it he would not have achieved so much because every effort to extract significant money would have lessened the breadth of his impact. People wouldn't have co-operated.

zero chance of any regulators agreeing to this plan.

The strength of ARM is that it's universal. If you shut down ARM to the public, then they will switch to RIS-V and suddenly, software will no longer support ARM.

the article says that Wu is effectively still on the job, and Wu's own LinkedIn page claims he's still the boss there.

Having myself been part of a joint venture with the Chinese (in the education space), and having a Chinese employee go rogue, I only advise against western firms (even large ones with clout) from engaging in such ventures. The Chinese will take control by any means necessary and bleed you dry from the inside.

>Although supposedly Softbank restored control last year?

Nope, the F-1 addresses this: "Neither we [Arm] nor SoftBank Group control the operations of Arm China, which operates independently of us. "

They don’t. They’re proper rogue and being China there isn’t much you can do about it

According to the filing they have extremely limited ability to influence them and yeah it is a big issue.

I'm not an accountant, but I think I'm referring to gross profit margin [1], which is revenue minus cost of goods sold (which is small for an IP licensing company, any company that actually sells hardware will be a fraction of that).

I think your math refers to operating margin, that's after they subtract all the operating overheads which are fixed, and not proportional to sales volume. In other words a 96% gross margin means they have virtually no friction to increasing sales.

Compare to Intel statement [2], they have a 35.8% gross margin and a negative operating margin this year, which would be the apples to apples comparison against 96% gross margin and 19.6% operating margin in the F1.

My read on the income line is they do a good job of 'spending money', but they are signaling that can be turned into things like dividends to shareholders once they IPO, perhaps by doing short sighted things like cutting R&D expenses and/or accounting tricks.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_margin

[2] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1637/...

>ARM designs some pretty good CPU cores, so imagine they offered good RISC-V cores as well.

This is the approach MIPS took. They deprecated their legacy ISA, embracing the industry-standard RISC-V.

Problem is, ARM's management hasn't shown any signs of actually being capable of doing this. It would have to be replaced, and the business model would need a deep redesign.

But everything hardware takes a long time. Can ARM survive until they have competitive RISC-V designs ready?

I will not bet on that.

There's another option:

For a SoC (or bigger uC) include both ARM & RISC-V cores. They can work side by side, be used as development platform for either, share memory or peripherals included in the SoC (or perhaps share different but overlapping subsets of those resources). Or a Big.Little style setup where the "Big" and "Little" are different ISA.

Where utilising chip resources 100% is not too important (like, in most applications), designers could simply work with the ISA cores they're comfortable with. Switch use to the other cores, use the same peripherals.

Would this be difficult to work with? Unlikely. Software support for such setups exists, suitable defaults / boot settings & go.

At the very least this would get ARM foot in the door if it turns out RISC-V eating ARMs market share (which is already happening, be it limited scale so far). Or collect the 'ARM tax' for SoCs whose designers wanted RISC-V but don't mind including ARM as well.

Apple never had the ability to develop custom x86 chips in house and were constantly at the mercy of Intel's timelines and product development priorities, as well as their extended issues shrinking their lithography below 14nm. ARM presents none of those issues for Apple - now they handle the design of their CPUs, prioritize whatever they want, and fab however many they need directly from whoever using newer processes that Intel still hasn't matched yet.

Intel is still around, still innovating, and still profitable. It has a lot more competition than in the past, but they are still a force to be reckoned with.

"Being open does not automagically make it happen." Absolutely true. Many many "open" things have never gained traction and have fallen by the wayside. It was a plausible argument about RISC-V in 2016. It is not in 2023, when it has already happened.

Lots of companies have made their decisions, projects are kicking off -- for example Samsung just started porting .NET and Tizen to RISC-V for use in their future TVs and other products. LG similarly. It will take five years for the products resulting from that to emerge, but they are coming.

The RISC-V ISA didn't even formally exist as a frozen spec a little over four years ago. Ratification in July 2019 was the starting gun for many to start projects. The results of that are just emerging in the last months -- the VisionFive 2, tne Lichee Pi 4A, the 64 core Milk-V Pioneer.

A lot more things have gone into the pipeline since then, and will be emerging in the next two to three years. Things up to around Apple M1 performance ... from multiple companies.

>If anything it has lot of mountains to climb before it can be considered a challenge to the existing instruction set.

That's not what ARM thinks[0].

>There is nothing inevitable about RISC V.

As it turns out, the decisions have long been made, and RISC-V has been chosen.

0. https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/risc-v-part-2-ambitious...

...because seriously, how many of those customers could ever possibly want to use Nvidia's graphics or AI silicon? That stuff is never going to fly.

No I didn't answer my own question because a hostile takeover of ARM can cost $70b and it doesn't guarantee that ARM would fall on its face after the acquisition because it has long-term contracts.