Microchip, ARM goes public. Off to the record 60 billion operation
ARM Holdings, the world’s largest chip companywill go public on Wall Street in the largest deal after a nearly two-year downturn in the US technology sector. The company is valued at around $64 billion, and it’s likely it will float at a similar figure. The last operation of this size took place in November 2021, when Rivian, the US company that produces electric cars, was listed for 70 billion dollars.
ARM was born 1990 as joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple and VLSI Technology. L’RISC architecture (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) developed by ARM engineers has proven to be highly efficient and suitable for low power consumption devices. This has led to the rapid adoption of ARM solutions by manufacturers mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Indeed, today the intellectual property by ARM (which does not make its own chips) is used in the vast majority of SoCs designed, developed and marketed by various manufacturers: Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, MediaTek, NVidia, Amazon, Huawei, just to name a few. It is estimated that approximately 70% of the global population uses chip-powered products that rely on theISA ARM or are built from designs developed using ARM technology. In another article we talked about how important ISA is in the competition between ARM64 and x86-64 chips. In the fiscal year ended March 31, 2023, the various manufacturers shipped 30 billion chips based on ARM, recording a 70% growth compared to 2016 (source: Nikkei). To date, ARM technology is used in 250 billion chips.
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In 2016, the Japanese company Soft Bank Group acquired ARM Holdings for about 32 billion dollars while at the beginning of 2022 the acquisition of ARM by NVidia definitively vanished. The agreement now seemed to be a done deal and instead, the fears of the various accomplices player on the market, it set.
ARM’s move to face the challenges of the coming years
The market is starting to adopt the architecture and the instruction set with increasing conviction royalty-free RISC-V. They had already seen each other for some time RISC-V SoC in more “ordinary” application fields such as sensors and cheap smart devices. For a while now, however, the technology has been adopted for applications of artificial intelligence And high performance computingareas of great importance for many companies.
These are “sinister” signs for ARM which sees its business potentially threatened by an architecture, RISC-V precisely, which is easily accessible by anyone without paying any “offer” (as happens instead in the case of the British company). ARM’s valuation is estimated between 60 and 70 billion dollarseven if to date it is not known the value of the IPO. If the operation is successful, ARM will be able to count on the arrival of lifeblood to optimize design activities and propose innovative projects to customers, able to counter the competition and strengthen the presence in the HPC and data center markets.
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