This may or may not happen, but I don’t believe it’s good news for Power if it does happen
https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/technology/6-thoughts-on-nvidia-s-reported-interest-in-buying-arm-15388218
3 replies (most recent on top)
@6qsk How about we give Softbank RH in exchange for ARM and a promise RHEL will support the ARM business, straight up swap? We all know IBM is going to ruin RH eventually. And frankly, I've worked with a number of the RH people, and they ain't all that.
This is one heck of an idea, as someone will do it. The problem, is IBM can’t take on the additional 32 billion of debt, and a stock swap would make SoftBank a 20-25% owner. My guess is they would consider it way too risky If done correctly, you would create a monopoly
IBM should buy ARM (and EOL Power). Licensing IP is one of the things IBM is actually good at.
And when it owns ARM, the first thing it should do is define a "systems architecture" for ARM servers in the datacenter so that systems vendors can create servers that are actually compatible with each other (like Intel/x86 servers are). Today, every ARM server design is its own unique snowflake, and that is severely holding back the software support for ARM. In other words, it's a lot like the personal computer market before IBM published the specs for the PC and anointed DOS.
Of course, this time around IBM needs to remember to actually monetize the resulting standard - maybe by tying RHEL licenses to ARM server architecture licenses? With RHEL as "the DOS of ARM servers", IBM would actually make money...