Fuck the moneymen
they're not happy unless they're gaming something.
UK chip designer ARM Holdings PLC announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2013 on Tuesday, and despite solid revenue growth and a positive guidance, the company behind the chips that power the vast majority of the world's smartphones and tablets was spanked by The City's moneymen. The reason for the immediate …
ARM is hardly tied to Smartphones or other shiny turds the city-boys carry in their pockets.
ARM is pretty much everywhere in embedded electronics and that is only growing.
A typical laptop has about 4 or so ARM cores in it: many in the disk drive, one in the wifi...
That car the city-boy bought with last year's bonus probably has 20 or more ARMs controlling body electronics, dash, etc.
The microwave he heats up his fusion cuisine chicken in probably has an ARM, or two, in it.
And the list goes on.
Pity he doesn't have an ARM in his skull.
Most marketing has gone into promoting older chips at ARMS expense.
With little take up of the much faster Cortex A15, ARM themselves got forced to go backwards in launching the likes of the A12.
As supposed partners of big American corporations they certainly look a bit brow beaten.
They do seem to have a point; 2.9 billion chips shipped, £95.5 million pre-tax profit, so that's about 3p a chip.
You have to sell a lot of chips to reap the rewards and have to find a lot of new opportunities to keep expanding in a saturated market. And on-going expansion is what the money men seem to favour.
Investment is not solely about how well they have done but how well they will do. There are opportunities for ARM but it remains to be seen if they can offset shortfalls elsewhere. I expect ARM will become favoured again if they can secure the IoT market. ARM is however up against a lot of credible competition in the low-cost chip sector and that's what IoT needs to really take off.
" I expect ARM will become favoured again if they can secure the IoT market. "
Is there really an IoT market?
If there is, in what way is it different from the existing consumer+professional electronics market which ARM already dominate?
If there is, which other architecture is in with a chance besides ARM? x86 is a non-starter (unless Intel are paying). MIPS has a niche. Where's PowerPC these days? The Chinese were rumoured to be developing MIPS-derived chips (e.g. longson/loongson), and some rather fanciful stories at one time that they were developing an Alpha-derived chip whose name I forget. Where are they now?
Is there really an IoT market?
A very small one at present but the potential is there. It likely will be a cost sensitive playing field and the competition isn't really Intel and traditional CPU chips but more with cheaper microcontrollers from Atmel, Microchip and the like.
"the competition isn't really Intel and traditional CPU chips but more with cheaper microcontrollers from Atmel, Microchip and the like."
For non-networked kit, I entirely agree.
If you want something that does real networking, surely you want a real OS, in which case would you really start with silicon from Atmel, Microchip, etc ?
"The important thing in the market is that prices change - it doesn't really matter why or in which direction, its the change itself that provides opportunities for profit."
Agree!
Additionally, even though all economists will disagree with each other on just about everything, they do all agree in infinite growth (except the steady state refusnicks) and so with growth and debt, new money will be conjured into existence so there will be more money to move into private non-taxed havens.
Of course the money is worth slightly less by doing so..
The problem is that the economy (the real one that makes things) is not truly growing. It mostly peaked out along with oil production which has remained flat since 2005 (the oil production).
The economy growth exactly matches energy growth in terms of BTU.
We are getting a small degree of additional growth but this is from increased energy production through fracking and is why coal and (shudder) oil shale are being brought online as fast as possible.
The politicians have no answer to this as anyone who is anti-growth will simply not get elected.
I encourage everyone to take a look at "The Man Who Fell to Earth" or "The Machine Stops" to see our future.
Who would miss a few?
Shortly before the banking collapse I was programming software for trading systems. Thanks to that I got to meet a lot of traders and their managers, and I was astounded by how little they knew about the markets they traded in. These were not complex derivatives, but more traditional trading in bonds and shares. The traders were typically dealing in one specific area, such as shares in firms involved with chip manufacturing, but hadn't a clue about the products or what drove demand for them. They were basically gambling, and followed their colleagues like lemmings terrified of making a different decision form their peers. As a result, I wasn't at all surprised by the crash and the ensuing panic amongst the banks.
ARM is an example of how success in computing IP can be achieved, because of their strategy ofopening and cheaply licensing a computer architecture. MIPS, with 64 registers, has a better architecture. The IBM Power PC is a vastly better computer architecture, made now irrelevant by the truly lame-brained analysts at IBM Finance, now driving that company to its ultimate destruction. But all are better than the Intel x86, an absurdity before the first chip was produced, universally acknowledged for 30 years to be a really bad way to design and make a computer.