The problem with ARM is that the most likely suitors don't dare buy them -- if Intel, Apple, Microsoft, or Google bought ARM Holdings, the others (all rivals) would start looking for an alternative architecture to run on and the licensing fees would take a nose dive.

It's one thing to license an architecture from an independent, scrupulously neutral third party: another entirely to gamble your business platform's future on a rival's goodwill.

Softbank isn't an obvious direct platform-level competitor for Intel or Apple or Samsung or the others, so may be an acceptable acquisitor who won't frighten ARM's licensees into abandoning ship.

That assumes someone would buy them as an ongoing business. Apple could have bought them specifically in order bring the ARM designers in to Apple and force their rivals to switch - an acquihire on a massive scale. Using an ARM designed chip is an advantage, and taking that advantage away from your competition could be a very good thing for your business.

I'm glad that didn't happen though.

Apple completely design their own chips. The real mystery is why Apple stuck with the ARM architecture when they switched to 64 bit (since aarch64 is a brand new design). My guess is because they still had to license the 32 bit architecture for compatibility, and because the amount that Apple pays to ARM each year for the license is peanuts.

For the same reason they haven't switched to ARM for macOS yet - compatibility. If Steve Jobs was still alive, he would've probably switched macOS to ARM by now, despite all the hassle. He's done it before. I'm not really seeing Tim Cook pull a move like that anytime soon.

Very much this. If this deal goes through, I have a feeling that we may see ARM begin to give way to RISC-V. Perhaps it might happen slowly at first, but the mobile space is already prepared for a switch given that Android is virtualized and Apple is switching to abstracted "bitcode."

An Apple switch is unlikely due to their significant in-house advantages being geared towards ARM directly. PA semi was an ARM shop and their innovation in their A$ line of chips is driven by significant experience working with the ARM ISA... They have a licence which gives them the freedom to design their own chips and unless the new owners decided to do something disastrous with respect to existing contracts, that license will remain valid and its terms unchanged. Something ephemeral to the facts of the existing contracts is unlikely to motivate Apple to do anything so drastic. They already have the ongoing Intel sky lake laptop debacle and a future of less and less certainty regarding Intel's promises to deal with.

Tldr: Apple are more likely to move macOS to ARM than iOS to RISC-V

PA was PPC, not ARM.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

I stand corrected. My memory failed me trying to compose a reply on my phone.

P.A. Semi's PWRficient processors were Power based, not ARM. They learned to adapt :-)

Financially the deal doesn't make sense. ARM has been around for a while their FCF ~500M a year. At $30 billion purchase price you are paying 60x FCF. Apple and Qcom just license the instruction set and design the processors themselves. To justify the $30 billion price they really need to increase FCF to 1.5 billion a year. For a relatively mature business I don't see how it is going to happen.

Mature in the mobile and current marketplace - as has been mentioned in the thread previously, the gamble they're taking is that ARM is going to dominate IoT. With a (potential) monumental increase in the number of connected devices, as well as updating older gen embedded systems, that's where they're aiming for that >3x growth to come from.