Intel Sells $147 Million Stake In Arm

In a regulatory filing on Tuesday, Intel revealed it has sold its entire stake in Arm Holdings, generating an estimated $147 million. "The company also sold its stake in ZeroFox, a cybersecurity company, and reduced stake in Astera Labs, a developer of connectivity platforms for enterprise," adds Tom's Hardware. From the report: Intel's recent regulatory filing revealed that it no longer holds the 1.18 million shares of Arm it owned three months ago, as noticed by Bloomberg. The average price of Arm's stock during this period was $124.34 per share, leading to the estimated $147 million pay-out. The company also reduced stake in Astera Labs (which has always been seen as a strategic investment for Intel to ensure steady supply of things like PCIe retimers) and got rid of its stake in ZeroFox. Despite this, Intel reported a net loss of $120 million on its equity investments for the quarter.

CPU wars just may be over

[bradgoodman]

With AI and the GPU boom among us - just like that - no one cares about one CPU being marginally better or less âoepower hungryâ than another.

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[kiviQr]

I care about CPU speed but not just "marginally better" over decade.

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[Rockoon]

I dont want the complexity of having a mix of X of one core and Y of another slower core unless Y is very large in relation to X.

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[Fly Swatter]

Laptops are still a thing. Power hunger matters.

But for a home computer? They are all commodities, unless you are an old fart power user or excitable gamer any non-laptop computer from the last decade is plenty fast for everyday use. Even most laptops

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[Gilgaron]

Yeah I agree, a $50 Kindle Fire will do most things normies want to do these days. Power or thermal hunger is sated with throttling on anything remotely recent in the PC space and there's not much to push demand for more, no one is trying to run Cyberpunk on battery power for 8 hours.

Intel

[oldgraybeard]

Is sinking into the sunset! If the c-suite does not mind their P's and Q's they will join Control Data Corp. as just another once global power has been.

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[The123king]

HP buys Intel, and another global juggernaut fades into obscurity

Somebody is selling their silverware

[gweihir]

Got to finance the c-level bonuses somehow, I guess. Well, Intel is clearly dying. This is an expected step of the process.

Re:Somebody is selling their silverware

[drinkypoo]

On one hand, true. On the other hand, Intel tried to do ARM and wasn't good at it already. They are married to their own architectures. They keep trying to throw their x86-whatever cores at everything.

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[BlueLightning]

Technically, selling their stake in ARM doesn't prevent them from doing ARM-based chips in the future (or even right now) - it just means they are no longer shareholders.

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[gweihir]

True. But at the size of Intel, influence is everything. They are not going to be a go-to name for ARM now and their existing customers will just look someplace else if they want to move to ARM.

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[gweihir]

You have a point. But since x86 clearly is not the longer-term future (it is an old architecture with tons of patches on top of it and that is never good), not developing alternatives means you give up your future. Obviously, Intel has never been good at strategic thinking and they are not going to learn that now.

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[serviscope_minor]

it is an old architecture with tons of patches on top of it and that is never good

x86 isn't that old, and from what I recall they are looking at chips where the majority of cores doesn't implement anything except x64.

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[hawk]

> they are looking at chips where the majority of cores doesn't implement anything except x64.

Ahh.

So they'll use this to buy a stake in AMD! :)

hawk

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[tlhIngan]

On one hand, true. On the other hand, Intel tried to do ARM and wasn't good at it already. They are married to their own architectures. They keep trying to throw their x86-whatever cores at everything.

What are you talking about? Intel's ARM chips were some of the best you could find - they were the most performant. StrongARM was the fastest for a long time (admittedly, they inherited a lot of it from DEC, but the SA-1110 was all Intel), and was only eclipsed by the XScale processors, which could go up to 62

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[drinkypoo]

What are you talking about? Intel's ARM chips were some of the best you could find - they were the most performant.

They didn't do that design. Also, they were the most power hungry. XScale didn't scale down. Intel never managed to get enough performance out of them to rival their homegrown IP, and never got enough efficiency out of them to compete with anyone else's ARMs.

I had an iPaq H2215 with PXA255, the fastest XScale. The battery life was poop, even with the massive extended battery.

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[The123king]

They're historically pretty crap at their own architectures. In fact, even x86 and it's heritage owes it's existence to the 4004, on who's ISA was defined by Datapoint. so even the x86 isn't wholly Intels own creation. And of course, lets not forget the x86-64 extensions were AMD's brainchild.

Good Job, Intel!

[organgtool]

You just sold the most valuable part of the company!

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[ChunderDownunder]

Well they announced a Horse Creek collaboration that Intel with SiFive, but if they were dumping Arm for RISC-V, nothing much yet in terms of an Intel product that would compete with Apple Silicon or Snapdragon.