I think SB might've upped the bid a bit extra with Oracle as the other suitor. With Graviton and Ampere processors owned by hyperscalers it would've been a very unfortunate time for the ARM server market to become stagnant.

Right now ARM is in a golden position to take server market pieces, higher compute densities with simpler i-set and good software support thanks to years of mobile and now Apple support (most language implementators wants things to run on Mac's so bugs and perf have been getting fixed)

If Oracle would've bought them, third parties (in this case including both Microsoft with Azure and Google) would probably have held back on ARM investments (not to mention smaller operators), Qualcomm being in lawsuit mode would also had sown doubt, maybe some other manufacturer would introduce chips in the meanwhile but they would be small and given time Risc-V might even pop up on the horizon as an alternative hurting ARM on server chances even more.

Now they're "independant", with better software support than ever, guaranteeing availability to smaller parties (at a time when many of those are outside the US and wanting alternatives) and a chance to benefit from vertical integration.

Not sure on that... AMD's 128+ core servers are competitive to ARM on power per unit of work and exceed them on total compute. It's still very competitive.

Might be, but that is the thing, while it is tradition to complain about Oracle, in many cases their are the only ones that show up at the door with the suitcase full of money.

So where are the others that supposedly are better than them?

In this case, Softbank will be having ARM and Ampere.

This depends on definition of "better". Maybe your question is better suited as "So, where are the others that supposedly are richer than them?"

In that case, we have the CPU manufacturers, which already do this as the business, Google, which is not that interested, or already make their own chips, Apple, which has an in-house CPU/GPU company, and probably IBM, which also designs and builds their own processors.

So, the only interested shopper in the vicinity is Oracle, and they happen to have the money. The others have the money, but not the interest.

Indeed, which kind of proves the point, in the scenarios where the only shopper at shows at the store is Oracle, the alternative is bankruptcy.

Was Ampere going bankrupt though?

I think the fear is that if Oracle was the purchaser, then that would be good for Oracle, but not necessarily the rest of the ARM ecosystem. Given Softbank’s ARM investment, it is in their interest to try to keep the ecosystem healthy.

I was speaking in general.

In the specific case of Ampere it remains to be seen, it wasn't that healthy also.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/26/oracle_ampere_stake_c...

I’d love for someone more informed to provide some insider detail, but by appearances Oracle really, really tried to make SPARC a differentiator for them after the Sun acquisition.

They were shipping new systems (M8) based on a consistent in-house evolution of SPARC almost 8 years after the acquisition, a veritable eternity in tech time.

Eventually the market just said, no, we want x64 and a path to Cloud.

One wonders if they’d kept at it for a few more years whether they’d have needed to bid for Altera at all, given the gaps opened up by Intel’s struggles.

Even if Oracle tried, SPARC performance was terrible and their value for money was too. We benchmarked a finance system (Transaction Processing) where we needed 3x the SPARC hardware to keep up with Intel/Linux. Once they bought Sun I couldn't see any future where they made it work with keeping SPARC alive. Best case was keeping Solaris on x86 since that had genuinely better features (Zones and DTrace in particular).

Which is a pity, given that Solaris SPARC has been doing hardware memory tagging in production for a decade now.