EU referendum are you in or out

[KlaxonCow]

A bit short-sighted, though, isn't it?

I mean, the thing with selling off the family silver to make a few bob, is that you can only do it the once.

If we come to depend far too much on foreign investment - with insufficient home-grown success stories of our own - then we increasingly won't have any "family silver", like ARM, to be sold off in the first place, come the next crisis.

And, of course, an ill wind blowing in - like Brexit or the Chinese dumping steel on the global markets or whatever else - could see all that foreign investment pack up their bags and leave the very next day, leaving behind... well, what does it leave behind exactly?

[pogo]

That’s one way to look at it. Another is that we have a current account deficit because our industry is successful.

The current account deficit is the gap between how much we save and how much our firms borrow. If our economy were closed these would have to balance. We could have no more industry than we could afford from our savings (including pensions, unit trusts, other investments).

But our industry is much bigger than this. This is good. It creates jobs and generates income for the county. Foreigners make up the difference, between our savings and investments. Why they invest here rather than in their own countries? You would have to ask them, or their governments.

Don’t worry about ARM. Softbank have said they will not only keep it here but double the workforce. The inward investment ARM has brought to the country will help fund dozens if not hundreds of other companies, one of them perhaps the next ARM.

[(o)(o)]

It's that old 1970's cornershop mentality..

Just sell anything with an intrinsic value and externalised cost benefit to the UK (v externalised costs) .. not going to regret that quick fix in the long term are we..

Yeah I'm sure Softbank will remain true to those amazing claims regardless of how the markets move...

[Dio]

I don't quite understand the context of a lot of the discussion here. ARM's not owned by the country, it's owned by the shareholders. This is just a financial transaction between one set of shareholders and another.

The only 'loss to the country' is that instead of ARM's profits being subject to UK corporation tax they'll be subject to Japan's instead.

If we really wanted to make the best of ARM specifically for Britain we'd nationalise it - I presume nobody here is advocating that?

[pogo]

I was thinking of that, but did not want to complicate it Yes, in practice the money will flow to ARM’s shareholders. Many of them will be UK based though – as a FTSE 100 listed stock it will be part of many share portfolios and pension funds in the UK. And any foreign holdings of ARM shares will have bought them from the UK at some point, and so will have been an earlier foreign investment.

To me the current account deficit is a bit like the trade deficit. On the one hand in the long term each is unsustainable. But in the medium and short term they are indicators of cashflows due to the relative strength of economies. We have a current account deficit as the UK is a much better place to invest than much of the EU. We have a trade deficit as our economy is doing well so we import far more than our struggling EU partners.

So complaining about them to me is wrong-headed. If they really were too large then markets could react by dumping the pound, forcing them into balance through slowdown or even recession. But this has not happened – markets continue to have confidence in the UK economy, and think that money lent to us for imports or investment is money well spent.

[gravy]

I don't quite understand the context of a lot of the discussion here. ARM's not owned by the country, it's owned by the shareholders. This is just a financial transaction between one set of shareholders and another.

The only 'loss to the country' is that instead of ARM's profits being subject to UK corporation tax they'll be subject to Japan's instead.

If we really wanted to make the best of ARM specifically for Britain we'd nationalise it - I presume nobody here is advocating that?

Well to be honest I was just being a twat.

Tax will still land in this country but it can be minimised to land in whatever territory is cheapest. And if we're seen to be too harsh a tax regime the barrier to leaving the UK completely has got a little bit lower.

That aside despite having a massively successful chip ARM has never made huge amounts of money.

[zip accident]

If we really wanted to make the best of ARM specifically for Britain we'd nationalise it - I presume nobody here is advocating that?

That's mighty presumptuous of you.

I don't actually have any thoughts on ARM, it seems to power a lot of phones I don't use, including one I own, but it's not a CPU that you can build a PC round (yet?).

[gravy]

Yeah it is

They can even reach the giddy heights of not being really awful


http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/ ... l-for-149/

[pogo]

Or a Raspberry PI. You would have to do a lot of building, but add a keyboard, monitor, stick Linux on it and you have a PC comparable to a $1000 desktop from only a few years ago.

[zip accident]

Yeah it is

They can even reach the giddy heights of not being really awful


http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/ ... l-for-149/

Or a Raspberry PI. You would have to do a lot of building, but add a keyboard, monitor, stick Linux on it and you have a PC comparable to a $1000 desktop from only a few years ago.

Sure, you can buy one, but so far as I know (I've not been searching), you can't build one yourself.

The pi is a computer no doubt, but you can't add extra memory, disks, or a GPU card.

I'd be interested in an ARM with 16 cores on a mini ITX motherboard at a reasonable price (compared to competing ITX motherboards) that could use SATA drives, DDR4 (or a lot of DDR3 at a large push) and PCIe graphics cards.

[Dio]

Who's going to write the video driver for that?

[VNVObit]

Yeah it is

They can even reach the giddy heights of not being really awful


http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/ ... l-for-149/

Or a Raspberry PI. You would have to do a lot of building, but add a keyboard, monitor, stick Linux on it and you have a PC comparable to a $1000 desktop from only a few years ago.

Sure, you can buy one, but so far as I know (I've not been searching), you can't build one yourself.

The pi is a computer no doubt, but you can't add extra memory, disks, or a GPU card.

I'd be interested in an ARM with 16 cores on a mini ITX motherboard at a reasonable price (compared to competing ITX motherboards) that could use SATA drives, DDR4 (or a lot of DDR3 at a large push) and PCIe graphics cards.

And what would you use it for?

[zip accident]

Who's going to write the video driver for that?

Oops, you are. You mean, you haven't already?

Your opposition too, presumably.

Is ARM that bad? I mean, yeah it's extra work, sorry about that. There are drivers for their built in GPUs, it can't be impossible.

With the way Intel have been sewing up the processor market, someone was bound to come along. It's why they nerfed the cooling on their CPUs, so they have something to pull out of the bag when someone catches up to them.

And what would you use it for?

Run an OS, play games? Linux and thus SteamOS ought to be available immediately.

[Dio]

I don't know if we have Linux ARM drivers. We could do I suppose. It's a very different memory model which makes threaded code rather unreliable, and I know that's a significant fear for the drivers.

I doubt many of the SteamOS games run on ARM. (The memory model change is a big barrier here too, probably, although I suppose anything that worked on 360 or before was working with the even weaker model there).

[zip accident]

There was a reason I mentioned 16 cores, the Pi 3 is 4 cores at 1.2 GHz, i5s are 4 cores at at most 4 GHz, so if everything scaled, 16 * 1.2 would be more than 4 * 4, and more or less round about if scaling was only slightly problematic.

... although I suppose anything that worked on 360 or before was working with the even weaker model there.

360? 368 I could follow, 360 just lost me completely, I don't remember a 360 at all. My memory is wonky though, so if there was a 360 don't worry about it.

I'm probably being silly, I just don't love monopolies, and currently Intel have most of one.