ARM Joins Consortium to Acquire MIPS Patents

[btarunr]

ARM today announced that it is a leading member of Bridge Crossing LLC, a consortium of major technology companies affiliated with Allied Security Trust, which has entered into an agreement with MIPS to obtain rights to its patent portfolio. The MIPS patent portfolio includes 580 patents and patent applications covering microprocessor design, system-on-chip design and other related technology fields. The consortium will pay $350 million in cash to acquire rights to the portfolio, of which ARM will contribute $167.5 million.

The transaction will, upon completion, support continued innovation in system-on-chip design, whilst removing any potential litigation risk presented by the MIPS patent portfolio with respect to the consortium members. The consortium will make licenses to the patent portfolio available to companies not within the consortium.

"ARM is a leading participant in this consortium which presents an opportunity for companies to neutralize any potential infringement risk from these patents in the further development of advanced embedded technology," said Warren East, CEO, ARM. "Litigation is expensive and time-consuming and, in this case, a collective approach with other major industry players was the best way to remove that risk."

This transaction, which is subject to MIPS shareholder approval, and customary closing conditions, is expected to close in the first quarter of 2013. ARM's contribution of $167.5 million will be funded out of existing cash reserves.

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[Katanai]

ARM just got, much, much stronger!!! They need to acquire VIA next if such a thing is possible and Intel will be really concerned then. That's the big prize I see in the PC world: VIA I was rooting for Nvidia to buy them but back then I kinda got the feeling that maybe it's impossible to do so...

 

[Inceptor]

The fact that ARM licenses its technology to other companies puts it in a unique position, relative to Intel.
It could never compete with Intel by playing the game Intel's way, it's nowhere near large enough, from a financial point of view. But, by farming out its architectures to other companies, who spend the money to implement designs and fabricate the silicon, the ARM technology is just as widespread, if not more so, than Intel's x86 technology.
That by itself is a strength; its designs have widespread application and acceptance, much more so than Intel, looking at the big picture. Ultra low power operation, with low but reasonable performance per core, and very high performance per watt.
It's an interesting company. Just not interesting from the "raw home computing power" standpoint.
When you compare ARM to x86, its a comparison between simple elegance and a complex exercise of power.
Elegance always ends up winning, at least in part.