The latest episode of Supply Chained, the new podcast from Tim Culpan and Jon Y has just dropped and it’s all about Arm. Before we go any further please drop what you’re doing and subscribe to Supply Chained and to Tim and Jon’s newsletters; you can thank me later. The podcast episode is titled ‘Arm might be swallowing its own poison pill’ and most of the discussion is about Arm’s decision to launch its own CPU. We’ve covered this move in detail recently in Arm Makes Chips! Tim and Jon bring an interesting perspective to the move: that Arm’s refusal to make (or rather sell) chips made it immune from takeover by a big chip seller such as Intel, Nvidia or Qualcomm. Indeed this ‘poison pill’ meant that Nvidia’s bid to buy Arm from Softbank was ended by competition authorities in 2022. So by becoming a chip seller now Arm is effectively swallowing its own poison pill! Tim and Jon’s discussion then moves on to the purchase of Arm by Softbank in 2016 and wondering why the UK government allowed the sale of, arguably, the UK’s leading technology company. Understandably Jon and Tim are baffled! As readers will know from the flavour of the spelling in this newsletter Babbage (me) is based in the UK and so had a ringside seat to the full political context of the Arm sale. I’ve also just finished reading Gambling Man, the 2022 biography of Softbank founder Masatoshi Son - widely known as Masa - by former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, which has a whole chapter on the sale of Arm. In the rest of this post we’ll try to understand why this sale took place and whether it really was bad news for the UK. We’ll end by considering an interesting idea put forward by Tim at the end of the podcast: that Apple should ditch the Arm ISA in favour of its own CPU ISA. Why did the UK sell Arm to Softbank? Some brief background on the sale. Arm had been listed on the London Stock Exchange (and on Nasdaq) ever since its flotation in 1998. The sale of the firm to Softbank was announced on...