ARM's trillion IoT chips need vision

Marco Jacobs, Nov. 16, 2016 – In September SoftBank bought ARM for $32B, 40% more than its listed stock price at the time. Why was SoftBank willing to pay so much more than the market thought the company was worth? There seems so little synergy between this processor IP company and SoftBank's telecommunications products. SoftBank's CEO Masayoshi Son gave a keynote presentation at ARM's own TechCon event where he laid out his thinking.

Masayoshi started his talk in an unconventional way, asking everyone to close their eyes for moment, and then open them again. Within a few seconds he made the whole audience understand that your eyes give you a completely different experience of the world around you.

Masayoshi then started his presentation with a picture of a trilobite, an early animal that roamed our oceans for over 270 million years until it went extinct about 250 million years ago. The trilobite was the first species with complex, compound eyes. Both predators and prey developed similar improvements in eyesight. This ability to see is believed to be one of the key evolutionary pressures that caused a rapid development of new life forms during what is known as the Cambrian Explosion, a relatively short evolutionary event during which many new animal species appeared.

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