The strategy they are using to establish a revenue stream that justifies this valuation is to continue to raise prices on their customers. I think this works in the near term (next 5 to 10 years), and generate a ton of money for ARM, but it will drive additional momentum to RISC-V.
The legendary Jim Keller is going all in on RISC-V, if you don't know Google him. His company has many core designs coming as well chiplets: https://tenstorrent.com/risc-v/
Because of Jim Keller and similar efforts I wouldn't be surprised for RISC-V to see both core count as well as per core performance meet ARM over the next few years. Maybe even exceed if Jim can push the chiplet approach faster than ARM can roll theirs out.
Hopefully this drives a lot of innovation and we all benefit as a result.
I think that using ARM is going to be viewed as being locked into ARM's ever increasing licensing fees, where as if you go RISC-V, you are free to switch CPU providers.
> where as if you go RISC-V, you are free to switch CPU providers.
Idk, this really isn't as true as you'd think. Yes RISC-V is an open and free ISA which will cut out some fees, but you'd still have to license IP/chip designs (if you can't make your own) and they could only undercut ARM by a little bit. Further, the lack of mobility across chips/boards/whatever is not usually from the ISA, but from the BSP, SDK, etc. so you still would have substantial lockin unless we somehow standardize on that (lol)
Part of the issue here is that nobody is going to build something free on top of someone else's property. What good is a "free" design if you still have to pay ARM?
Whereas once you have a free ISA which is actually in widespread use, you could get some designs out of universities or major corporations which intend to use them rather than sell them as their primary business and then release the design for the same reason they do for Linux code, potentially under a copyleft-style license.
Those designs aren't going to be competitive with the state of the art, at least in the beginning, but they don't have to be. All they have to be is low power enough to stick in an embedded device and fast enough to run the display on a refrigerator and the lack of a license fee would cause them to replace a zillion ARM chips that currently go into every IoS device and <$200 phone and consumer internet router. That's a huge chunk of ARM's market.
Then someone like Amazon evaluates this thing for something like the Kindle and finds that it's almost good enough, all they have to do is throw a couple of engineers at it for a short period of time, so they do and it gets released because what do they care of some non-competitor uses it in some cheap laptop. Commoditize your complement -- now laptops are cheaper and people buy more laptops on Amazon.
Meanwhile the "small project" uncompetitive boards start to have their own open source BSP and SDK under the BSD license, which means anybody else can fork it for their own thing, and that's a competitive advantage so it happens a lot. But now it's way easier to reverse engineer the code because 95% of it is unmodified, so you start getting community replacements for that stuff and with any luck the OEMs stop even producing it and point you to the open source repository.
It could be a long time before that takes over the high end, if that ever happens, but the low end? It's almost inevitable. And the high end is AMD64 and Apple, the latter of which has all the leverage in the world over ARM because they could always switch to RISC-V.
ARM actually has a pretty good story for how they can undercut RISC-V prices in that they can design the ISA rather than accepting the decisions of a committee. That committee used to make good choices, but things like the vector ISA seem more suspect.
You're not wrong, but having two choices of supply does wonders for squeezing profit margins from both back to the customer. Duopolies are terrible but better than monopolies.
Especially when your lifeline is tied to Apple. No way are they going to negotiate to raise prices in a meaningful way against their largest client.
Actually>
"Apple (AAPL.O) has signed a new deal with Arm for chip technology that "extends beyond 2040," according to Arm's initial public offering documents filed on Tuesday."
Unity IPO’ed three years ago. Their stock is down 80%, common among tech stock since money printer stopped. However now their plan to turn the tech company to cash cow and milk existing customers seem to have backfired.
A lot of games can not just drop Unity quickly. So a bunch will be forced into paying Unity. Also remember Apple just made Unity "the way" for making full screen VR apps on their new VR device. Don't underestimate how much Unity can make this way... while a lot will drop Unity many games simply can not in the medium term.
I think everyone in this thread underestimates this part of ARM's business (from the F-1):
*
Expand our System IP and SoC Offerings. To enable further improvements in performance and efficiency, we continue to develop a broader set of configurable systems IP offerings, including proven on-chip interconnect, security IP, memory controllers, and other design IP to be used with our processors, including the integration of multiple IP technologies into a subsystem and additional information to assist in fabrication. More recently, we have invested in a holistic, solution-focused approach to design, expanding beyond individual design IP elements to providing a more complete system. By delivering SoC solutions optimized for specific use cases, we can ensure that the entire system works together seamlessly to provide maximum performance and efficiency. At the same time, by designing an increasingly greater portion of the overall chip design, we are further reducing incremental development investment and risk borne by our customers while also enabling us to capture more value per device.*
ARM doesn't just give you the architecture, they give you a reference design that already works and then lets you customize it however you want.
Companies like Apple don't care about that, but MediaTek, NXP, etc. use it to speed the design process meaningfully.
ARM already does that though. Their dev systems like the Juno boards are ARM designed chips with ARM IP through and through covering just about every accelerator and integration niche. CPUs, NoC fabrics, GPIO, sound, just about every hardware interface master and slave, AI inference, display scanout, etc.
Integrators don't typically go all in on ARM IP though for a couple major reasons. 1) They want to provide some value add beyond the standard offerings or else why pick them over a competitor? 3) They have massive collections of IP blocks already that they don't have pay ARM for. Maybe it takes some engineering to convert to the next chip, but that's probably cheaper than what ARM is asking for.
> if you go RISC-V, you are free to switch CPU providers.
That's not even true within the ARM ecosystem itself. The chips from Infineon are not source-code compatible with STM, STM is not compatible with Microchip, Microchip is not compatible with TI...
The problem is that the ARM core is just a portion of the architecture. Everything on top of that - GPIO, memory interfaces, timing, etc - is vendor specific, and will stay that way for RISC-V. RISC-V is just an instruction set architecture (with some appendages), not a blueprint for a complete CPU / MCU / SoC.
Not to mention, the chips also won't be electrically-compatible. Your hardware architecture can be as daunting to redesign as the code, if not more so. There's a reason why we try to do as much as possible in software, after all...
An open source ISA isn't the same as a design. They are radically different, in order to use an ISA you need IP design. The companies that are gaining ground with RISC-V are all largely IP vendors, which is exactly what Arm is. It's just shifting where the dollars go.
I like the idea of an open platform centered around an open standard - I don't know enough about the subject but I wonder if RISC-V is viable as a complete product?
Like, if we ignore the chip design aspects - is it guaranteed software compiled on one RISC-V chip will run on another RISC-V chip? (in the same way it does on ARM and amd64/x86?
What about hardware interoperability? PCI? UEFI/Boot semantics? Power management?
Who enforces that stuff for arm and x86 platforms?
Building out tooling and even chips based on RISC-V is handing the future to China. They’re going all in because it’s an ISA that the west generated and builds support for but is free to use, which plays into their strengths of lowest cost and their ambition to own the future chips of the world.
You are right that China is going on in on RISC-V in part because of Western sanctions. It is yet another reason why RISC-V has so much momentum. It is in China's interest to destroy Intel's and ARM's competitive advantages and it is pouring money and people into it.
Our first family computer was an Acorn Archimedes, we had it for maybe a year before it was replaced by a PC with an Intel.
Now here we are 30 years later and I'm typing on a laptop running on a ARM (née Acorn RISC Machines, then Advanced RISC Machines), I have an ARM in my pocket, another in a tablet in my bag. My wife is next to me on an ARM laptop, she's also got an ARM on her arm... we're listening to music on a wifi speaker running on an ARM. There are probably 30-40 ARMs in one way or another around our house. Amazing really.
I cut my teeth on an Acron Atom in 1982, and upgraded to a BBC Micro (a renamed Acorn Electron) the next year.
But, yes, I never would have thought that, 40 years later, most of the CPUs in my house would still be derived from that scrappy British's company's designs.
One of my favorite examples of the benefits of public interest spending and investment. There very likely wouldn’t be an ARM today if it weren’t for the Micro.
About 10 years ago, my partner turned to me and said, there is an ARM core for every person on the planet. Her company was designing printer chips and using ARM cores. They bought the reference design to use. "Arm and a Leg" they nicknamed it due to high fees even back then.
I bought some "Armh" (ARM's old ticker symbol) which did really well before they got bought by softbank. Oddly hard to find any info about historical stocks on the interwebs.
I wouldn't go that far. Apple's strategy in a lot of cases is more like that of automobile manufacturers where they invest heavily in a company as sort of a king maker, but then hold them over a barrel on later margins with the threat that they can make another king. That's what they did with TSMC, pre purchasing chips to the tune of ~$15B which allowed TSMC to go ahead and buy a bunch of the first EUV steppers.
Here's a list of companies that can be bought for $50b:
Valero Energy. Profit: $10b. [valustox.com/VLO]
DR Horton home builders. Profit: $5b. [valustox.com/DHI]
General Motors (!). Profit: $10b. [valustox.com/GM]
Aflac Insurance. Profit: $5b. [valustox.com/AFL]
Nucor steel. This one is selling for only $40b. Profit: $5.6B. [valustox.com/NUE]
Microchip Technology Inc. Also $40b. Profit: $2.4b. [valustox.com/MCHP]
Arm has it's work cut out to raise their profits from the rumored $1b. I'm not sure why an investor would consider them without a strong plan to 10x-100x their profits when there are companies selling at a similar rate but making much more money in boring product categories. Hope they can do it while staying true to their mission.
It was disappointing for the UK not to get a dual listing, despite Rishi Sunak's best attempts. I guess Europe is just not attractive enough for capital from the rest of the world for IT investments.
It would mean you can buy and sell ARM shares on more one stock exchange.
One basic rule for making money as a country is to ensure capital flows through your country (e.g., services, manufactured goods, FDI, etc). Then skim off some of the captial that flows.
If ARM were listed in the UK and say, $30b of shares is traded anually, of which say $10b is in the UK, then some of that will go to UK ltd.
Technical question: why do people need ARM licenses? Surely you don't need anything from them to design a chip from scratch that implements the same instruction set, as Cyrix and AMD famously did to the ia32.
Are the licensees using parts of the actual chip design? Are their own designs too far down the "derivative work" rabbit hole due to not being cleanroomed that they have no hope of ever not licensing?
The ISA isn't very useful IMO, outside of the compiler framework.
The crux of modern chip design is the tradeoff in MHz, peculiarities of Tomasulo's Algorithm (out of order buffers, tuning sizes and number of pipelines, etc. etc.).
Lets take an example: should you have 200 64-bit words in the reorder buffer, or should you have 800 (Apple M2). What's the tradeoffs? How much slower does accessing the reorder buffer get when you need to go from 8-bits to 10-bits to address the various locations?
How many multiplication units should you have? I know Intel has 3 of them per core, is that enough? Or do you go IBM Power route and go for like 20 pipelines wide?
Etc. etc. etc.
ARM Neoverse N2 makes a lot of these decisions, packages them up into an easy moniker ("General Purpose"), and also has customizations towards V-cores (higher performance but bigger) vs E-cores (lower-performance but smaller and more power-efficient).
You then make decisions based off of the core as a whole, rather than designing a core. Ex: do you use 128kB of L1 cache? Or 64kB? Do you do L1 / L2 / L3 cache like Intel? Or do you do L1 / L2 cache like Apple?
You still need to make these "uncore" decisions, including the important MESI (core-to-core communications: Modified data vs Exclusive data vs Shared data vs Invalid data). Even _IF_ you buy an off-the-shelf core like Neoverse N2, you're no where close to finishing an actual chip yet cause the darn thing can't even talk to RAM yet.
ARM uses a mix patents, copyright and trade secret protections for their ISA. The give you the RTL/vhdl/verilog for the core when you license it and they forbid you from changing the core in the license agreement to use it.
You can clean room implement the trade secret part, but the patents would be an issue and ARM could still sue and drag things out.
You also could never legally call it ARM because it's trademarked. This makes it harder for semiconductor vendors to sell chips.
See the Qualcomm lawsuit shitshow which is now causing Qualcomm to invest big in RISCV.
You also don't need anything from your architect to design a building from scratch. But unless you're an architect yourself, it's going to be prohibitively difficult, or even impossible. So people hire architects.
> Surely you don't need anything from them to design a chip from scratch that implements the same instruction set, as Cyrix and AMD famously did to the ia32.
Cyrix and AMD had licenses to do so, ultimately deriving from a time when Intel needed second sources of their CPUs in order to win defense contracts.
Originally Cyrix did not license from Intel. Intel sued for patent infringement and lost badly enough they had to give Cyrix a few million to settle their counter claims.
Cyrix has also sued Intel over their Pentium chips. In the end the results of all the lawsuits are cross-licensing deals.
> Surely you don't need anything from them to design a chip from scratch that implements the same instruction set, as Cyrix and AMD famously did to the ia32.
> Early 1980s--IBM chooses Intel's so-called x86 chip architecture and the DOS software operating system built by Microsoft. To avoid overdependence on Intel as its sole source of chips, IBM demands that Intel finds it a second supplier.
Comment on the timing of this IPO: for a company to IPO "unfavorably" compared to previous valuations likely means ARM's hand was forced by timing considerations, unless they are running out of cash, which I don't think is the case.
My interpretation of this is that their investors suspect that whatever boost ARM is getting from AI optimism will likely peak soon, so the timing has to be now.
I know that's not fully rational because they're mostly unrelated, but certainly the optimism because of AI has to be good for them. Curious to see if this "signal" plays out - investors tend to be pretty savvy about timing.
> I know that's not fully rational because they're mostly unrelated, but certainly the optimism because of AI has to be good for them. Curious to see if this "signal" plays out - investors tend to be pretty savvy about timing.
The "investors" are SoftBank; they've been pretty much the stupidest money in the world for years.
While it's possible that they're being more savvy about the timing of this sale than about their investment decisions, I don't know that it should be the default assumption.
ARM was wholly owned by SoftBank. They did not have their own cash, it was all Softbank’s cash. And obviously SoftBank selling ARM means SoftBank wants to cash out, for whatever reason.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the weird self-dealing and tiny float that softbank are going for indicate a strong chance that this is going to fall through the floor. Softbank should've learned by now, you can bully the market when you're buying, but you can't bully the market when you're selling. I'd be surprised if this stock weren't down 50% within 12 months. There's too much sell pressure from Softbank and there's no buy pressure.
Readit News
The legendary Jim Keller is going all in on RISC-V, if you don't know Google him. His company has many core designs coming as well chiplets: https://tenstorrent.com/risc-v/
Because of Jim Keller and similar efforts I wouldn't be surprised for RISC-V to see both core count as well as per core performance meet ARM over the next few years. Maybe even exceed if Jim can push the chiplet approach faster than ARM can roll theirs out.
Hopefully this drives a lot of innovation and we all benefit as a result.
I think that using ARM is going to be viewed as being locked into ARM's ever increasing licensing fees, where as if you go RISC-V, you are free to switch CPU providers.
Idk, this really isn't as true as you'd think. Yes RISC-V is an open and free ISA which will cut out some fees, but you'd still have to license IP/chip designs (if you can't make your own) and they could only undercut ARM by a little bit. Further, the lack of mobility across chips/boards/whatever is not usually from the ISA, but from the BSP, SDK, etc. so you still would have substantial lockin unless we somehow standardize on that (lol)
Whereas once you have a free ISA which is actually in widespread use, you could get some designs out of universities or major corporations which intend to use them rather than sell them as their primary business and then release the design for the same reason they do for Linux code, potentially under a copyleft-style license.
Those designs aren't going to be competitive with the state of the art, at least in the beginning, but they don't have to be. All they have to be is low power enough to stick in an embedded device and fast enough to run the display on a refrigerator and the lack of a license fee would cause them to replace a zillion ARM chips that currently go into every IoS device and <$200 phone and consumer internet router. That's a huge chunk of ARM's market.
Then someone like Amazon evaluates this thing for something like the Kindle and finds that it's almost good enough, all they have to do is throw a couple of engineers at it for a short period of time, so they do and it gets released because what do they care of some non-competitor uses it in some cheap laptop. Commoditize your complement -- now laptops are cheaper and people buy more laptops on Amazon.
Meanwhile the "small project" uncompetitive boards start to have their own open source BSP and SDK under the BSD license, which means anybody else can fork it for their own thing, and that's a competitive advantage so it happens a lot. But now it's way easier to reverse engineer the code because 95% of it is unmodified, so you start getting community replacements for that stuff and with any luck the OEMs stop even producing it and point you to the open source repository.
It could be a long time before that takes over the high end, if that ever happens, but the low end? It's almost inevitable. And the high end is AMD64 and Apple, the latter of which has all the leverage in the world over ARM because they could always switch to RISC-V.
Actually> "Apple (AAPL.O) has signed a new deal with Arm for chip technology that "extends beyond 2040," according to Arm's initial public offering documents filed on Tuesday."
* Expand our System IP and SoC Offerings. To enable further improvements in performance and efficiency, we continue to develop a broader set of configurable systems IP offerings, including proven on-chip interconnect, security IP, memory controllers, and other design IP to be used with our processors, including the integration of multiple IP technologies into a subsystem and additional information to assist in fabrication. More recently, we have invested in a holistic, solution-focused approach to design, expanding beyond individual design IP elements to providing a more complete system. By delivering SoC solutions optimized for specific use cases, we can ensure that the entire system works together seamlessly to provide maximum performance and efficiency. At the same time, by designing an increasingly greater portion of the overall chip design, we are further reducing incremental development investment and risk borne by our customers while also enabling us to capture more value per device.*
ARM doesn't just give you the architecture, they give you a reference design that already works and then lets you customize it however you want.
Companies like Apple don't care about that, but MediaTek, NXP, etc. use it to speed the design process meaningfully.
Integrators don't typically go all in on ARM IP though for a couple major reasons. 1) They want to provide some value add beyond the standard offerings or else why pick them over a competitor? 3) They have massive collections of IP blocks already that they don't have pay ARM for. Maybe it takes some engineering to convert to the next chip, but that's probably cheaper than what ARM is asking for.
That's not even true within the ARM ecosystem itself. The chips from Infineon are not source-code compatible with STM, STM is not compatible with Microchip, Microchip is not compatible with TI...
The problem is that the ARM core is just a portion of the architecture. Everything on top of that - GPIO, memory interfaces, timing, etc - is vendor specific, and will stay that way for RISC-V. RISC-V is just an instruction set architecture (with some appendages), not a blueprint for a complete CPU / MCU / SoC.
Not to mention, the chips also won't be electrically-compatible. Your hardware architecture can be as daunting to redesign as the code, if not more so. There's a reason why we try to do as much as possible in software, after all...
Not as true for RISC-V, as there's efforts (some of them complete) to standardize interfaces to standard peripherals.
E.g. timers, gpios and watchdogs.
Like, if we ignore the chip design aspects - is it guaranteed software compiled on one RISC-V chip will run on another RISC-V chip? (in the same way it does on ARM and amd64/x86?
What about hardware interoperability? PCI? UEFI/Boot semantics? Power management?
Who enforces that stuff for arm and x86 platforms?
Afraid I have bad news about ARM right there.
Refer to the RISC-V platform spec (ongoing).
It depends on other specs, some of which (like those related to the boot process) have already been ratified.
Now here we are 30 years later and I'm typing on a laptop running on a ARM (née Acorn RISC Machines, then Advanced RISC Machines), I have an ARM in my pocket, another in a tablet in my bag. My wife is next to me on an ARM laptop, she's also got an ARM on her arm... we're listening to music on a wifi speaker running on an ARM. There are probably 30-40 ARMs in one way or another around our house. Amazing really.
Newb /s
I cut my teeth on an Acron Atom in 1982, and upgraded to a BBC Micro (a renamed Acorn Electron) the next year.
But, yes, I never would have thought that, 40 years later, most of the CPUs in my house would still be derived from that scrappy British's company's designs.
Actually renamed Acorn Proton. Electron came later.
I bought some "Armh" (ARM's old ticker symbol) which did really well before they got bought by softbank. Oddly hard to find any info about historical stocks on the interwebs.
Valero Energy. Profit: $10b. [valustox.com/VLO]
DR Horton home builders. Profit: $5b. [valustox.com/DHI]
General Motors (!). Profit: $10b. [valustox.com/GM]
Aflac Insurance. Profit: $5b. [valustox.com/AFL]
Nucor steel. This one is selling for only $40b. Profit: $5.6B. [valustox.com/NUE]
Microchip Technology Inc. Also $40b. Profit: $2.4b. [valustox.com/MCHP]
Arm has it's work cut out to raise their profits from the rumored $1b. I'm not sure why an investor would consider them without a strong plan to 10x-100x their profits when there are companies selling at a similar rate but making much more money in boring product categories. Hope they can do it while staying true to their mission.
They don't manufacturer anything, correct?
I don’t know anything about Arm’s business interals, but I think they have more of a low-revenue problem than a low-margin problem.
According to [0] they had 2.5b in revenue and 0.5b in profit. A healthy margin, and much lower revenue than the other companies I mentioned.
[0] https://www.barrons.com/articles/arm-stock-price-ipo-caf090b...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/03/uk-chip-des...
One basic rule for making money as a country is to ensure capital flows through your country (e.g., services, manufactured goods, FDI, etc). Then skim off some of the captial that flows.
If ARM were listed in the UK and say, $30b of shares is traded anually, of which say $10b is in the UK, then some of that will go to UK ltd.
Deleted Comment
Are the licensees using parts of the actual chip design? Are their own designs too far down the "derivative work" rabbit hole due to not being cleanroomed that they have no hope of ever not licensing?
What are the specifics?
The crux of modern chip design is the tradeoff in MHz, peculiarities of Tomasulo's Algorithm (out of order buffers, tuning sizes and number of pipelines, etc. etc.).
Lets take an example: should you have 200 64-bit words in the reorder buffer, or should you have 800 (Apple M2). What's the tradeoffs? How much slower does accessing the reorder buffer get when you need to go from 8-bits to 10-bits to address the various locations?
How many multiplication units should you have? I know Intel has 3 of them per core, is that enough? Or do you go IBM Power route and go for like 20 pipelines wide?
Etc. etc. etc.
ARM Neoverse N2 makes a lot of these decisions, packages them up into an easy moniker ("General Purpose"), and also has customizations towards V-cores (higher performance but bigger) vs E-cores (lower-performance but smaller and more power-efficient).
You then make decisions based off of the core as a whole, rather than designing a core. Ex: do you use 128kB of L1 cache? Or 64kB? Do you do L1 / L2 / L3 cache like Intel? Or do you do L1 / L2 cache like Apple?
You still need to make these "uncore" decisions, including the important MESI (core-to-core communications: Modified data vs Exclusive data vs Shared data vs Invalid data). Even _IF_ you buy an off-the-shelf core like Neoverse N2, you're no where close to finishing an actual chip yet cause the darn thing can't even talk to RAM yet.
You can clean room implement the trade secret part, but the patents would be an issue and ARM could still sue and drag things out.
You also could never legally call it ARM because it's trademarked. This makes it harder for semiconductor vendors to sell chips.
See the Qualcomm lawsuit shitshow which is now causing Qualcomm to invest big in RISCV.
Cyrix and AMD had licenses to do so, ultimately deriving from a time when Intel needed second sources of their CPUs in order to win defense contracts.
Cyrix has also sued Intel over their Pentium chips. In the end the results of all the lawsuits are cross-licensing deals.
What is the legal interpretation of IP law that says you need permission to design a chip that implements an ISA?
Deleted Comment
Cyrix and AMD got (cross-)licenses from Intel:
* https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236...
* https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clar...
This has been true since the very beginning:
> Early 1980s--IBM chooses Intel's so-called x86 chip architecture and the DOS software operating system built by Microsoft. To avoid overdependence on Intel as its sole source of chips, IBM demands that Intel finds it a second supplier.
* https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/intel-and-amd-a-long...
* https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/intel-and-the-x86-archit...
The reverse engineering happened with Compaq doing the BIOS:
* https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...
This was a major plot point in AMC's (very good) show Halt and Catch Fire:
* https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/05/the-incredibl...
* https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/05/review-halt-and-catch...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
My interpretation of this is that their investors suspect that whatever boost ARM is getting from AI optimism will likely peak soon, so the timing has to be now.
I know that's not fully rational because they're mostly unrelated, but certainly the optimism because of AI has to be good for them. Curious to see if this "signal" plays out - investors tend to be pretty savvy about timing.
The "investors" are SoftBank; they've been pretty much the stupidest money in the world for years.
While it's possible that they're being more savvy about the timing of this sale than about their investment decisions, I don't know that it should be the default assumption.