Month: May 2022

Enlarge (credit: Arm)

The US chipmaker Qualcomm wants to buy a stake in Arm alongside its rivals and create a consortium that would maintain the UK chip designer’s neutrality in the highly competitive semiconductor market.

Japanese conglomerate SoftBank plans to list Arm on the New York Stock Exchange after Nvidia’s $66 billion purchase collapsed earlier this year. However, the IPO has sparked concern over the future ownership of the company, given its crucial role in the global technology sector.

“We’re an interested party in investing,” Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm’s chief executive, told the Financial Times. “It’s a very important asset and it’s an asset which is going to be essential to the development of our industry.”

Enlarge / The DeLorean Alpha 5 is inspired by the mediocre mid-engined coupe from Northern Ireland. (credit: DeLorean)

Back in the earlier days of the Internet, when web fora still mattered and there was no such thing as Twitter, Sniff Petrol's Richard Porter published a now-infamous "Press Release Help For New Supercar Makers." No stranger to cutting satire, Porter's checklist was a reaction to a seemingly never-ending string of new British supercars announced to middling fanfare and then often never heard of again.

Sixteen years later, I can't help but feel that we need a new version, this time not the UK's cottage industry of vaporware supercars, but the ever-expanding field of electric vehicle startups. Specifically, I'm writing this in reaction to the "new" DeLorean, renders of which went public yesterday, causing some particularly excitable corners of the Internet to begin smoldering dangerously.

Now, this isn't John DeLorean's company—that went bankrupt in 1982 after producing about 8,500 examples of a single model that wasn't really ever as good as it should have been, called the DMC-12. However, the DMC-12 acquired cult status after starring in Back to the Future, and the DeLorean name now belongs to a company in Texas that supplies spares for the stainless steel-bodied classics.