And they’re also wondering why SoftBank has pledged to increase jobs and increase investment at its Cambridge HQ.

Analyst Mark Hibbens at Seeking Alpha reckons that Intel faces a challenge on the data center from a new and revised ARM and may see a raid on its still lucrative server business.

Hibbens points to people thinking that ARM will find itself in the position of a fully fledged semiconductor business - a sort of a Qualcomm.

But that’s not what Hibbens reckons.

He thinks that ARM wouldn’t be able to match Qualcomm’s commodity model. Intel taking over ARM rather than SoftBank would have led to a furore, given Intel’s near monopoly position on the server front.

ARM, he points out, doesn’t have a server approach, but he believes that the server market and the PC market are obviously targets for a SoftBank bid to topple Intel in the data center market.

The internet of things isn’t going to be a mega market for ARM. Nor will it be huge for Intel.

I believe Hibbens may well have it right, and a SoftBank ARM combo could easily dislodge Intel from the data center, given the right strategy and approach. Intel is a slow moving tortoise despite the decimation of its staff earlier this year, and like IBM in the old days will find it hard to turn itself into a really nimble player.