7 ms·
Acorn no longer exists, but ARM does charge royalties for their processor designs. Around 1% - 2.5%. They have revenue was £795.2 in 2014, so yes, that pennies
by FigBug 11y ago
Acorn no longer exists, but ARM does charge royalties for their processor designs. Around 1% - 2.5%. They have revenue was £795.2 in 2014, so yes, that pennies and fractions of a penny do add up.
Edit: The cheapest ARM processor I found on Digikey is $0.35, Digikey must be buying them for under $0.15 so that royalties would be under 3/10ths of a cent.
- kens 11y agoGetting back to ck2's comment, ARM Holdings (the company spun off from Acorn to do ARM development) is in Cambridge, so you can count it as a UK success story. It's interesting that they don't make any chips themselves, but are purely an IP company.
- reportingsjr 11y agoNot many companies actually make ICs themselves anymore. A lot of the bigger IC companies you know are fabless: Nvidia, AMD, broadcom, qualcomm, etc. It is simply way, waaay too expensive to operate a fab nowadays.
- duaneb 11y agoHow do you operate at the level of nvidia or amd without running your own fab? I'm sure it's mind bogglingly expensive, but the marginal return is surely worth it.
- StringyBob 11y agoIf you've got a successful (i.e. working well) and fully utilized leading edge fab, it can be more profitable than printing bank notes. However it's so insanely expensive to set up that type of chip manufacture the only way it is really viable now is to share the costs. Samsung, TSMC and Intel (and maybe GF) are the only groups left who can afford it (see http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327060 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327060 ) and you have to keep up the r+d every year to stay competitive...
- wtallis 11y agoThey have a very close relationship with their preferred foundries and design chips with a specific foundry and process in mind. The big benefit of going fabless is that you don't have to worry so much about keeping your fab busy enough to cover its expenses. Intel's basically the only company that always sells enough of its own chips to keep its fabs busy and profitable.
- rogerbinns 11y agoFabs are very expensive. You can see numbers ranging from 4 to 10 billion dollars each. Those are the fixed costs that you now need to spread over production. It looks like Nvidia does around 20 million chips a year. If a $4bn fab was useful for 4 years, then those fixed costs work out at $50 per chip! If you make other people's chips on the same fab then the per chip costs go down, assuming there is spare capacity. The economies of scale really do help. Which is why there are a few foundries who do most of the chips, and those foundries can spread the costs over a large number of chips including later ones that don't need the newest process. For example Intel is known to do their CPUs on the current process, while doing the chipsets on the older processes. In other words, work out what set of numbers would make sense, and you won't be able to find any. New processes keep getting more expensive, and competitors adopt them too, so you have to sustain your current fab as well as the work to do the next generation one. This requires a lot of available money. Don't build a fab unless you are sure you can use almost all its capacity for the next several years.
- duaneb 11y agoWow, I had no idea the fixed cost ran that high. That is very enlightening.
- Sindisil 11y agoActually, AMD/ATI spun off their fab into a separate business. Makes sense, really. Lets them more easily fab their chips where it makes sense, while still giving them fallback for safety.
- detaro 11y agoAnother benefit to not running your own fabs is that you are a bit removed from the rat race to keep your tech up-to-date. Getting a new, smaller process to run well is expensive and difficult, but gives important benefits. If you don't run your own fabs, you can't jump ahead of others. But you are also safe from investing a billion or a few in an upgrade and it not working out properly, and you still can get basically the same tech as all the other fabless companies.
- kens 11y agoIf I understand things correctly, ARM takes things a step further. Not only do they not have a fab, they don't design or sell chips at all. ARM processors are all built and sold by other companies (STMicroelectronics, NXP, TI, etc), using ARM Holdings' IP - the core design (as an abstract netlist) or a license on the instruction set itself.
- striking 11y agoARM designs and licenses chip/core designs, which are then bought by companies that will then further modify them to fit a specific application. They design the chips, but they don't make the entire design.
- dmitrygr 11y agoARM designs the Core STM, NXP, Mediatek, etc buy the core design, slap it on a piece of silicon, design peripherals around it (SATA ports, UARTS, SDIO controllers, etc), slap those on the silicon, put interconnects in between, and sell the complete SoC. This is of course EXTREMELY oversimplified. But the idea is the same: ARM makes the CORE, and others make SoCs out of it. (I am not aware of anyplace you can buy a simple ARM CORE without it being part of an SOC.
- agumonkey 11y ago£795M or £795B ?
- smcl 11y agoAcorn kinda exist but they were rebranded as Element 14 a few years back. In a slightly interesting twist, I own an Element 14 clone of the Beaglebone Black - which is powered by ... you guessed it, an ARM chip (built by TI). You can actually get RISC OS (the original OS for Acorn computers) images for the BBB - http://beagleboard.org/project/riscos http://beagleboard.org/project/riscos