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The press release linked by OP doesn't give the full story. For a better perspective see https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip-to-combat-
by paulgerhardt 8y ago
The press release linked by OP doesn't give the full story. For a better perspective see https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip-to-combat-fossi-threat/ https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip...
If you're just joining us, Arm very much sees the up and coming RISC-V stack as an immediate threat to the future of their business and is taking pro-active countermeasures - doing everything from awkward, backfiring smear campaigns against RISC-V[1] to straight up license dumping their own product to prevent developers jumping ship.
It's interesting to see because RISC-V is wonderful and Arm seems to recognize that. Arm Holdings is acting rationally as someone in a privileged competitive position would do. At the same time, big players like Western Digital are migrating to RISC-V so Arm is internally freaking out [2].
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/
[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_strategy/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_str...
- dang 8y agoOk, we changed the URL to that from https://www.arm.com/company/news/2018/10/arm-expands-design-possibilities-with-free-cortex-m-processors-for-xilinx-fpgas https://www.arm.com/company/news/2018/10/arm-expands-design-.... Thanks!
- jgome 8y agoKinda off-topic, but I feel like they could gain a lot by opening their graphics stacks or simply by letting FOSS devs work on them, instead of making their work more difficult/impossible (see: history of the FOSS lima driver).
- sweden 8y agoThe problem with graphics is that it's a patent minefield. This is one of the main reasons why graphics stacks are usually so closed.
- jgome 8y agoHow do Intel and AMD manage to make their own drivers mostly open-source, then?
- kikoreis 8y agoHaving spent a few years focused on this (and other semiconductor enablement-related problems) my guess is they have evaluated their own patent portfolios and the risk of their implementations triggering a war, and have concluded it was worth doing. Note that Intel's GPUs are relatively simple, so AMD would seem to be bolder here, but I haven't dug into the detail to see how they have limited their exposure. I find Intel is pretty solid about open sourcing everything they provide for Linux that runs on the host — it's a pity they haven't applied the same policy to the ME.
- broknbottle 8y agopatents and cross licensing agreements https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/10/intel_and_nvidia_settle_patent_dispute_with_6_year_1_5b_deal https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/10/intel_and_nvidia_...
- angry_octet 8y agoYes but if it is patented that doesn't mean it is secret -- in fact the opposite. I can copy the code but I can't sell a product using it without getting a licence or risk being sued. Obviously I can't licence it as GPLv3. But I don't see why the driver implementation should be so closed.
- snaky 8y agoBig and small players are interested indeed, from WD, Alibaba and Huami to 'some 300 companies already looking at or developing with RISC-V in China'[1], but not because RISC-V is so wonderful, it's just not bad and just enough for many tasks - and it's basically free. [1] https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1333476 https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1333...
- steve19 8y agoWhat I don't understand is does it really cost a company like WD that much to license or just buy already manufactured chips? It would seem taking risks on new architectures, and all the extra development time (both chip and tooling) would far outweigh the cost of just licensing arm. Can someone explain the economics of it all? Don't get me wrong, I am all for a free competitor to ARM's near monopoly on the mobile embedded space. I don't just get it.
- daeken 8y agoI think the issue is really just one of scale. If you ship 400M drives a year (as the global hard drive industry did last year), a cost savings of $1 is a lot of money that goes into your pocket/R&D. If you're making 10000 of something, making a custom chip is almost certainly going to cost you a fortune; if you're making tens or hundreds of millions of something, that cost gets amortized very quickly, I imagine. If WD is making their own chips, it almost certainly isn't to save a couple grand a year; it's probably to save many millions.
- jacquesm 8y agoI spent a little bit of time Logitech's R&D department back in the late 90's, they were doing all they could to shave two pins off a chip. It cost them a terrible amount of money, including a custom package and the difference in price per mouse must have been on the order of a few pennies. But the enormous amount of devices shipped more than made up for the R&D investment.
- kabdib 8y ago
- stcredzero 8y agoIf you're just joining us, Arm very much sees the up and coming RISC-V stack as an immediate threat to the future of their business and is taking pro-active countermeasures By any chance, does anyone know if Intel is funding RISC-V? According to the logic of "Commoditizing the Complement" one way of hurting a competitor is to make their product a commodity.
- ffsc 8y agoIntel Capital participated in SiFive's Series C funding round. Besides that I don't know of anything else Intel has done for risc-v.
- CalChris 8y agoThey were one of the funders for RISC-V at Berkeley but that may have been funding EECS rather than RISC-V. https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/Data/106902.html https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/Data/106902...
- mrtweetyhack 8y agoI don't see any reason why Intel would support RISC-V because it would eat into their market too(in the distant future)
- nickik 8y agoIntel was the original sponsor of RISC-V because they sponsored Berkeley. They just didn't really know about it. Since then they also invested in RISC-V startups, like SiFive.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoPretty much exactly right. What I found interesting initially was how the 32 bit CPU was disrupting the 8 bit CPU market. People using Cortex M0 chips where they used to use ATMega chips. Identical package size, faster, more resources, not too much more memory. And some unreal bargains[1]. And now as FPGAs get cheaper and cheaper, RISC-V was becoming the default 'soft' processor because everything else cost money and didn't have any sort of ecosystem. Amazing times. [1] Not sure how these folks make money -- https://satoshinm.github.io/blog/171212_stm32_blue_pill_arm_development_board_first_look_bare_metal_programming.html https://satoshinm.github.io/blog/171212_stm32_blue_pill_arm_...
- zekevermillion 8y agoIs there some way ARM could make money supporting an open IP like RISC-V, analagous to Red Hat for Fedora Linux? Obviously, not a perfect analogy, but...
- rataata_jr 8y agoDonations.
- Someone 8y agoBuild RISC-V chips with proprietary extensions. License the extensions to third parties. That would require the extensions to be popular, though, and having a corner of one fort is less ideal than having an entire fort.
- jononor 8y agoCustom design services. Which is more of a consulting business, so does not scale in same way as IP licensing. Could also integrate manufacturing services, but fabs is incredibly capital intensive, making it another kind of business. Could also keep IP licensing as a model, but open the core and push it further and further out into peripherals. Problem is that would probably kill the surrounding ecosystem of partners that do this today.