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Arm license cost is nothing compared to what they have invested in testing and QA. One round of asic that fails is significantly more expensive. If you are jum

Arm license cost is nothing compared to what they have invested in testing and QA. One round of asic that fails is significantly more expensive. If you are jumping on risc-v to save money you have your priorities very wrong. On the other hand if you are Huawei and can't do business with arm...

tyingq 7y ago
1.5% of your per unit revenue for a hard drive seems significant. WD seems to agree, and they don't seem like a risk prone company.
- panpanna 7y ago
  1.5% does sound significant, but does WD save 100% of those 1.5% by doing it in-house? Furthermore, those 1.5% covered more than just the CPU (peripherals, buss technologies, patents, manufacturing know-how). I'm not saying WD is wrong, but I think they are overestimating how much they can save. This is probably just to get a better deal from arm.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    From their public statements, this is not to get a better deal from ARM. they are all-in with risc-v and have already made public their first core (among other things), which is better than an equivalent from ARM. At this point I dont think ARM could bring much to the table for WD. They've invested way beyond what makes sense for getting better pricing.
  - hajile 7y ago
    1.5% of a big number is still a big number. Western Digital's revenue in 2018 was 18 billion. Even if only 0.15% of their revenue went to ARM, that would be 27M or enough to hire 100 chip designers at 270K each. That would be enough people for a very advanced chip, but WD doesn't need to build the next supercomputer. Instead, they want a chip customized to handle their specific workload with high throughput and probably some specialized instructions to put some algorithms in hardware. Moreover, their RISCV chip design expense should reduce over time both because they don't need to change chip micro-architectures very often and because as more companies switch to shared, open hardware, the costs are reduced Another example is Nvidia. They continue to hold an ARM license for several ARM designs and another license for their own custom Denver/Carmel designs. Despite this, they still opted to use RISCV in their GPUs. These companies manufacture chip designs for a living. They certainly understand the costs involved and have determined the immediate and long-term costs are lower vs the provided benefits.
- pjc50 7y ago
  It's not for the whole unit, just the chip? Isn't it Qualcomm with the whole-device royalties?
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Seems you may be right, but how would you calculate the "chip selling price" for a chip inside a hard drive? It's not clear to me what the royalty charge is for a company like WD.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Probably they've negotiated a nominal value with their ARM rep based on whatever they're currently using.
jimktrains2 7y ago
> One round of asic that fails is significantly more expensive. Does that change with ARM? If you're licensing the ISA, or even bits of HDL, you're still fabbing your own stuff, right? If it was the choice between pre-made RISCV and pre-made ARM, then the licensing could play into a cost difference between models, but otherwise they'd both be pre-fabbed, ready-to-use-products?
- panpanna 7y ago
  But then why bother if you are just using someone elses pre-made macros with a fixed architecture (cpu + memories + peripherals + power & clock distribution)? At this stage, would it even be cheaper? I think there is some merit to risc-v but people pushing hard for it's use RIGHT NOW don't seem to understand the challenges of SoC design and manufacturing.
abainbridge 7y ago
This argument used to come up when I worked at Cambridge Silicon Radio, where we made ASICs. We made our own CPU designs for those ASICs. Some of the engineers thought making our own CPU designs was a stupid idea and some thought that switching to ARM designs was a stupid idea. The only fact I have is that our CPU designs were not the main cause of bugs in our chips. If you asked the digital designers, they'd say things like, "Why are software engineers so interested in CPU designs. The kinds of embedded CPUs we need are easy to design. Implementing a correct power management state machine is hard. Implementing an efficient WiFi PHY is hard. Get off my lawn..." Some problems with putting ARM CPUs in our chips were: a) integration engineering costs (ie find a way to multiplex some existing pins on the package with the jtag debug port), b) having to do price and contract negotiation with ARM (that part of the company was less efficient than the digital engineering team), c) finding that the change you wanted to make to the chip was incompatible with the ARM contract you'd just spent 6 months negotiating.
- panpanna 7y ago
  I believe CSR went out of business after burning an investment of $1bn with nothing to show for. Not trying to be hostile, just pointing out how costly "let's design our own soc, how hard can it be?" is.
  - lnsru 7y ago
    Are we talking about same CSR? It’s still in business. It’s now part of Qualcomm: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSR_(company) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSR_(company)
    - panpanna 7y ago
      Hmmm.. I stand corrected. I know a few people who joined ARM after CSR closed down but that could be just some offices shutting down. (not an arm employee, btw)
      - abainbridge 7y ago

tyingq 7y ago

1.5% of your per unit revenue for a hard drive seems significant. WD seems to agree, and they don't seem like a risk prone company.

panpanna 7y ago
1.5% does sound significant, but does WD save 100% of those 1.5% by doing it in-house? Furthermore, those 1.5% covered more than just the CPU (peripherals, buss technologies, patents, manufacturing know-how). I'm not saying WD is wrong, but I think they are overestimating how much they can save. This is probably just to get a better deal from arm.
- phkahler 7y ago
  From their public statements, this is not to get a better deal from ARM. they are all-in with risc-v and have already made public their first core (among other things), which is better than an equivalent from ARM. At this point I dont think ARM could bring much to the table for WD. They've invested way beyond what makes sense for getting better pricing.
- hajile 7y ago
  1.5% of a big number is still a big number. Western Digital's revenue in 2018 was 18 billion. Even if only 0.15% of their revenue went to ARM, that would be 27M or enough to hire 100 chip designers at 270K each. That would be enough people for a very advanced chip, but WD doesn't need to build the next supercomputer. Instead, they want a chip customized to handle their specific workload with high throughput and probably some specialized instructions to put some algorithms in hardware. Moreover, their RISCV chip design expense should reduce over time both because they don't need to change chip micro-architectures very often and because as more companies switch to shared, open hardware, the costs are reduced Another example is Nvidia. They continue to hold an ARM license for several ARM designs and another license for their own custom Denver/Carmel designs. Despite this, they still opted to use RISCV in their GPUs. These companies manufacture chip designs for a living. They certainly understand the costs involved and have determined the immediate and long-term costs are lower vs the provided benefits.
pjc50 7y ago
It's not for the whole unit, just the chip? Isn't it Qualcomm with the whole-device royalties?
- tyingq 7y ago
  Seems you may be right, but how would you calculate the "chip selling price" for a chip inside a hard drive? It's not clear to me what the royalty charge is for a company like WD.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Probably they've negotiated a nominal value with their ARM rep based on whatever they're currently using.

jimktrains2 7y ago

> One round of asic that fails is significantly more expensive. Does that change with ARM? If you're licensing the ISA, or even bits of HDL, you're still fabbing your own stuff, right? If it was the choice between pre-made RISCV and pre-made ARM, then the licensing could play into a cost difference between models, but otherwise they'd both be pre-fabbed, ready-to-use-products?

panpanna 7y ago
But then why bother if you are just using someone elses pre-made macros with a fixed architecture (cpu + memories + peripherals + power & clock distribution)? At this stage, would it even be cheaper? I think there is some merit to risc-v but people pushing hard for it's use RIGHT NOW don't seem to understand the challenges of SoC design and manufacturing.

abainbridge 7y ago

This argument used to come up when I worked at Cambridge Silicon Radio, where we made ASICs. We made our own CPU designs for those ASICs. Some of the engineers thought making our own CPU designs was a stupid idea and some thought that switching to ARM designs was a stupid idea. The only fact I have is that our CPU designs were not the main cause of bugs in our chips. If you asked the digital designers, they'd say things like, "Why are software engineers so interested in CPU designs. The kinds of embedded CPUs we need are easy to design. Implementing a correct power management state machine is hard. Implementing an efficient WiFi PHY is hard. Get off my lawn..." Some problems with putting ARM CPUs in our chips were: a) integration engineering costs (ie find a way to multiplex some existing pins on the package with the jtag debug port), b) having to do price and contract negotiation with ARM (that part of the company was less efficient than the digital engineering team), c) finding that the change you wanted to make to the chip was incompatible with the ARM contract you'd just spent 6 months negotiating.

panpanna 7y ago
I believe CSR went out of business after burning an investment of $1bn with nothing to show for. Not trying to be hostile, just pointing out how costly "let's design our own soc, how hard can it be?" is.
- lnsru 7y ago
  Are we talking about same CSR? It’s still in business. It’s now part of Qualcomm: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSR_(company) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSR_(company)
  - panpanna 7y ago
    Hmmm.. I stand corrected. I know a few people who joined ARM after CSR closed down but that could be just some offices shutting down. (not an arm employee, btw)
    - abainbridge 7y ago