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How many ARM chips will the average consumer buy in their life? How much profit will ARM make on each of those chips? How many Tiktok videos will the average c

How many ARM chips will the average consumer buy in their life? How much profit will ARM make on each of those chips? How many Tiktok videos will the average consumer watch in their life? How much profit will Tiktok make on each of those views?

repiret 6y ago
I have more Arm CPUs in consumer devices within arms reach at this moment than the number of Tiktok videos I’ve seen in my entire life.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  Other people watch more TikTok videos in a single day than the number of ARM consumer devices that you've owned in your entire life.
  - ponker 6y ago
    But if we are doing nonsense comparisons let’s use the number of ARM clock cycles for devices you own.
    - repiret 6y ago
      It’s not nonsense - Arm gets paid per device, TikTok get paid per ad impression (and views are a good proxy for that)
      - ponker 6y ago
        But the pay for each of those is orders of magnitude apart.
        jmchuster 6y ago
        Here's an estimate of ARM's revenue per chip at 10 cents (profit maybe half that). [1]https://qz.com/741078/a-company-that-doesnt-really-make-chips-dethroned-intel-with-super-savvy-business-moves/ https://qz.com/741078/a-company-that-doesnt-really-make-chip... Here's an estimate of youtube (not exactly tiktok, but not exactly not), revenue at 10 to 30 cents per view. [2]https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-do-youtubers-make/ https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-do-youtubers-mak...
        jmchuster 6y ago
        Sorry, this is wrong by an order of magnitude. Youtube is making more like 1-3 cents per view.
        nintendo1889 6y ago
        that article makes me wonder if the beos would have survived if they switched from Hobbit to arm chips and stuck with selling hardware+software, and later on added x86/x64/PPC/POWER. A tight integration of hw+sw has worked for apple.
        mumblemumble 6y ago
        My guess is no. I loved BeOS, but there was an even more fundamental problem that put a limit on its days: A failure to anticipate coming need for home computers to become more secure. At the same time that Microsoft and Apple were both working frantically to ditch their old single-user desktop operating systems and replace them with, in effect, spruced up versions of existing server/workstation operating systems, Be was trying to launch a brand new OS on the dying model. Had they survived even a couple years longer, they would have had to reckon with that, and they simply didn't have the resources to navigate such a fundamental transition.
    - sitkack 6y ago
      The sheer number of TikTok videos that have been watched on an Arm device. Arm soon to rebrand as TikArmTok.
    - MaysonL 6y ago
      Compared to the number of pixels * the number of video frames displayed by Tikki…
  - watersb 6y ago
    They watch those TikTok videos on devices powered by ARM SoCs.
- Cyph0n 6y ago
  Same here, which makes neither of us an “average consumer”.
Sebb767 6y ago
By this logic, TicTac should be worth more than all car manufacturers combined, since there are more TicTacs in an 1$ pack than I will ever buy cars in my entire life. And I'm sure their margin is much higher, percentage-wise, at least compared to most car manufacturers. Let's be real here: TikTok is a big social network, yes, but ARM owns most of the embedded market. Every smartphone your average consumer buys runs an ARM chip. And hardware is harder to replace than software.
- jmchuster 6y ago
  Car manufacturers make about $2k per car. Do you buy 2k packs of TicTac every 10 years?
Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
Maybe ARM should copy the business model of more valuable companies like TikTok by harvesting and selling it's users data. Surely the data flowing through a SOC is worth something.
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
ARM doesn't manufacture chips, they license ARM Processor 'designs'. ARM is more of a household name for their use in mobile phones but that is just the tip of the iceberg. I think you underestimate how many ARM chips you have in a single car or delivery truck. Add to that: - farming machinery - construction machinery - factory line automation - elevators, escalators - EV chargers - fridges, washing machines, ovens - medical devices such as drug-infusion pumps, ventilators, surgical machinery, etc. - Auxiliary modules in aeroplanes and shipping containers. - Infrastructure for Road, Rail, Power Grid with ARM processors running headless embedded systems - Anything the size of a pebble with bluetooth connectivity uses nordic's nRF chip (which is yet again an ARM chip) ARM processors are hiding in plain sight in the world all around you. I understand the point you make, from a business standpoint, on how Tiktok might scale. The thing that is bizarre for me and I agree with the parent's sentiment, is how disconnected the valuation is from the real-world impact and objective _usefulness_ of ARM versus Tiktok. Edit: bullet points
- amelius 6y ago
  > The thing that is bizarre for me and I agree with the parent's sentiment, is how disconnected the valuation is from the real-world impact and objective _usefulness_ of ARM versus Tiktok. Also how easily the technology behind Tiktok can be duplicated compared to ARM. Anyway, it's probably all about the network effect and brand value.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    ARM has no exposure to any end consumers and takes the tiniest sliver from each sale—if anything at all. Tiktok can deliver arbitrary content to hundreds of millions of people’s eyeballs around the planet.
- mcdevilkiller 6y ago
  Also Intel ME and (not sure, but probably) AMD PSP.
  - einr 6y ago
kelnos 6y ago
Per-video profit isn't really meaningful; these kinds of companies report revenue (and thus profit) base on the number of active users. Consider that in 2017, 21 billion ARM chips were manufactured (doubled in 4 years, from 10 billion in 2013), and that ARM's licensing fees are over 2% of chip cost for current high-end designs (and they're talking about raising that even more). They have 95%+ of the mobile phone market, are making inroads in the server market, and will soon be in every Apple laptop, which I expect will grow the market for ARM laptops even outside Apple. It wouldn't be a stretch to find them in common desktop computers after that. They're in smart TVs, washing machines, robot vacuum cleaners, and all other kinds of smart (and non-smart) appliances. Even SSDs have their own embedded ARM chip. And that's just home/consumer stuff; haven't even scratched industrial/commercial applications, of which there are a ton. I could easily see yearly production at over 100 billion chips before 2030, probably even before 2025. While I'd love to see something like RISC-V take off commercially, I don't think that's realistic. Meanwhile, social media users are incredibly fickle; platforms are subject to fad and fashion. Certainly Facebook and Instagram are still huge behemoths, but their growth is nothing like it once was, with people -- especially younger people, trying to distinguish themselves from their older, boring relatives -- flocking to TikTok. I fully expect TikTok will be in Instagram's boat in under 10 years, with some other platform taking its place. ARM seems like an amazingly great short-, medium-, and long-term bet, while TikTok feels like a nice short- (maybe medium-, if they're lucky) term money-maker, and even that feels like a big maybe: I have no idea what their ad revenue per user looks like, but it's probably not great since their audience skews younger. Teenagers and college kids don't have much in the way of discretionary income. Then again, TikTok doesn't pay their creators like e.g. YouTube does, so they get to keep all that ad revenue.
- ponker 6y ago
  21 billion is 3 per person per year for everyone in the world, including rural goat herders etc. who don’t consume very many. I don’t doubt the number but it’s still wild.
- minzi 6y ago
  If you don’t see RISC-V taking off commercially, then why is ARM trying to sell? I ask because my understanding was that they were trying to exit because of RISC-V.
usrusr 6y ago
Something like Tiktok can myspace in the blink of an eye. Established CPU architectures have enormous staying power.
- posguy 6y ago
  MIPS sure didn't, same for SPARC. CPU architectures can effectively die in a handful of years just like MySpace, Delicious, Digg and such.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Even decades after starting to decline both are still less dead than the average former social media fad.
  - shakna 6y ago
    MySpace is dead, dead. You'll still find devices, especially in manufacturing, that are still running on a MIPS, and are essential to the process. You'll still find them in various cheap toys on the shelves. MIPS _should_ be dead, half the manufacturers of the chip have stopped. But, Imagination Technology still sell a considerable number to Apple every year.
pmarreck 6y ago
Considering Apple is moving their desktops to ARM and pretty much all iOS devices are ARM...
thinkloop 6y ago
What if giphy was worth 100x ARM, would it be interesting then?
otabdeveloper4 6y ago
> How many Tiktok videos will the average consumer watch in their life? This number is not unbounded. It will converge to some asymptotic limit. > How much profit will Tiktok make on each of those views? Around a tenth of a cent per view. These huge valuations are purely because people don't do the math and don't know how the market works.

repiret 6y ago

I have more Arm CPUs in consumer devices within arms reach at this moment than the number of Tiktok videos I’ve seen in my entire life.

mumblemumble 6y ago
Other people watch more TikTok videos in a single day than the number of ARM consumer devices that you've owned in your entire life.
- ponker 6y ago
  But if we are doing nonsense comparisons let’s use the number of ARM clock cycles for devices you own.
  - repiret 6y ago
    It’s not nonsense - Arm gets paid per device, TikTok get paid per ad impression (and views are a good proxy for that)
    - ponker 6y ago
      But the pay for each of those is orders of magnitude apart.
      - jmchuster 6y ago
        Here's an estimate of ARM's revenue per chip at 10 cents (profit maybe half that). [1]https://qz.com/741078/a-company-that-doesnt-really-make-chips-dethroned-intel-with-super-savvy-business-moves/ https://qz.com/741078/a-company-that-doesnt-really-make-chip... Here's an estimate of youtube (not exactly tiktok, but not exactly not), revenue at 10 to 30 cents per view. [2]https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-do-youtubers-make/ https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-do-youtubers-mak...
        jmchuster 6y ago
        Sorry, this is wrong by an order of magnitude. Youtube is making more like 1-3 cents per view.
        nintendo1889 6y ago
        that article makes me wonder if the beos would have survived if they switched from Hobbit to arm chips and stuck with selling hardware+software, and later on added x86/x64/PPC/POWER. A tight integration of hw+sw has worked for apple.
        mumblemumble 6y ago
        My guess is no. I loved BeOS, but there was an even more fundamental problem that put a limit on its days: A failure to anticipate coming need for home computers to become more secure. At the same time that Microsoft and Apple were both working frantically to ditch their old single-user desktop operating systems and replace them with, in effect, spruced up versions of existing server/workstation operating systems, Be was trying to launch a brand new OS on the dying model. Had they survived even a couple years longer, they would have had to reckon with that, and they simply didn't have the resources to navigate such a fundamental transition.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    The sheer number of TikTok videos that have been watched on an Arm device. Arm soon to rebrand as TikArmTok.
  - MaysonL 6y ago
    Compared to the number of pixels * the number of video frames displayed by Tikki…
- watersb 6y ago
  They watch those TikTok videos on devices powered by ARM SoCs.
Cyph0n 6y ago
Same here, which makes neither of us an “average consumer”.

Sebb767 6y ago

By this logic, TicTac should be worth more than all car manufacturers combined, since there are more TicTacs in an 1$ pack than I will ever buy cars in my entire life. And I'm sure their margin is much higher, percentage-wise, at least compared to most car manufacturers. Let's be real here: TikTok is a big social network, yes, but ARM owns most of the embedded market. Every smartphone your average consumer buys runs an ARM chip. And hardware is harder to replace than software.

jmchuster 6y ago
Car manufacturers make about $2k per car. Do you buy 2k packs of TicTac every 10 years?

Jon_Lowtek 6y ago

Maybe ARM should copy the business model of more valuable companies like TikTok by harvesting and selling it's users data. Surely the data flowing through a SOC is worth something.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago

ARM doesn't manufacture chips, they license ARM Processor 'designs'. ARM is more of a household name for their use in mobile phones but that is just the tip of the iceberg. I think you underestimate how many ARM chips you have in a single car or delivery truck. Add to that: - farming machinery - construction machinery - factory line automation - elevators, escalators - EV chargers - fridges, washing machines, ovens - medical devices such as drug-infusion pumps, ventilators, surgical machinery, etc. - Auxiliary modules in aeroplanes and shipping containers. - Infrastructure for Road, Rail, Power Grid with ARM processors running headless embedded systems - Anything the size of a pebble with bluetooth connectivity uses nordic's nRF chip (which is yet again an ARM chip) ARM processors are hiding in plain sight in the world all around you. I understand the point you make, from a business standpoint, on how Tiktok might scale. The thing that is bizarre for me and I agree with the parent's sentiment, is how disconnected the valuation is from the real-world impact and objective _usefulness_ of ARM versus Tiktok. Edit: bullet points

amelius 6y ago
> The thing that is bizarre for me and I agree with the parent's sentiment, is how disconnected the valuation is from the real-world impact and objective _usefulness_ of ARM versus Tiktok. Also how easily the technology behind Tiktok can be duplicated compared to ARM. Anyway, it's probably all about the network effect and brand value.
- sjwright 6y ago
  ARM has no exposure to any end consumers and takes the tiniest sliver from each sale—if anything at all. Tiktok can deliver arbitrary content to hundreds of millions of people’s eyeballs around the planet.
mcdevilkiller 6y ago
Also Intel ME and (not sure, but probably) AMD PSP.
- einr 6y ago

kelnos 6y ago

Per-video profit isn't really meaningful; these kinds of companies report revenue (and thus profit) base on the number of active users. Consider that in 2017, 21 billion ARM chips were manufactured (doubled in 4 years, from 10 billion in 2013), and that ARM's licensing fees are over 2% of chip cost for current high-end designs (and they're talking about raising that even more). They have 95%+ of the mobile phone market, are making inroads in the server market, and will soon be in every Apple laptop, which I expect will grow the market for ARM laptops even outside Apple. It wouldn't be a stretch to find them in common desktop computers after that. They're in smart TVs, washing machines, robot vacuum cleaners, and all other kinds of smart (and non-smart) appliances. Even SSDs have their own embedded ARM chip. And that's just home/consumer stuff; haven't even scratched industrial/commercial applications, of which there are a ton. I could easily see yearly production at over 100 billion chips before 2030, probably even before 2025. While I'd love to see something like RISC-V take off commercially, I don't think that's realistic. Meanwhile, social media users are incredibly fickle; platforms are subject to fad and fashion. Certainly Facebook and Instagram are still huge behemoths, but their growth is nothing like it once was, with people -- especially younger people, trying to distinguish themselves from their older, boring relatives -- flocking to TikTok. I fully expect TikTok will be in Instagram's boat in under 10 years, with some other platform taking its place. ARM seems like an amazingly great short-, medium-, and long-term bet, while TikTok feels like a nice short- (maybe medium-, if they're lucky) term money-maker, and even that feels like a big maybe: I have no idea what their ad revenue per user looks like, but it's probably not great since their audience skews younger. Teenagers and college kids don't have much in the way of discretionary income. Then again, TikTok doesn't pay their creators like e.g. YouTube does, so they get to keep all that ad revenue.

ponker 6y ago
21 billion is 3 per person per year for everyone in the world, including rural goat herders etc. who don’t consume very many. I don’t doubt the number but it’s still wild.
minzi 6y ago
If you don’t see RISC-V taking off commercially, then why is ARM trying to sell? I ask because my understanding was that they were trying to exit because of RISC-V.

usrusr 6y ago

Something like Tiktok can myspace in the blink of an eye. Established CPU architectures have enormous staying power.

posguy 6y ago
MIPS sure didn't, same for SPARC. CPU architectures can effectively die in a handful of years just like MySpace, Delicious, Digg and such.
- usrusr 6y ago
  Even decades after starting to decline both are still less dead than the average former social media fad.
- shakna 6y ago
  MySpace is dead, dead. You'll still find devices, especially in manufacturing, that are still running on a MIPS, and are essential to the process. You'll still find them in various cheap toys on the shelves. MIPS _should_ be dead, half the manufacturers of the chip have stopped. But, Imagination Technology still sell a considerable number to Apple every year.

pmarreck 6y ago

Considering Apple is moving their desktops to ARM and pretty much all iOS devices are ARM...

thinkloop 6y ago

What if giphy was worth 100x ARM, would it be interesting then?

otabdeveloper4 6y ago

> How many Tiktok videos will the average consumer watch in their life? This number is not unbounded. It will converge to some asymptotic limit. > How much profit will Tiktok make on each of those views? Around a tenth of a cent per view. These huge valuations are purely because people don't do the math and don't know how the market works.