I'm surprised. There have been many failures in the past to outdo ARM's cores: Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm. Granted, some of those are ancient histor

I'm surprised. There have been many failures in the past to outdo ARM's cores: Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm. Granted, some of those are ancient history or were more management failures than technical failures. It seemed to me that with ARM finally focusing on developing high performance cores, and the success of N1, the industry would coalesce around that. ARM has control over the ISA development which can influence and be influenced by microarchitecture designs, though they do work with Apple and Fujitsu somewhat. ARM gets to combine license fees from many customers into a single large R&D budget, much like TSMC. There's a huge risk that you spend billions for years and end up with custom cores that are worse than what ARM puts out. So why design custom cores? Maybe it's a necessity for a viable CPU company. Maybe it's too easy to create a custom CPU with stock ARM cores so unless you can do substantially better than that, all your biggest potential customers will just make their own: Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Baidu, Google, Tencent, Alibaba, are all perfectly capable of putting some stock cores together. Yes, the devil is in the details but I don't think the details are enough to base a company around. Maybe even if making a better microarchitecture is unlikely you have to try or be doomed to failure in the long run. Maybe they believe their engineering is better. It's tempting to discount the value of individual contributors in projects involving hundreds or thousands of people. Maybe Ampere believe their engineers and/or managers are just better than the competition, and can beat them with fewer resources. Maybe it's not as hard as it used to be. The received wisdom after decades of Intel dominance was to not even try to compete. Now we seem to be reaching a plateau in microarchitecture innovation. Yes, CPUs are still getting faster but the designs seem to have converged a lot. It certainly seems easier to catch up given that Apple, ARM, and AMD have all succeeded recently. Ampere also starts with an A so they're in good company. Maybe it doesn't actually have to be substantially better. Maybe the N1 license fees are high and they just need something similar for less money. Maybe they just need something different that their sales team can sell as being better.