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ARM doesn't sell chips. They license the instruction set. Ask Apple or Qualcomm if the final ARM SOCs they build and sell are cheap...
by dcow 5y ago
ARM doesn't sell chips. They license the instruction set. Ask Apple or Qualcomm if the final ARM SOCs they build and sell are cheap...
- kadoban 5y agoI don't see that that really changes anything here.
- dcow 5y agoWell the argument is that ARM is cheap and good for consumers because it's cheap. I wanted to make it clear that you can't go to ARM and buy <cheap arm chip>. You have to go to Qualcomm or Apple or Broadcom and buy <not quite so cheap arm chip>. So that kinda impacts the argument. Whatever Nvidia wants to do with licensing they have to combat market forces already in play. There's a market for somewhat less expensive arm chips, for one, so they'd lose that revenue. Two, if they want to royally fuck arm shops and become the only ARM vendor, well, good luck... you just killed the ISA you bought for 40 billion...
- throwaway2048 5y ago40 billion isn't much to sabotage the vast majority of your competitors
- scotty79 5y agoThey are responsible through licensing for huge number of cheap chips on the market. It really doesn't matter they don't sell it themselves. If they stop licensing it would have the same effect as if they werse selling them directly and they stopped selling.
- irrational 5y agoWouldn’t the effect be Apple and others creating a new (and hopefully better) replacement for ARM?
- ivirshup 5y ago"just create a new instruction set"? It's taken the better part of a decade for workable alternatives to CUDA to emerge.
- irrational 5y agoBy that logic there will never again be another workable alternative. Why not start now rather than wait a few decades?
- InvertedRhodium 5y agoThere's nothing that prevents you from doing that as it stands.
- nerdponx 5y agoInnovation is not an on-off switch. Market forces create an incentive to attempt to innovate, but they don't magically make innovation happen.
- vxNsr 5y agoIt's likely that there are many new designs being spun up everyday by various people, but that doesn't mean that we want to remove competition from the market.
- techdragon 5y agoI hope you’re not calling ROCm a workable alternative… it’s really not close. I love that they are trying, I just honestly feel they need to be trying with 10 times as much funding/resources behind them. Or do you mean Apple’s Metal Compute? useful only with inconvenient (at scale) Apple hardware. If workable CUDA alternatives were really here, I feel people would be talking about them more given how large the hate is for Nvidia on multi fronts from multiple different user groups.
- ivirshup 5y agoI was, but mostly through XLA or Vulkan layers. Also, I’d define workable as a pretty low bar.
- chaboud 5y agoARM also licenses CPUs, GPUs, and just about everything that one would need to build an SoC. And those elements are used to enable the manufacture and sale of cheap chips. Semantics aside, ARM is the critical player in several market segments.
- fulafel 5y agoIt's not correct to say they just license the insn set. They license ready to use cpu and gpu core designs (like the Cortex family in most Android phones).
- yosefk 5y agoIt depends on the customer. Apple and Nvidia indeed license just the ISA and build their own CPU implementation from scratch. At the other extreme, you can make a complete chip just from ARM IP - they have way more than CPU and GPU IP, they can sell you pretty much everything else, too. At the middle are chip makers taking eg ARM CPU IP but no other ARM IP and making other IP themselves or licensing from other vendors.
- StreamBright 5y agoDepends. Apple does not sell chips. Apple sells a vertically integrated platform that has many components from cloud services to physical devices. The price of one component in the physical device is not that important.
- ngcc_hk 5y agoBut we have pi and many others. If all these are slowly killed may be they moved to more expensive chips. The business model does not fit.