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RISC-V is going to bite at the low end embedded market where pennies matter, but it'll be a while before it eats into ARM at the mid to high end. ARM is offerin

RISC-V is going to bite at the low end embedded market where pennies matter, but it'll be a while before it eats into ARM at the mid to high end. ARM is offering non-discriminatory licenses at unit prices that are largely an irrelevance on the retail cost of a mobile phone or laptop. So it's going to take a long time to convince manufacturers that they want a non-compatible chip versus a few cents extra to get the well known one with all the support.

gorgoiler 5y ago
Could you quantify it a bit more precisely: how much of that $1000-per-phone goes to ARM?
- IMSAI8080 5y ago
  Not easily as their terms are private, but you can tell it's not a huge slice. Fairly well every phone and all manner of other devices uses an ARM but I'm googling their royalty revenues at $1.3 billion dollars annually. So that's not much per device shipped. Stuff you hear suggests maybe they get 1% on the sale price of a CPU. Note that's the CPU price, not the phone. The CPU in a phone might cost e.g. $20 so they maybe get 20 cents off that. I expect they have other revenues from design assistance and support etc but those costs would apply to a RISC-V device also.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  A high end Snapdragon CPU is maybe 70$. It's unlikely they're making more than a dollar or two on a 1000$ phone.
- gumby 5y ago
  Everything is confidential, but you can get an idea. Arm's revenue on a phone CPU likely pennies, or at the highest end a buck. They just make it up in volume. The interesting point is how. First, you can see from a recent HN post that an electric toothbrush contains a 32-bit ARM CPU. If you've built any hardware you'll know that your BOM is king, and you try to squeeze that on the back of your OEMs. So Philips isn't paying much for that CPU and the CPU vendor (who could be Philips) would choose a different CPU if the royalty payment was too high. By taking a tiny bite out of a huge number of parts ARM both spreads out its risk (the parts are ubiquitous) and starves the market of oxygen: there just isn't enough revenue for many or any competitors to get started. They'd have to lose money for years, or even decades, to get to the break even point. And don't forget what ubiquity means: that phone doesn't have an ARM CPU: there is ARM logic in all sorts of devices inside the phone, from the baseband processor to probably integrated logic in the camera (even if the CPU has ISP logic) to USB PHYs to who knows what. With a few pennies or less on each one. Those headline CPUs may have the highest royalty rate for all we know. The real question is why Apple uses ARM. Yes they have a longstanding history back to the founding of ARM but they are masters of cutting their BOM. They have an architectural license, and have their own microarchitecture. They make their own toolchain soup to nuts. They don't have to worry about compatibility with anyone outside their ecosystem. So why bother to pay anything to ARM? I've been asking around and the best (and consensus) theory I've been able to get is patents. That architectural license would presumably contain rights to all of ARM's patents. If that theory is correct, that's a huge threat to RISC V. I doubt ARM would ue, or even threaten to sue any RISC V user now: they'd look like Goliath beating up David. But once RISC V starts to get noticeable traction, and especially if ARM is a public company, patent licensing will start to matter. Their smartest strategy would be to pull a Microsoft and force companies to simply pay ARM a royalty for every RISC V they ship. Note: I'm a fan of the RISC V and not particularly a fan of ARM. But I recognize that ARM has played the long game quite well.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Perhaps Apple chose arm because they wanted to own their processor now-with the plan being to move to a non-arm architecture in the coming years?
    - gumby 5y ago
      Apple has been an ARM licensee since they were a founding shareholder in ARM. They used it in the Newton, but now of course it's ubiquitous in their products. The effort to design their own instruction set (including all the tooling) would not be trivial, but probably not enormous for them given their scale. And given their scale, their license must be cheaper than the cost of that activity, because you know Cook would pay it if it would save them enough down the road.
      - justahuman74 5y ago
        Apple has deep pockets, but using an existing ISA gives you a lot of OSS porting and optimization work for free. They could just use RISC-V if they wanted to and still have all the flexibility they want.
        gumby 5y ago
        Given the amount of software they write from scratch, and that they have their own tool chains, the actual ISA is below Apple’s noise floor. I’m sure they spend more on optimizing for the quirks (cache size, instruction timing, etc) of each generation of chip.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    RISC-V has been specifically designed so that the ISA itself doesn't use anything that's recent enough to be possibly patent encumbered. There might be risk involved in some chip designs, but these can be seamlessly replaced if needed.
    - gumby 5y ago
- _448 5y ago
  I remember few years back ARM's CEO was giving presentation at AMD conference, and he explained ARM's strategy as such: Rather that taking a bigger slice of a smaller pie, we take a smaller piece of a very large pie.
foobiekr 5y ago
There are only really two drivers for RISC-V at this point - license fees and Arm's insistence that unless you are Apple, you have to comply with the ISA exactly. Both are something Arm can adjust at any point and is in the process of adjusting post-Nvidia-collapse. All it is going to take is for Arm to stand up a review process to deal with the problem gracefully.
- jpleger 5y ago
  Just curious, where aren’t they complying with the ISA? I know they use a couple registers in specific ways, but IIRC, the way they use it was left to the implementer so they aren’t diverging from the architecture.
  - thetallstick 5y ago
    You can find more information here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801500
- snvzz 5y ago
  There's a third one: ARM doesn't allow you to license your ARM cores (of your own design) to third parties. Only ARM can do that.
dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
You're missing the point. It's not the cost but the fact that it has to be purchased that becomes a barrier to development and experimentation. Having to negotiate a licence even before you get started on a project can kill it. You have to compare it to open source. Why are so many open source projects so popular? It's not the cost, corporations don't mind paying. It's the freedom to go in whatever direction any person wants to go without restriction that produces innovative software. The comparable model for RISC-V is Linux and Redhat (et al), and on that basis it will win like Linux won. That combined with a clean and simple design.

gorgoiler 5y ago

Could you quantify it a bit more precisely: how much of that $1000-per-phone goes to ARM?

IMSAI8080 5y ago
Not easily as their terms are private, but you can tell it's not a huge slice. Fairly well every phone and all manner of other devices uses an ARM but I'm googling their royalty revenues at $1.3 billion dollars annually. So that's not much per device shipped. Stuff you hear suggests maybe they get 1% on the sale price of a CPU. Note that's the CPU price, not the phone. The CPU in a phone might cost e.g. $20 so they maybe get 20 cents off that. I expect they have other revenues from design assistance and support etc but those costs would apply to a RISC-V device also.
sudosysgen 5y ago
A high end Snapdragon CPU is maybe 70$. It's unlikely they're making more than a dollar or two on a 1000$ phone.
gumby 5y ago
Everything is confidential, but you can get an idea. Arm's revenue on a phone CPU likely pennies, or at the highest end a buck. They just make it up in volume. The interesting point is how. First, you can see from a recent HN post that an electric toothbrush contains a 32-bit ARM CPU. If you've built any hardware you'll know that your BOM is king, and you try to squeeze that on the back of your OEMs. So Philips isn't paying much for that CPU and the CPU vendor (who could be Philips) would choose a different CPU if the royalty payment was too high. By taking a tiny bite out of a huge number of parts ARM both spreads out its risk (the parts are ubiquitous) and starves the market of oxygen: there just isn't enough revenue for many or any competitors to get started. They'd have to lose money for years, or even decades, to get to the break even point. And don't forget what ubiquity means: that phone doesn't have an ARM CPU: there is ARM logic in all sorts of devices inside the phone, from the baseband processor to probably integrated logic in the camera (even if the CPU has ISP logic) to USB PHYs to who knows what. With a few pennies or less on each one. Those headline CPUs may have the highest royalty rate for all we know. The real question is why Apple uses ARM. Yes they have a longstanding history back to the founding of ARM but they are masters of cutting their BOM. They have an architectural license, and have their own microarchitecture. They make their own toolchain soup to nuts. They don't have to worry about compatibility with anyone outside their ecosystem. So why bother to pay anything to ARM? I've been asking around and the best (and consensus) theory I've been able to get is patents. That architectural license would presumably contain rights to all of ARM's patents. If that theory is correct, that's a huge threat to RISC V. I doubt ARM would ue, or even threaten to sue any RISC V user now: they'd look like Goliath beating up David. But once RISC V starts to get noticeable traction, and especially if ARM is a public company, patent licensing will start to matter. Their smartest strategy would be to pull a Microsoft and force companies to simply pay ARM a royalty for every RISC V they ship. Note: I'm a fan of the RISC V and not particularly a fan of ARM. But I recognize that ARM has played the long game quite well.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Perhaps Apple chose arm because they wanted to own their processor now-with the plan being to move to a non-arm architecture in the coming years?
  - gumby 5y ago
    Apple has been an ARM licensee since they were a founding shareholder in ARM. They used it in the Newton, but now of course it's ubiquitous in their products. The effort to design their own instruction set (including all the tooling) would not be trivial, but probably not enormous for them given their scale. And given their scale, their license must be cheaper than the cost of that activity, because you know Cook would pay it if it would save them enough down the road.
    - justahuman74 5y ago
      Apple has deep pockets, but using an existing ISA gives you a lot of OSS porting and optimization work for free. They could just use RISC-V if they wanted to and still have all the flexibility they want.
      - gumby 5y ago
        Given the amount of software they write from scratch, and that they have their own tool chains, the actual ISA is below Apple’s noise floor. I’m sure they spend more on optimizing for the quirks (cache size, instruction timing, etc) of each generation of chip.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  RISC-V has been specifically designed so that the ISA itself doesn't use anything that's recent enough to be possibly patent encumbered. There might be risk involved in some chip designs, but these can be seamlessly replaced if needed.
  - gumby 5y ago
_448 5y ago
I remember few years back ARM's CEO was giving presentation at AMD conference, and he explained ARM's strategy as such: Rather that taking a bigger slice of a smaller pie, we take a smaller piece of a very large pie.

foobiekr 5y ago

There are only really two drivers for RISC-V at this point - license fees and Arm's insistence that unless you are Apple, you have to comply with the ISA exactly. Both are something Arm can adjust at any point and is in the process of adjusting post-Nvidia-collapse. All it is going to take is for Arm to stand up a review process to deal with the problem gracefully.

jpleger 5y ago
Just curious, where aren’t they complying with the ISA? I know they use a couple registers in specific ways, but IIRC, the way they use it was left to the implementer so they aren’t diverging from the architecture.
- thetallstick 5y ago
  You can find more information here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801500
snvzz 5y ago
There's a third one: ARM doesn't allow you to license your ARM cores (of your own design) to third parties. Only ARM can do that.

dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago

You're missing the point. It's not the cost but the fact that it has to be purchased that becomes a barrier to development and experimentation. Having to negotiate a licence even before you get started on a project can kill it. You have to compare it to open source. Why are so many open source projects so popular? It's not the cost, corporations don't mind paying. It's the freedom to go in whatever direction any person wants to go without restriction that produces innovative software. The comparable model for RISC-V is Linux and Redhat (et al), and on that basis it will win like Linux won. That combined with a clean and simple design.