5 ms·

And if ARM started allowing everyone to use their IP for free you would expect them to survive? ARM the architecture might survive but probably no ARM the compa

And if ARM started allowing everyone to use their IP for free you would expect them to survive? ARM the architecture might survive but probably no ARM the company. IMHO a more likely outcome with Risc (assuming it gets widely adopted) would be one or two companies like Samsung, Qualcomm, AMD or even Intel gaining a massive advantage and profiting from it instead of cheaply licensing their designs to other companies. I don’t really see how is that preferable to the ARM model where company can theoretically license the most advanced ARM cores there are (of course aside of what Apple is doing) or mostly equal terms. Of course RISC might push them to make their licensing mechanism to be more flexible if they start considering RISC an a real threat to them (I don’t think this is very likely to happen in the near future, though)

snvzz 5y ago
>if they start considering RISC an a real threat to them I'm afraid they have seen RISC-V as a threat for a while now. It has already been years since their first FUD campaign. >if ARM started allowing everyone to use their IP for free you would expect them to survive? That's not how I see ARM surviving. One way ARM could survive is by doing what the MIPS owners did: Abandon the ISA, move to RISC-V, use your extensive expertise to make competitive cores, and your clout in the market to sell them to your pre-existing clients. They could totally pull it off, but it would honestly surprise me if they did so, considering how poorly they've dealt with RISC-V so far.
- Someone 5y ago
  > The way ARM could survive is by doing what the MIPS owners did: Abandon the ISA, move to RISC-V, use your extensive expertise to make competitive cores, and your clout in the market to sell them to your pre-existing clients. Even if that’s their best bet, long term, I don’t see why they would have to start doing that right now. Why would they leave their castle with its golden egg-laying goose, only because they know it won’t live for X more years? Timing such transitions is always difficult (you can’t wait until your goose is dead), but I think they’re better of waiting at least a few more years. The MIPS owners were in a different situation, weren’t they? Their goose already was dying or even dead.
  - snvzz 5y ago
    >I don’t see why they would have to start doing that right now. Me neither, but spreading FUD about RISC-V as they've been doing doesn't help their credibility should they take the MIPS path.
    - hyperman1 5y ago
      That's just a job for the marketing department. I can hear them already: ARM's vast experience brings the quality you've come to expect to the RISC-V world. Want to lower TCO and level up your designs, while leveraging existing experience, but worried about low quality IP polluting your tech? Fear not. etc... You can probably let an AI spew this stuff by now. Training data is easy to find.
      - trs-80 5y ago
        > Training data is easy to find. Got a good chuckle from that, I did! :D
    - cestith 5y ago
      Take a look at the Halloween Documents and then look at Windows Subsystem for Linux. This industry can absolutely forgive FUD in the long term if a company changes its path.
      - snvzz 5y ago
        Long term, yes.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - the_duke 5y ago
    ARM has extensive IP and know how. They could build up and sell high performance RISC-V IP/cores now and prevent RISC-V focused companies like SiFive from gaining a foothold by denying them revenue and investment. Alas, that would probably have worked better 2+ years ago, there is a lot of movement now. It seems like Intel has realized this. They tried to buy Sifive, but have now themselves joined as a major RiscV International sponsor and are investing heavily in the ecosystem. Of course there is a downside there too, because it accelerates a software and hardware ecosystem transition to a different architecture that can enable other players. We'll see how it plays out
- admax88qqq 5y ago
  Abandoning the ISA is probably too extreme. MIPS was pretty dead when they abandoned it, ARM is still alive and well. ARM could survive by making the ISA free and competing by having the best ARM core designers and designs, and/or by having proprietary addons for media handling/decoding.
admax88qqq 5y ago
They will have no choice. Either ARM becomes irrelevant as people switch to an easier to license ISA, or they have to swallow a different profit model and compete by having the _best_ ARM cores in an open market of ARM IP. The trend with RISC-V suggests that ISAs are going to be commoditized and the real value will be in the implementations themselves.
- YorkshireSeason 5y ago
  > real value will be in the implementations themselves. It is not that difficult to re-target a micro-architecture (what you call implementation) to a new ISA, especially if the ISAs relatively close, as most modern ISAs are. RISC-V and Arm ISAs are an example where that should be especially easy.
  - admax88qqq 5y ago
    Totally, all the more reason that the specific ISA is less important than the implementation/micro-arch. Why pay for ARM if you can retarget to RISC-V and still retain most of the benefits of your designs.
    - baq 5y ago
      you'll pay ARM for a good ARM RISC-V CPU.
    - YorkshireSeason 5y ago
      As "baq" also says: you pay Arm (or Apple, or Qualcomm or ...) for the micro-architecture. I expect Arm to drop licensing costs for their ISA to zero to compete with RISC-V at the low end. Right now, the Arm ISA has much better micro-architectures than RISC-V, why bother with RISC-V? I think this will change over the next 5 years. One of the ways to change this could be Arm selling RISC-V implementations. Of course there are also dangers in RISC-V: one is that we will get too many RISC-V versions, so no stable software ecosystem emerges for any single one of them. Adapting Linux, GCC and so on to your specific version of RISC-V (or any processor really) is rather expensive.
Brian_K_White 5y ago
"And if ARM started allowing everyone to use their IP for free you would expect them to survive?" Irrelevant question that no one anywhere has any obligation to care about.
- asoneth 5y ago
  I don't think the parent comment was suggesting we have an obligation to care about ARM's survival. But ARM probably cares about ARM's survival so it is relevant to the discussion about what future decisions ARM might make.
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    When the landscape changes that some business model depended on, it is no one else's obligation to care if some business using that model adapts or doesn't. I literally quoted a question that asks "you expect", and what I am pointing out, not declaring but observing, it's already a fact regardless if I say it, that neither you or I nor anyone else has any obligation to expect anything. It doesn't even matter if we do expect something. Even if you were some kind of Arm fan like being a fan of a sneaker brand or a celebrity, your good wishes still don't change anything. "you expect" is just irrelevant in this question. Arm can adapt to the new environment or not. The environment is changing and it doesn't matter if anyone likes it or not. And the nature of the change, people giving away something that someone else used to be able to charge rent for, is not unfair or unethical or immoral in anyway, nor is it any kind of net loss for society as a whole, so there is no argument for doing something to artificially protect Arm's business model. Steve used to sell cakes. Sally gave everyone her recipe for cake and now fewer people buy Steve's cakes. So what? Do you mean to say that Sally should not be able to give away her own cake recipe? Steve doesn't like it because he had a good gig going for a while there, but so what? The environment Steve was operating in changed, and his business model no longer works. And while you could sorta-kinda say it's Sally's fault, you can't say she did anything wrong either legally or morally or in a holistic sense for everyone as a whole, and so there is nothing anyone else should do about it. Steve had no special right to his cakes being purchased. He has the right to offer them, but no one is obligated to buy them, and no one is obligated to care if he fails to sell enough to live well on. I don't expect anything related to Arm, and neither can anyone else. It's just a totally irrelevant question.

snvzz 5y ago

>if they start considering RISC an a real threat to them I'm afraid they have seen RISC-V as a threat for a while now. It has already been years since their first FUD campaign. >if ARM started allowing everyone to use their IP for free you would expect them to survive? That's not how I see ARM surviving. One way ARM could survive is by doing what the MIPS owners did: Abandon the ISA, move to RISC-V, use your extensive expertise to make competitive cores, and your clout in the market to sell them to your pre-existing clients. They could totally pull it off, but it would honestly surprise me if they did so, considering how poorly they've dealt with RISC-V so far.

Someone 5y ago
> The way ARM could survive is by doing what the MIPS owners did: Abandon the ISA, move to RISC-V, use your extensive expertise to make competitive cores, and your clout in the market to sell them to your pre-existing clients. Even if that’s their best bet, long term, I don’t see why they would have to start doing that right now. Why would they leave their castle with its golden egg-laying goose, only because they know it won’t live for X more years? Timing such transitions is always difficult (you can’t wait until your goose is dead), but I think they’re better of waiting at least a few more years. The MIPS owners were in a different situation, weren’t they? Their goose already was dying or even dead.
- snvzz 5y ago
  >I don’t see why they would have to start doing that right now. Me neither, but spreading FUD about RISC-V as they've been doing doesn't help their credibility should they take the MIPS path.
  - hyperman1 5y ago
    That's just a job for the marketing department. I can hear them already: ARM's vast experience brings the quality you've come to expect to the RISC-V world. Want to lower TCO and level up your designs, while leveraging existing experience, but worried about low quality IP polluting your tech? Fear not. etc... You can probably let an AI spew this stuff by now. Training data is easy to find.
    - trs-80 5y ago
      > Training data is easy to find. Got a good chuckle from that, I did! :D
  - cestith 5y ago
    Take a look at the Halloween Documents and then look at Windows Subsystem for Linux. This industry can absolutely forgive FUD in the long term if a company changes its path.
    - snvzz 5y ago
      Long term, yes.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- the_duke 5y ago
  ARM has extensive IP and know how. They could build up and sell high performance RISC-V IP/cores now and prevent RISC-V focused companies like SiFive from gaining a foothold by denying them revenue and investment. Alas, that would probably have worked better 2+ years ago, there is a lot of movement now. It seems like Intel has realized this. They tried to buy Sifive, but have now themselves joined as a major RiscV International sponsor and are investing heavily in the ecosystem. Of course there is a downside there too, because it accelerates a software and hardware ecosystem transition to a different architecture that can enable other players. We'll see how it plays out
admax88qqq 5y ago
Abandoning the ISA is probably too extreme. MIPS was pretty dead when they abandoned it, ARM is still alive and well. ARM could survive by making the ISA free and competing by having the best ARM core designers and designs, and/or by having proprietary addons for media handling/decoding.

admax88qqq 5y ago

They will have no choice. Either ARM becomes irrelevant as people switch to an easier to license ISA, or they have to swallow a different profit model and compete by having the _best_ ARM cores in an open market of ARM IP. The trend with RISC-V suggests that ISAs are going to be commoditized and the real value will be in the implementations themselves.

YorkshireSeason 5y ago
> real value will be in the implementations themselves. It is not that difficult to re-target a micro-architecture (what you call implementation) to a new ISA, especially if the ISAs relatively close, as most modern ISAs are. RISC-V and Arm ISAs are an example where that should be especially easy.
- admax88qqq 5y ago
  Totally, all the more reason that the specific ISA is less important than the implementation/micro-arch. Why pay for ARM if you can retarget to RISC-V and still retain most of the benefits of your designs.
  - baq 5y ago
    you'll pay ARM for a good ARM RISC-V CPU.
  - YorkshireSeason 5y ago
    As "baq" also says: you pay Arm (or Apple, or Qualcomm or ...) for the micro-architecture. I expect Arm to drop licensing costs for their ISA to zero to compete with RISC-V at the low end. Right now, the Arm ISA has much better micro-architectures than RISC-V, why bother with RISC-V? I think this will change over the next 5 years. One of the ways to change this could be Arm selling RISC-V implementations. Of course there are also dangers in RISC-V: one is that we will get too many RISC-V versions, so no stable software ecosystem emerges for any single one of them. Adapting Linux, GCC and so on to your specific version of RISC-V (or any processor really) is rather expensive.

Brian_K_White 5y ago

"And if ARM started allowing everyone to use their IP for free you would expect them to survive?" Irrelevant question that no one anywhere has any obligation to care about.

asoneth 5y ago
I don't think the parent comment was suggesting we have an obligation to care about ARM's survival. But ARM probably cares about ARM's survival so it is relevant to the discussion about what future decisions ARM might make.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  When the landscape changes that some business model depended on, it is no one else's obligation to care if some business using that model adapts or doesn't. I literally quoted a question that asks "you expect", and what I am pointing out, not declaring but observing, it's already a fact regardless if I say it, that neither you or I nor anyone else has any obligation to expect anything. It doesn't even matter if we do expect something. Even if you were some kind of Arm fan like being a fan of a sneaker brand or a celebrity, your good wishes still don't change anything. "you expect" is just irrelevant in this question. Arm can adapt to the new environment or not. The environment is changing and it doesn't matter if anyone likes it or not. And the nature of the change, people giving away something that someone else used to be able to charge rent for, is not unfair or unethical or immoral in anyway, nor is it any kind of net loss for society as a whole, so there is no argument for doing something to artificially protect Arm's business model. Steve used to sell cakes. Sally gave everyone her recipe for cake and now fewer people buy Steve's cakes. So what? Do you mean to say that Sally should not be able to give away her own cake recipe? Steve doesn't like it because he had a good gig going for a while there, but so what? The environment Steve was operating in changed, and his business model no longer works. And while you could sorta-kinda say it's Sally's fault, you can't say she did anything wrong either legally or morally or in a holistic sense for everyone as a whole, and so there is nothing anyone else should do about it. Steve had no special right to his cakes being purchased. He has the right to offer them, but no one is obligated to buy them, and no one is obligated to care if he fails to sell enough to live well on. I don't expect anything related to Arm, and neither can anyone else. It's just a totally irrelevant question.