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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 comp

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.
melony 5y ago
ARM won't become irrelevant as long as Apple exists.
- bonzini 5y ago
  Arm is the fourth ISA for the Macintosh and its descendents. Apple has shown three times that they're anything but wed to architectures.
klelatti 5y ago
Assumes that Arm have no implementation IP - which comes with the ISA and is not available to others - and that the only factor in choosing an ISA is how 'easy' it is to license. Very strongly disagree with these assumptions.
- ksec 5y ago
  > Very strongly disagree with these assumptions. It is the fundamental basic business ideas that they have it all wrong. Which is why every time these discussions came up they are non-productive. It is no different to saying Linux would take over desktop in the 90s because it is free. We are in 20s and coming up 30s. It is still not happening. But at least ( or hopefully ) we have passed stage where RISC-V is fundamentally better ISA than ARM. And talk about the business aspect of it. Edit: Ok I was wrong, the ISA debate is near the bottom of the page. I didn't invent the term "Riscy Silver Bullet" for no reason :).
  - klelatti 5y ago
    "Riscy Silver Bullet" is very good. Completely agree.
  - ansible 5y ago
    > It is no different to saying Linux would take over desktop in the 90s because it is free. We are in 20s and coming up 30s. It is still not happening. The desktop? Maybe not. But Linux has done well with laptops in recent years (Chromebooks). Definitely not "taken over", but 30 million units a year is nothing to sneeze at either.
    - yywwbbn 5y ago
      ChromeOS is Linux in name only, just like Android. Google just needed a kernel and a functional low level stack. They can switch to Fuchsia in the near/medium future and most user would probably not notice a thing.
cestith 5y ago
Market segmentation exists. RISC-V being open means it's also open to ARM. You may, in the future, pay ARM to license a SoC that's a RISC-V ISA core or four with their tried-and-true peripheral cores and maybe a couple of M0 cores to boot.

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.

melony 5y ago

ARM won't become irrelevant as long as Apple exists.

bonzini 5y ago
Arm is the fourth ISA for the Macintosh and its descendents. Apple has shown three times that they're anything but wed to architectures.

klelatti 5y ago

Assumes that Arm have no implementation IP - which comes with the ISA and is not available to others - and that the only factor in choosing an ISA is how 'easy' it is to license. Very strongly disagree with these assumptions.

ksec 5y ago
> Very strongly disagree with these assumptions. It is the fundamental basic business ideas that they have it all wrong. Which is why every time these discussions came up they are non-productive. It is no different to saying Linux would take over desktop in the 90s because it is free. We are in 20s and coming up 30s. It is still not happening. But at least ( or hopefully ) we have passed stage where RISC-V is fundamentally better ISA than ARM. And talk about the business aspect of it. Edit: Ok I was wrong, the ISA debate is near the bottom of the page. I didn't invent the term "Riscy Silver Bullet" for no reason :).
- klelatti 5y ago
  "Riscy Silver Bullet" is very good. Completely agree.
- ansible 5y ago
  > It is no different to saying Linux would take over desktop in the 90s because it is free. We are in 20s and coming up 30s. It is still not happening. The desktop? Maybe not. But Linux has done well with laptops in recent years (Chromebooks). Definitely not "taken over", but 30 million units a year is nothing to sneeze at either.
  - yywwbbn 5y ago
    ChromeOS is Linux in name only, just like Android. Google just needed a kernel and a functional low level stack. They can switch to Fuchsia in the near/medium future and most user would probably not notice a thing.

cestith 5y ago

Market segmentation exists. RISC-V being open means it's also open to ARM. You may, in the future, pay ARM to license a SoC that's a RISC-V ISA core or four with their tried-and-true peripheral cores and maybe a couple of M0 cores to boot.