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> I mean... I think it's the opposite. There was a time when Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia had their own microarchs which they used in most things. Increasingly

> I mean... I think it's the opposite. There was a time when Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia had their own microarchs which they used in most things. Increasingly they're back to ARM-supplied designs now. Indeed but I'm wondering if we'll see a swing back, if they're all selling SoCs with the same set of arm IP in varying configurations what's the differentiating factor? I suspect there's an aspect of 'arm never builds what we want' as arm needs to satisfy multiple people that would drive them to build their own design at the high end. That said I've only got a hunch and can't recall concrete evidence for this.

enragedcacti 4y ago
I think there is a lot of room for competition in the accelerator space e.g. GPUs, ML inference engines, video encode/decode. It seems to me like modern core design is expensive and high risk/low reward for most of these companies. Remember, Apple has a ton of R&D and the margins to put massive cores into just about everything they sell, upto and including putting a CPU faster than most desktops into their "budget" monitor. Fabbing costs keep going up and the extra revenue from larger+faster CPUs would get gobbled up by TSMC and Samsung Fab. Setting out to build something faster at the same size and R&D is what eats your profit. For Qualcomm, Samsung, Google (for Pixel at least), and NVidia, ARMs balance of performance/die size/efficiency is aligned well with their market positions and the opportunity cost of rolling their own is just too high even in the face of thinning margins from competition.
- throw34 4y ago
  This has been a popular topic for some time in the computer architecture space. “ The End of the Road for General Purpose Processors & the Future of Computing - Prof. John L. Hennessy” https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/end-road-general-purpose-processors-future-computing-prof-john-l-hennessy https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/end-road-general-purpose-proc...
- williadc 4y ago
  Qualcomm acquired Nuvia whose only product is a custom ARM CPU microarchitecture. I wonder what they'll do with it.

enragedcacti 4y ago

I think there is a lot of room for competition in the accelerator space e.g. GPUs, ML inference engines, video encode/decode. It seems to me like modern core design is expensive and high risk/low reward for most of these companies. Remember, Apple has a ton of R&D and the margins to put massive cores into just about everything they sell, upto and including putting a CPU faster than most desktops into their "budget" monitor. Fabbing costs keep going up and the extra revenue from larger+faster CPUs would get gobbled up by TSMC and Samsung Fab. Setting out to build something faster at the same size and R&D is what eats your profit. For Qualcomm, Samsung, Google (for Pixel at least), and NVidia, ARMs balance of performance/die size/efficiency is aligned well with their market positions and the opportunity cost of rolling their own is just too high even in the face of thinning margins from competition.

throw34 4y ago
This has been a popular topic for some time in the computer architecture space. “ The End of the Road for General Purpose Processors & the Future of Computing - Prof. John L. Hennessy” https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/end-road-general-purpose-processors-future-computing-prof-john-l-hennessy https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/end-road-general-purpose-proc...
williadc 4y ago
Qualcomm acquired Nuvia whose only product is a custom ARM CPU microarchitecture. I wonder what they'll do with it.