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Arm wants to charge dramatically more for chip licenses
- AviationAtom 4y agoReminds me somewhat of the Rambus saga
- wolpoli 4y agoWhere is Arm's moat? Is it on the software or the hardware ecosystem side?
- smoldesu 4y agoHardware, I guess? ARM's moat is that you can buy a fairly RISC CPU today for a fairly cheap price. It won't stay that way forever though, and there are efforts underway with RISC-V to drain that moat. The interesting part (to me) is speculating which parts of the market ARM will choose to focus on. Microcontrollers seem like a lost cause at their price point, but making a shift to higher-margin licensing might be part of a strategy to acknowledge that loss.
- sottol 4y agoBoth Google and Apple have multi-arch support and Apple has pulled off a ISA transitions, guess that really only leaves Apple's investment in the actual M1/M2 chip-design itself. Apple's price-point and margins are high enough but they're pretty protective of their margins afaik. I wonder if it's worth transitioning away though. I think this will definitely boost Risc-V investment and maybe other alternatives, if for no other reason than to have a viable threat to leave ARM if they decide to get more aggressive in pricing.
- cpeterso 4y agoApple had a secret x86 port of MacOS System 7 in the early 1990s ("Project Star Trek"). Similarly, Apple continued to maintain a public x86 port of Darwin and a secret port of Mac OS X ("Project Marklar"), prior to Apple's transition from PowerPC to Intel. They no doubt have a secret RISC-V port of macOS today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project https://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/10/a-bit-of-history-behind-the-mac-os-x-on-intel-project-marklar/ https://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/10/a-bit-of-history-behind... the Mac OS X on Intel Project "Marklar"
- klelatti 4y ago> They no doubt have a secret RISC-V port of macOS today. Possibly but as it’s believed they were lead partner for the design of the ARM64 ISA and seem to be able to add their own extensions (as well as designing their own micro architecture) they already have a lot of control in a way they didn’t with 68k and PowerPC.
- shjake 4y agoThey’d need an actual chip to run it on or is it just simulated? I mean isn’t RISC-V still 5-10 years behind M series? Also do you think the they still maintain macOS ports for PowerPC?
- cpeterso 4y agoI doubt Apple still maintains macOS for PowerPC. Building for RISC-V would be to keep future options available, whereas PowerPC is a dead end. We might look for clues in any Apple contributions to LLVM and Darwin for RISC-V or PowerPC. I went searching if Darwin still supports PowerPC. I found a Reddit thread about compiling Rust code for Darwin PowerPC, but they only talk about old versions of Darwin: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qbok3d/how_difficult_is_it_to_add_powerpcappledarwin_as/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qbok3d/how_difficult_...
- shjake 4y agoI really doubt they have seriously considered porting macOS to RISC-v though. It shouldn’t take that long to port darwin to a new arch anyway. And when/IF RISC-V actually becomes even close to being competitive to ARM/x86 it will probably be very different than it is now.
- dragontamer 4y ago> Microcontrollers seem like a lost cause at their price point Is there even a RISC-V that can compete against the ARM Cortex-M33? Or ARM Cortex-M0+ ? ARM has the microcontroller market in a deathgrip. I'm honestly not seeing any competition here from anybody. STM32, NXP, Microchip SAM, etc. etc. Its all ARM. You get some 8-bitters (8051 lol still alive) at the lowest end with SiLabs USB stuff and other such stuff. But ARM is incredibly dominant here.
- smoldesu 4y agoNot yet, most of the RISC-V cores intended to compete with those chips are still on-paper and not in-production. Tables turn though, and the messaging ARM is sending right now seems to be directed away from their smaller piecemeal component market. That makes sense, too - Chinese manufacturers have been mass-producing knockoff ARM processors for years. There are probably more unique STM32 clones than there are unique ARM core designs available today. The competition isn't here yet, but the bloody strangler is knocking at the door and someone upstairs just yelled "Nobody's home!"
- alexisread 4y agoI think it depends on the scale of mcu you look at, for instance in the sub $1 mcu for birthday cards etc riscv is making inroads: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/22/10-cents-ch32v003-risc-v-mcu-offers-2kb-sram-16kb-flash-in-sop8-to-qfn20-packages/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/22/10-cents-ch32v003-ri... Robotics and IoT edge is another. The bl808 is a 5 core chip for $2odd with the lowest power mcu having access to 64mb ram, no other mcu can do that as far as I know: https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005004970779483.html https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005004970779483.html There is also more of a drive to open source drivers etc with many of the riscv mcus.
- snvzz 4y agoDo not forget the Espressif, as they have shipped multiple generations of ESP32 MCUs based on RISC-V cores already.
- mmoskal 4y ago
- Gibbon1 4y agoI do microcontrollers. If you swapped out the ARM core in any of the ones I use for some other 32 bit arch I wouldn't notice.
- brigade 4y agoDesigning a high-performance CPU within the power budget of a smartphone is expensive and hard; so hard that Samsung, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and even Intel have all tried and bowed out because ARM did it better. RISC-V doesn't really make this easier, since at best the ISA is neutral at the performance levels of the Cortex-X cores. Outside of application cores though, no real moat.
- panick21_ 4y agoCompanies like SiFive are claiming they are beating the ARM cores in terms of area (and power) and they are quickly marching up the performance scale. The software isn't ready and they are primarily not looking at smartphones yet. It will take a few more years until we get there, but once the software is ready you will have lots of companies competing.
- sliken 4y agoWell depends, Apple has been refining their arm chips for many generations now. Generally the Arm competition (non-apple) hasn't caught up to Apple yet. CPUs are amazingly complicated. A major new CPU designs can take 3-5 year, consume many $100M, and end up not competitive. Even Intel has had serious issues after many years dominating their market. The ecosystem of OS kernels, platforms, testing/verification tools, compilers, debuggers, and related can take awhile to mature. Android is a major platform for phones, and while by default apps are portable, assuming the vm is ported, but some apps write native code to avoid the Java related overhead. Intel tried a phone and ended up emulating ARM chips for native arm code and delivered terrible performance and terrible perf/watt. That project died with a total design win of (I believe) just a single relatively low volume phone. So making a CPU to compete with a flagship android phone isn't easy, and even if investing some multiple of $100M and years you might end up still behind, or bankrupt when you scare Arm into cutting prices again.
- tromp 4y ago> Arm wants to stop charging chip vendors to make Arm chips, and instead wants to charge device makers—especially smartphone manufacturers—a fee based on the overall price of the final product. Device maker: I'd like to buy some ARMs please. Arm: for what final product? Device maker: none of your business. Arm: we're making it our business. Tell or get lost. Device maker: if you must know, we put them in our Mars rocket...
- jjoonathan 4y agoRISCV to the moooooon!
- jmyeet 4y agoThis is the long-standing joke with enterprise software. Company: how much money does your product cost? Seller: how much money do you have?
- causi 4y agoAccording to the report, Arm wants to stop charging chip vendors to make Arm chips, and instead wants to charge device makers—especially smartphone manufacturers—a fee based on the overall price of the final product. Hmm, I wonder if this could put the brakes on the vomitously expensive phones that dominate the market these days.
- soup10 4y agothat's not how it works, arm wants a bigger cut, they aren't trying to make the pie smaller
- doubled112 4y agoI would imagine if ARM wants more money, smart phone manufacturers will not want to make less money and pass that extra cost off to the consumer.
- wolpoli 4y agoI recall news about Qualcomm charging a fee based on the overall price of the final product too. But does Arm have as strong of a hold on the market, compared to Qualcomm, to pull it off?
- srgpqt 4y agoWell, practically every single Apple product is using ARM-based processors.
- beambot 4y agoCalling it now: CaaS - Chips as a Service. Soon everyone from CPUs, GPUs, memory, etc will be trying to charge a recurring fee.
- tree_enjoyer 4y agoIt can be an IoT FPGA that can add (or remove) new IO ports, CPU cores, and peripherals based on licensing
- abeyer 4y agoand brick itself if you miss your monthly payment
- TheLoafOfBread 4y agoNice, can't wait on cracking my FPGA platform to get more power from a softcore.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- frogperson 4y agoIBM has been doing this for decades with mainframes.
- manzu 4y agoSoftBank needs to make bank somehow
- yafbum 4y agoTempted to blame Adam Neumann
- strangattractor 4y agoFeeling the pressure from Risc-V perhaps?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- adql 4y agoInvestors more likely. It's good news for RV, even more reasons to ditch ARM
- wmf 4y agoIf Arm was feeling pressure they would drop prices. Increasing prices is the strategy of a monopolist.
- shjake 4y agoThey have been charging pennies until now, though..
- panick21_ 4y agoNo. They are raising prices in places where RISC-V isn't yet completing.
- strangattractor 4y agoMonopolist - every Entrepreneur's dream. Maybe a desire to milk the cow a little faster before it dries up;)
- dboreham 4y agoMore MBA nonsense.
- klelatti 4y agoThe original Arm proposition was to make it cheaper for firms to use Arm’s IP than to develop their own. I suspect we are now in a (possibly short) period when there is no viable alternative to Arm on mobile say. When that period ends then the alternatives (RISC-V based) won’t be free. There will still be a cost. This move obviously looks like a move to juice profits short term ahead of a float, but perhaps also to tilt pricing to keep Arm competitive on the lowest end devices.
- brucethemoose2 4y ago"A dream scenario for RISC-V" What about POWER? There's this RISC-V dream about an high performance CPU with a fleshed out, open source ISA, with a company championing it with a big proven core you can buy, and decent compiler support in place... but we already have it! Its right over there! Also, I think POWER is a bad omen. If IBM can't sustain POWER's hype (even with good CPUs you can buy right now), I'm not sure how RISC-V is supposed to surpass that from square one.
- 10000truths 4y agoThe POWER ISA wasn't royalty free until 2019, over a decade after its decline. RISC-V was royalty free from the beginning.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- brucethemoose2 4y agoBut thats still 4 years of basically zero POWER adoption. I don't want to hate on RISC-V, but I just don't see a line from here to where ARM is now, even with ARM's shenanigans.
- sauruk 4y agoI get the impression that devs are happy about RISCV and willing to port things to it, not so much for POWER. Also China seems to be pursuing RISCV heavily.
- brucethemoose2 4y agoBut where the rubber hits the road seems to be in niche stuff like accelerators (which is indeed a great application for RISC-V) and low power embedded stuff. Other countries (like Russia, and China's MIPs thing) have pursued novel architectures for higher power general purpose computing, but its mostly for government use I think. China pulling off a societal transition to RISC-V would be quite a coup.
- pavlov 4y agoSoftbank owns ARM but is planning an IPO this year. After Softbank reported massive losses last year, its legendary founder Masayoshi Son said he was stepping down from Softbank operations to focus on “unleashing ARM’s potential”. This seems to be part of his profit drive.
- brucethemoose2 4y agoSoftbank, the gift that keeps on giving.
- paulmd 4y agoMassive "no shit"/"told you so" moment. ARM is an incredibly important foundational company but they barely make any money, hell they lose money about half the time, including during the pandemic, despite absolutely crazy electronics sales! Softbank isn't a charity, they want $40b+ valuation on a company that makes $0 +/- 1.5b ish. They want almost double what they paid for it, in fact. The only companies willing to pay that much money are the ones who see some kind of strategic synergy with owning ARM. NVIDIA could have gotten CUDA into every smartphone's default graphics IP, and become kingmaker licensing one of the most important ISAs in the world. Not only would they not kill that "just to sell some more tegras", but actually it likely would have been a watershed moment of NVIDIA moving towards licensing their IP to external companies. This would have been the start of the pivot towards semicustom - just like AMD already does. People just don't want to accept that because of "green man bad syndrome". But NVIDIA isn't exactly what people always present them as either - they are moving towards open linux drivers, they opened up to adaptive sync, both of which people would have (and did) defend to the death would absolutely never happen, hell would freeze over. And now that they are, still, nothing is ever good enough - well they have a closed userland, they have blobs (which so does AMD, in linux-firmware), they have a security processor! Even if those things are also true of other brands... the green man bad field means it'll never be good enough. There were always two alternatives to NVIDIA buying it - another sugar-daddy with business synergy, someone like TSMC ("bundle deal if you get it fabbed here") or Samsung or someone like that that could pair it with some other aspect of their business. Or finally, Softbank just makes it actually turn a profit. Who pays for that? Well, big tech, and probably ultimately consumers too. Companies like Google and Amazon and Tesla have grown fat on the "pay almost nothing for this ISA, bolt on our accelerator, sell it for billions" while ARM gets nothing and that's never been sustainable in the long term. Companies like HDMI already do make private tech that is licensed per-device, and again, you can't even have HDMI 2.1 in linux on AMD because it's closed-source and they won't license it in a compatible way, while NVIDIA can offer support because of those blobs. Qualcomm requires similar per-device licensing on their modems too, and wireless/modem blobs are some of the most notoriously opaque/blobby peripherals too. People deal with it, pay the licenses, and move on. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417 And the "big tech forms a consortium and buys it and runs it as a nonprofit" was always a pipedream. Never going to happen, and none of the companies involved have any incentive to push tech forward in the same way as, say, Apple does. They just need it to be Good Enough And Cheap, and it already is. And scraping up $40b to keep it cheap is a bit of a mixed bag. Well, you didn't get NVIDIA. You did get big ARM layoffs (just as Jensen warned, and just as people scoffed at, ARM UK dropped 20% of their staff) and big price increases. Just as predicted. /shrug https://www.tomshardware.com/news/arm-uk-jobs-cut https://www.tomshardware.com/news/arm-uk-jobs-cut And yeah RISC-V exists and it's good to have an alternative to x86 and ARM too. There's a bit of a lifecycle here where they tend to get stagnant over time, maybe RISC-V being open-source will help that. But it also is going to be hell for ISA compatibility across vendors (a lot of the codes are deliberately left "vendor-defined") and there's a long way to go, RISC-V is where ARM was 10 years ago, and after companies pay to R&D to bring it up to speed, they're going to want a return on their investment too.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoobligatory "bold move Cotton"
- olliej 4y agoIt's worth noting that this is the argument Qualcomm uses for its "FRAND" licensing terms on its modem patents. I did like 'Arm has been "frustrated by customers’ reluctance to accept the new arrangement."' why ever would that be? why would customers not love this value proposition?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xt00 4y agoARM is so foundational, it should be bought by 3+ companies like Apple/Qualcomm/nvidia and turned into essentially a Chip ISA Lab where basically all of the companies that want to license stuff can pretty much do whatever they want and pay no licenses other than some set of dues that each company must pay each year to keep the thing alive. Then softbank gets its annoying payday for its dumb investment, and things can go back to how they were.
- kmeisthax 4y agoSo, funny story, that's actually how ARM started. Apple wanted to use the Acorn Archimedes chip - the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) - in the Newton. Acorn spun off the chip design part of the business and got VLSI in on the deal, in a business alliance structure very similar to the much more famous AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) alliance for PowerPC a year later. The problem here is that ARM's current owners - SoftBank - are starving and trying to eat their seed corn. The problem with a company like ARM is that's value is mainly that they don't take all the value of the widget. This is in contrast to, say, Intel or Nvidia who completely squeezed all the margin out of the PC business decades ago. Problem is, "we leave money on the table for our customers" is not something the stock market will buy, so they have to start squeezing. (Same reason why Nvidia tried to buy them.) Personally I don't see this being fixed unless ARM is either privately owned by someone who just has the money to burn on an FRAND-licensable architecture, or they get nationalized.
- klelatti 4y agoSeems like an appropriate point to give credit to Robin Saxby who, with help from Acorn and Apple - notably the late Larry Tesler, devised the strategy and who then energetically made it work. Saxby is a great, engaging, interviewee. https://youtube.com/watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI https://youtube.com/watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI
- kramerger 4y agoFirst of all, that is not how ARM started, because at that point "ARM" already existed :) The collaboration with Apple failed spectacularly. The only reason ARM is alive today is because Nokia and Ericsson needed a better CPU for their phones and ARM happened to be really power efficient (mainly by accident, but that's a story for another day).
- kmeisthax 4y agoThis adds context to the Qualcomm/ARM spat. ARM desperately wants to find anything to hold Nuvia hostage so that Qualcomm can be levered into the new charge-for-value licensing model. Before I was on the fence about the lawsuit - there were arguments on both sides that made sense. Now it feels like ARM is trying to pull various coins out of various vending machines.
- nayuki 4y agoI think Qualcomm already charges for value on its own customers, eh? I recall something about them taking royalties from device makers as a percentage of the full device price, not a fixed cost per chip. e.g. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-sues-qualcomm-for-1b-over-unfair-licensing-terms/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-sues-qualcomm-for-1b-...
- wyldfire 4y agoThey do indeed. but their argument was/is that their CDMA licenses made it so that your phone/tablet/etc design was feasible at all. ARM could make this claim too but in ARM's case, it doesn't have standard-essential patents required for network interoperability. That's the bit that pissed Apple off so much that they ordered their suppliers to stop paying the royalties.
- rektide 4y agoThis is such a huge-scale massively-disrupting event. I hope Intel & AMD try to play. I'd love to see ultra-small x86 cores & cut down Gpus come out to play. I tend to doubt x86 is inherently vastly worse. But it's also hard to imagine them wanting to march into a competitive down market where most phones cost less than the starting prices of their regular cpus. This is a huge chance for RISC-V but so far it has been an unserious competitor. Nothing big, nothing efficient, nothing on vaguely recent nodes. And there's just so so much more than cores at stake. Power management, coherency fabric, there's so many other things mobile chips are great at, tuned at. It's just wild that there's literally no one else out there.
- klelatti 4y agoIntel threw billions at trying to get x86 into mobile - and failed. They really don’t have the cash to try that again. AMD has been very successful but wouldn’t have the bandwidth to try this.
- xattt 4y ago> ultra-small x86 cores Is it actually possible to have performant x86 cores for handheld devices, or is that just the limitation of x86 with almost 50 years of legacy?
- margorczynski 4y agoWould also like to hear the answer from someone with a better grasp of the subject. I have a crude understanding of how basically a CPU works but the real-deal is probably orders of magnitude more complex and convoluted thanks to optimizations stacked on one another.
- shash 4y agoA statistic from the development of the Shakti platform[1] is that you can fit multiple RISC-V chips within the _decoder_ stage of a modern x86 alone. [1] https://shakti.org.in https://shakti.org.in
- 4y ago
- gorjusborg 4y agoThis might be tolerated in the short term, but the main story here is that their customers now have an incentive to find an alternative to ARM. Do you really want to risk your profit margins being held ransom?
- penguin_booze 4y agoMany moons ago, while I was ARM (note the casing), during a presentation given by someone in the upper management said that 'the guy who sells your phone screen guard makes more money than ARM do off a chip in that phone'. The message was that the margins were tight, and it was probably true. ARM is Arm now. More cool, more public, and a larger employer than it ever was. I hear that they did some pretty big salary correction recently--ARM engineers used to be paid non-competitive salaries, and there were mass exodus. Obviously, they now need to cover this cost somehow.