5 ms·

Where is Arm's moat? Is it on the software or the hardware ecosystem side?

smoldesu 4y ago
Hardware, 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 ago
  Both 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 ago
    Apple 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.
      - sottol 4y ago
        Then I wouldn't be surprised if they also had a long-term, iron-clad license at fixed cost.
        klelatti 4y ago
        Agreed. Although not the mythical perpetual free license which lots of people seem to assume.
    - shjake 4y ago
      They’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 ago
        I 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 ago
        I 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 ago
    Not 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      Do not forget the Espressif, as they have shipped multiple generations of ESP32 MCUs based on RISC-V cores already.
  - mmoskal 4y ago
Gibbon1 4y ago
I 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.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  I don't think they are talking about the microcontroller (Cortex-M) business, this is about ARMv8/9 in smartphones, tablets, computers. What the two have in common is the name "ARM".
  - Gibbon1 4y ago
    Those products are even worse because they get redesigned on a ongoing basis.
brigade 4y ago
Designing 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 ago
  Companies 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 ago
Well 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.

Hardware, 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 ago
Both 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 ago
  Apple 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.
    - sottol 4y ago
      Then I wouldn't be surprised if they also had a long-term, iron-clad license at fixed cost.
      - klelatti 4y ago
        Agreed. Although not the mythical perpetual free license which lots of people seem to assume.
  - shjake 4y ago
    They’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 ago
      I 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 ago
        I 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 ago
  Not 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Do not forget the Espressif, as they have shipped multiple generations of ESP32 MCUs based on RISC-V cores already.
- mmoskal 4y ago

Gibbon1 4y ago

I 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.

jeremyjh 4y ago
I don't think they are talking about the microcontroller (Cortex-M) business, this is about ARMv8/9 in smartphones, tablets, computers. What the two have in common is the name "ARM".
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  Those products are even worse because they get redesigned on a ongoing basis.

brigade 4y ago

Designing 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 ago
Companies 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 ago

Well 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.