5 ms·

ARM 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 com

by xt00 4y ago

ARM 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 ago
So, 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 ago
  Seems 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 ago
  First 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).
  - klelatti 4y ago
    That's a slightly roundabout way of saying that Arm built the best microprocessor design for the fast growing mobile market. A design that was a factor in Nokia getting to No. 1 in the handset market. The 'happened' on power consumption is true on day 1 in 1985, but the Arm team continued to keep power consumption low and added features, such as Thumb, that won Nokia and others over. Shameless self plug for more on this stage of the Arm story: https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/the-arm-story-part-3-creating-a-global-1b0 https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/the-arm-story-part-3-cr...
Beached 4y ago
isn't that why RISC exists?
- shash 4y ago
  You mean RISC-V I suppose? It doesn’t _exist_ because of this, but it’s definitely getting a lot of attention because of this.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    ARM is a mess as an architecture ( every ARM has different ISA, you need blobs for the majority of it to make it work and OS support is lacking). RISC-V is almost nonexistent (where can i buy one at a reasonable price? ) and it seems that it has the same fragmentation problem.
    - brucehoult 4y ago
      >RISC-V is almost nonexistent Over 10 billion shipped so far. Chances are you're using a few without realising it. Got an Android phone made since 2019? Qualcomm has shipped 650 million Snapdragon SoCs with RISC-V in them. Got a WD hard drive? Got an NVidia GPU made in the last five years or so? > where can i buy one at a reasonable price? What are you after, exactly? 50 chips for $5? https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005005036714708.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005005036714708.html A quad core 1.5 GHz Linux SBC at near Raspberry Pi price? https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-StarFive-VisionFive2-Computer-Version/dp/B0BQJ1K9VK https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-StarFive-VisionFive2-Comput... Those are the extremes of the mainstream range you can buy right now. Considerably higher performance is rolling out all year, including many-core (e.g. 64) OoO server chips.
    - piperswe 4y ago
      In fact, one of the main reasons for RISC-V's existence is fragmentation - the ISA is meant to be extended and not meant to be one-size-fits-all. The core of the ISA is designed for everything from microcontrollers to supercomputers, but extensions tend to fall closer to one side of that.

by xt00 4y ago

kmeisthax 4y ago

So, 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 ago
Seems 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 ago
First 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).
- klelatti 4y ago
  That's a slightly roundabout way of saying that Arm built the best microprocessor design for the fast growing mobile market. A design that was a factor in Nokia getting to No. 1 in the handset market. The 'happened' on power consumption is true on day 1 in 1985, but the Arm team continued to keep power consumption low and added features, such as Thumb, that won Nokia and others over. Shameless self plug for more on this stage of the Arm story: https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/the-arm-story-part-3-creating-a-global-1b0 https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/the-arm-story-part-3-cr...

Beached 4y ago

isn't that why RISC exists?

shash 4y ago
You mean RISC-V I suppose? It doesn’t _exist_ because of this, but it’s definitely getting a lot of attention because of this.
- hulitu 4y ago
  ARM is a mess as an architecture ( every ARM has different ISA, you need blobs for the majority of it to make it work and OS support is lacking). RISC-V is almost nonexistent (where can i buy one at a reasonable price? ) and it seems that it has the same fragmentation problem.
  - brucehoult 4y ago
    >RISC-V is almost nonexistent Over 10 billion shipped so far. Chances are you're using a few without realising it. Got an Android phone made since 2019? Qualcomm has shipped 650 million Snapdragon SoCs with RISC-V in them. Got a WD hard drive? Got an NVidia GPU made in the last five years or so? > where can i buy one at a reasonable price? What are you after, exactly? 50 chips for $5? https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005005036714708.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005005036714708.html A quad core 1.5 GHz Linux SBC at near Raspberry Pi price? https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-StarFive-VisionFive2-Computer-Version/dp/B0BQJ1K9VK https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-StarFive-VisionFive2-Comput... Those are the extremes of the mainstream range you can buy right now. Considerably higher performance is rolling out all year, including many-core (e.g. 64) OoO server chips.
  - piperswe 4y ago
    In fact, one of the main reasons for RISC-V's existence is fragmentation - the ISA is meant to be extended and not meant to be one-size-fits-all. The core of the ISA is designed for everything from microcontrollers to supercomputers, but extensions tend to fall closer to one side of that.