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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 t

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...

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...