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This emphasis on price is a bit misleading imho. Arm had revenues of less than $800m in the last reported quarter and there were 8 billion Arm cores shipped. So
by klelatti 4y ago
This emphasis on price is a bit misleading imho. Arm had revenues of less than $800m in the last reported quarter and there were 8 billion Arm cores shipped. So that’s less than 10c per core. And that’s not the fee for the ISA it’s the total cost of licensing the core. So if you’re expecting a big cost saving on the end user price from the ISA being open source then you’ll be likely to be disappointed.
More important is that more competition may lead to better designs and the RISC-V gives more freedom for firms to innovate.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago10¢ is significant on the low end. This is where RISC-V will chip away at ARM.
- klelatti 4y ago10c is an average of course but yes eg WD
- jbverschoor 4y agoI don’t think apple had to pay fees
- klelatti 4y agoI think that’s an urban myth. They (and Acorn) had to pay fees in the early days of Arm and no reason why that would change.
- brucehoult 4y ago$745m, their highest ever. $2.74 billion for the year. Not chicken feed. As for the 10c a core on average, there will be billions of 1c/core royalties for things you don't even realise have a CPU in them, and tens of millions of much much higher royalties on the kinds of chips that go into smartphones and SBCs. Maybe as much as $10 a chip?
- klelatti 4y agoNo your numbers are wrong (1) by an order of magnitude. The cost per smartphone equivalent CPU will be around $1 and that’s for the whole design not the ISA. [1] tens of millions is wrong and it clearly not true that Arm charges ‘as much as $10’ for an SBC that will cost $40 retail.
- brucehoult 4y agoThere are phones that cost $1000. Apple sells 70 or 80 million phones per quarter and they are only a small fraction of the market. Android phones sell over a billion a year.
- klelatti 4y agoSo if there are over a billion phones sold per year Arm clearly don’t charge anywhere near $10 per smartphone CPU.
- brucehoult 4y agoNot on average, obviously. But most phones sold are low end. I bet Arm gets a lot more than $1 from ARMv9 Snapdragon 8 gen 1/2 with the very latest cores.
- klelatti 4y agoSo you’re complaining that Arm make more than a dollar on the latest multi core CPU on an absolutely top end smartphone that retails for probably near $1000. Seems like a perfectly reasonable deal to me!
- brucehoult 4y agoWho is complaining? I'm merely pointing out that not all those cores are licensed for 10c each. Many go for a lot less, some go for a lot more. It's been a struggle but I'd glad we agree on that now. Now we can discuss what the scope is for RISC-V companies to charge for cores or chips. Jim Keller said yesterday that in 2024 his company will have an 8-wide RISC-V core, on a chip, that performs on a par with Apple M1/M2 and Zen 5. Performance gap between RISC-V and x86 down to zero. I suspect that in 2024 he means expensive shuttle run chips. But working and able to be demoed. Mass-production chips are usually 12-24 months later.