7 ms·

Intel announces Arm investment, talks up RISC-V

150 points by klelatti 3y ago

mhh__ 3y ago
Intel can dig for gold and sell shovels here at the same time here. They have a long way to go (it will require a herculean effort by the leadership) but nonetheless the upside potential is huge.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  Will Nvidia do something similar? If not dig themselves, could they actually design and license derivatives of Risc-v? I don't know how licensing works here.
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    They could but they have a very strong relationship / want to acquire arm so it might not make much sense in today's terms — for Nvidia, Arm/RISC-V is more of a software thing and they've spent a lot of money making their drivers and toolchain work on Arm so similar. My point WRT shovels is selling fabrication, which Nvidia can't do, to be clear.
micvbang 3y ago
Somewhat related: I believe RISC-V is going to well in the coming decade. I've been trying to figure out what I can invest in to get exposed to it, but have been unable to find anything. If anybody had got any angles, I'd love to hear them!
- cinntaile 3y ago
  Then your actual bet is that RISC-V based products will outperform products based on competing ISAs, no?
  - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
    They might, on the basis of it being an open unencumbered ISA that will see a lot of investment from parties trying to get rid of Intel/ARM dependencies. Think of it a bit like what happened to JS. Being the open language the web runs, it saw immense competition from multiple particles and today we have a what should be a shitty dynamically typed prototype based scripting language outperform and outoptimize the likes of Java with its static classes and types in some scenarios.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      I would be wary about comparing software to hardware in this way. Open source software is generally only successful in cases when it's a cost center not the actual end product. I don't see how than can work when developing competitive CPU cores is extremely expensive. Why would anyone who does that make them free? (even licensing seems like a poor idea looking at ARMs business model).
    - alostpuppy 3y ago
      Just as God intended
    - mhh__ 3y ago
      Is JS faster than java? Also the web ecosystem is still basically a pile of shit on a few key metrics compared.to (say) boring Microsoft-land stuff a decade or 3 ago, so I'm not so sure if that's such a good argument.
  - voytec 3y ago
    It may not overpower other ISAs but could be attractive from the cost-effectiveness perspective.
    - cinntaile 3y ago
      I meant outperform in a general sense. It could be on cost-effectiveness, especially for low-margin chips. It would mean he'd invest in companies that make this transition, but I expect almost all low-margin producers to make this shift. High-margin we're probably looking at proprietary ISA extensions that they don't open source.
- prabhu-yu 3y ago
  .
  - dboreham 3y ago
    I thought parent was asking about potential stock investments that could be expected to do well based on future RISC-V popularity.
    - micvbang 3y ago
      You're right!
- photonbeam 3y ago
  You could buy private stock for some companies like SiFive on something like EquityZen. Other companies are already public, like Andes Look at names of companies that give talks at https://events.linuxfoundation.org/riscv-summit/ https://events.linuxfoundation.org/riscv-summit/
  - rwmj 3y ago
    I'm guessing most of the value will be taken by TSMC. They don't care who wins :-) This move is about Intel Foundry Services (IFS) trying to get some of that action. IFS is now operated separately from the x86 part of the company.
- mattnewton 3y ago
  Depends on where you think the value will accrue - Maybe cloud providers who are some of x86’s biggest customers today but would switch if workloads work there? But their bottom line is exposed to so many different things it’s not a clean bet. For the processors designers themselves, I wouldn’t bet outside value accrues to them since the instruction set is open and competition could be fierce. Another option would be to figure out who you think will be manufacturing the other peripherals needed to use RISC processors. Something like Supermicro on the server side (which benefitted hugely from a similar relationship making nvidia cards into servers), or find some supplier on whatever market you think will pop because of RISC-V (automotive, military systems, etc). Basically whoever turns these processors into finished systems is probably a good bet, but I haven’t done enough research to know who that would be.
  - micvbang 3y ago
    Thank you. Yes, I agree that it's a good idea to look for companies that create divided systems based on RISC-V. It's primarily these I've had trouble to identify :)
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    I can see AWS developing a risc-v based cpu, like with gravitons as a competing offer. disclaimer: this is pure speculation, I am not privy to any information, I am just a rando engineer.
    - dboreham 3y ago
      There's a vast amount of ocean boiling to do first, unless such a thing just emulates x86 or aarm64. It took until...tomorrow for me to be able to run my workloads on arm. That only happened (hasn't 100% happened yet) because we had RPi and then the M1 forcing all the dependency folks to ship arm builds. I've never seen a RISC-V docker container...
- upsidedownside 3y ago
  [dead]
- sobkas 3y ago
  I believe RISC-V will recreate balkanization and UNIX wars of the past. There will be just to much incentive for corporations to introduce closed/proprietary extension to distinguish themselves from their competitors. So either users would be forced to use only core specification(that would be not as competitive as new extensions) or be forced to choose extended ISA from one of big players.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    If that happens we will just end up with math libraries with tons of feature detection branches and the return of Gentoo.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    Yes. People upthread are talking about how corporations want to recreate the open software revolution with open hardware and this will (and already does) play out exactly like it has with open software: big vendors extract all the value from the product, contribute nothing back, and keep any cool features they come up with internal and proprietary. This is the problem with arm, it’s this foundational technology that underpins everything from Grace to Dojo and TPU and yet arm doesn’t make any fucking money. They lost money during the first year of the pandemic (and the two years prior iirc!) despite the boom in electronics sales! Nvidia buying arm for the synergy of forcing CUDA as the default arm graphics IP (and BYO for higher price) was the good ending. Nobody else is going to pay $40b for a company that makes 0.5b +/- 1b without some other synergy, and the other possibilities are companies like Samsung, tsmc, or Oracle with their own synergies. CUDA as an ai platform was absolutely a play that would be cashing out big right now if they had succeeded. Well, if it’s not nvidia (and it seems any other buyout would be equally unlikely to get approval) then SoftBank is just gonna have to make the existing licensees pay up, and cash out the business that way (revenue and then IPO). So there’s a lot of licensees who are going to find an extra zero on their TCO of ARM usage. That’s the reason you saw Qualcomm pitch a fit and start lying about the terms of their licensing deal last year. And google and meta and Amazon are equally upset. And they’re gonna start funding a competitor. Those companies (and the bulk android market) mostly don’t care about performance, this is the “cheapest thing that works” market. The accelerator (TPU etc) is the thing that really matters now. There may be a minimal amount of collaboration (ala Minix or CDDL) to build that common platform but that’s all they really care about, is some basic P-core and E-core designs. There is no incentive for Amazon to build processors that are way faster than googles, actually everyone is still selling vCPUs based on sandy bridge processing power. They’d rather make cheaper smaller CPUs (this is why zen4c and zen5c exist, in large part) than compete on performance or features. That’s just not where the secret sauce is, and it’s not where the revenue is. So we are going to see the same thing as the software space, where vendors take the fruit of risc-v, build their own stuff around it, and pay nothing and contribute nothing back. Everything important will live in proprietary, non-portable IP that doesn’t need to be shared under open terms. The same problems as always when you BSD/MIT license. The future is a google TPU that you are not allowed to purchase yourself, stamping on a human face endlessly. But the boot will be based on a core of open-source/open-license designs, how wonderful! (with the interesting parts living inside proprietary parts of the core ofc) Nvidia/CUDA dominance is way better than google platform-as-service that you can’t even run on-prem if you wanted to. And for all you can say about them, nvidia has never stopped pushing to the next thing, even when they had an insurmountable lead, and even when nobody else believed in the goal or saw where they were trying to go. Google and Amazon don’t benefit from pushing the limit like this, they just want cheap arm.micro instances and a host for their proprietary accelerators. The difference between BSD/MIT and GPL is fundamentally about who gets the freedom - BSD/MIT let developers do what they want with it, and that sometimes comes at the expense of user freedoms. And when google/Amazon/meta say they want free and open cores, they certainly don’t mean they’ll be giving away their IP. That’s arm’s predicament in a nutshell. Their business model lets other companies extract all the value and revenue. They’re this foundational technology that google/Amazon/meta make billions off of, and arm gets to lick the beaters. And any change to this model is is going to piss off enormous amounts of people, not least google/Amazon/meta. And arm’s play is “ok but if we don’t contribute anything worth paying for, then you won’t mind switching”. There is no BATNA for arm licensees right now. Long term this could mean arm being knocked off its pillar. But that could happen anyway too, eg with the nvidia merger perhaps.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  Invest in companies making esoteric accelerators, like Fujitsu, Marvell, Broadcomm, probably many more I don't know about. RISC-V is going to show up more and more in heavily customized stuff like HPC chips or networking accelerators before it starts replacing Xeons, as (right now) thats what its best suited for. Look up what Jim Keller said about RISC-V usage for Tenstorrent and how ARM just doesn't allow for the kind of customization these specialized designs need from a standardized ISA.
- spiralpolitik 3y ago
  Look into the fabs that make RISC-V processors. At some point Intel Foundry Service will be spun off as a separate company, so invest in that when it happens. Disclaimer: Not investment advice.
roughly 3y ago
To be honest, it’s a little hard to really take this seriously. The number of times I’ve watched Intel make Serious Declarations of Significant Strategic Realignments in the last decade or so only to watch them inevitably shed all the new divisions and product lines to Focus On Core Products makes it hard to really give this the attention it might warrant.
- oldgradstudent 3y ago
  It's not just the last decade Does anyone remember ViiV, or explain what exactly it was?
  - paulmd 3y ago
    just looks like centrino or the multimedia PC standard: a basket of technologies (and like centrino/ultrabook, all intel ones) that define a standard for media PCs and set-top hardware that would support a certain distribution model. now of course a lot of people didn't get what centrino was either (or what vpro is today!). it's a little hard to market these hardware standards when it's not something obvious like "the multimedia PC standard" that consumers grok. But it's the same kind of idea: we're going to need X, Y and Z hardware and feature support to do this workload or customer use-case. If your PC has it, then it's Centrino/Ultrabook/whatever! But again I think it's true that people respond more intuitively to the idea of branding the product and not the platform. "Ultrabook" or “Multimedia PC Level 3” makes more sense as a concept to people than "Centrino" or "Viiv". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Viiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Viiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_vPro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_vPro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook
    - MenhirMike 3y ago
      Centrino was an absolute slam-dunk success that did significantly bring x86 laptop computers forward (it may not be complete hyperbole to say that the Pentium M is the most important Intel CPU of this century), but in some ways it became obsolete by its own success: As all laptop manufacturers followed and gave us Ultrabooks that were amazing, Centrino as a brand didn't become a differentiator anymore, and Viiv just wasn't offering anything important enough - though the brand made perfect sense, given how hot Media Center PCs were for a short while.
meepmorp 3y ago
Oh wow, it's xscale again.
mhandley 3y ago
Seems like this is mostly about making sure that Intel Foundry customers who will inevitably use lots of ARM processors are well supported.
- rwmj 3y ago
  This is exactly the reason. There are now (in all but corporate legality) two Intels, the one that makes x86 and the one that runs the foundries. Most RISC-V was going to be made on TSMC, and Intel Foundry Services (IFS) wants a piece.
jmclnx 3y ago
No, I do not want Intel to touch anything associated with RISC-V. I do not want to see Intel MI cloned into RISC-V (and other backdoors), nevermind all the SMT Issues Intel is having.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Too late, see Horse Creek.
drexlspivey 3y ago
ARM is preparing to IPO next week, their main business is collecting license fees. Here are last year’s income statement: Revenue: $2.67B (down from 2.7) Gross profit margin: 96% Net Profit: $524m And they are planning to IPO at a valuation of 60-70 billion dollars! Thats a P/E of 130 and a P/S of 25. Frankly this is ridiculous for a company that collects license fees, there is no potential for massive growth, all smartphones are using ARM chips already and their biggest client has a perpetual license already. Why is it valued like a tech startup? This is Softbank dumping on retail and they somehow got Apple and Intel to buy a small piece of the IPO (700m combined).
- tester756 3y ago
  Do I understand ARM's business? They rely on people wanting to design their own ~~ships~~ chips So if we assume that their ecosystem is healthly and mature at this moment, then there's potential that customers wanting to design their own stuff will go to them. So until RISC-V matures, then they'll be making profits, yup? But is there growth potential? Are companies really interested in designing their own chips except a few startups that already license from them and probably google/amazon/whatever that need highly specialized chips, but already license from them? What I'm missing?
  - Veserv 3y ago
    Generally speaking, ARM sells chip blueprints in return for a royalty on every chip manufactured using their blueprints (or designed to be compatible). Their growth potential is more chips being made using their blueprints or getting a higher royalty per chip manufactured.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    > then there's potential that customers wanting to design their own stuff will go to them. There is plenty of evidence that anyone 'wanting to design their own stuff' are targeting RISC-V. Licencing ARM for that sort of thing is both costly and a pain in the arse and a distraction from actual processor development. You dismiss startups, but the ripest growth market for processors is in AI accelerators and they are predominantly RISC-V based in the startup world. RISC-V is growing fast and has a structural advantage to ARM's ISA monopoly, in that sense it is a real danger to ARM's business model.
nickdothutton 3y ago
I’m old enough to remember the 1997/8 Intel deal with ARM. https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1998/CN022398.HTM https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1998/CN0223...
SilverBirch 3y ago
This may seem like a dumb question: Do we know how much Intel is paying? I can understand Intel wanting to invest.... but at what price and how much? Because I could imagine Softbank (who seem pretty desparate at this point) punting off big chunks of the company at a discount simply to try and trick retail into inesting. It's certainly not ethical, is it legal?
joachimma 3y ago
Anyone have some insight into why RISC-V seems to be getting traction? Has there not been prior attempts to make an open source cpu? Is there a lot of skill in making the ISA? It seems to me (naively) that most talented EE students could probably come up with their own ISA, or is there some "magic" in the RISC-V one? I assume that there are a reference implementations in VHDL/Verilog and Cadence and good support in compilers. Is this what pushed through, where others failed?
- spiralpolitik 3y ago
  The big part is royalty-free open-source licenses. If you don't want to pay ARM for an ISA and RISC-V is good enough for your needs then RISC-V might be for you. Plus there are limitations on which countries the latest ARM designs can be shipped to. RISC-V has no such limitation. The RISC-V Foundation is based in Switzerland and so isn't subject to US trade sanctions.
- photonbeam 3y ago
  Nvidia trying to purchase Arm got a lot of companies noticing that they have a sole-source provider, and instead want options
- askvictor 3y ago
  ARM also license chip designs that implement the architecture. Not quite sure, but I think they'll do (for a fee) much of the process of making a chip that doesn't involve the fab.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  Because it's a free, well designed, clean and simple ISA.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  ARM had some blunders with licensing changes for one, and then the split with ARM China was bad. Price plays a part. The next thing is that several open designs, including the reference design from Berkley, did very well at optimizing the most common instructions on which easily 90% of computation actually happens. As a result, very early RISC-V silicon showed seriously good performance at extremely low cost. As things are now, RISC-V is becoming increasingly competitive with ARM and x86 with amazing rapidity. There will be a few more hurdles in making RISC-V as performant as x86 or ARM, but given the ISA's open source nature, many eyes will make all bugs shallow.
gavinray 3y ago
I'm 26 and I don't know anything about finance or stocks. I've never invested before and I'm planning on purchasing ARM stock the day they IPO. Is this a bad idea? I was planning on investing a sizeable chunk of my savings.
- wskinner 3y ago
  Yes. If you know nothing about investing, the best thing you can do is read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street". It's quick and easy and explains why beating the market by picking stocks is not a great way to invest.
  - qznc 3y ago
    For people who prefer a website over a book, this is a solid place to start: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page
- Varloom 3y ago
  Softbank are dumping their shares in ARM while at peak valuation, before RISC-V eats its market share (they saw it coming, that's why they are rushing to IPO before rise of RISC-V). Most big ARM clients are dumping ARM for RISC-V. Including, Qualcomm: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/qualcomm-one-of-arms-biggest-customers-starts-a-risc-v-joint-venture/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/qualcomm-one-of-arms... Google (Converting whole Android system to support RISC-V): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-announces-official-android-support-for-risc-v/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-announces-off... And Samsung : https://research.samsung.com/news/Samsung-Electronics-Participates-in-RISE-an-Open-Source-Project-for-Enabling-Software-Ecosystem-of-RISC-V https://research.samsung.com/news/Samsung-Electronics-Partic... When you want to invest look for the underdog, not a company that has it's market share ready to be eaten alive by RISC-V in the coming 5-10 years.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3y ago
dikaio 3y ago
Short

150 points by klelatti 3y ago

Intel can dig for gold and sell shovels here at the same time here. They have a long way to go (it will require a herculean effort by the leadership) but nonetheless the upside potential is huge.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
Will Nvidia do something similar? If not dig themselves, could they actually design and license derivatives of Risc-v? I don't know how licensing works here.
- mhh__ 3y ago
  They could but they have a very strong relationship / want to acquire arm so it might not make much sense in today's terms — for Nvidia, Arm/RISC-V is more of a software thing and they've spent a lot of money making their drivers and toolchain work on Arm so similar. My point WRT shovels is selling fabrication, which Nvidia can't do, to be clear.

micvbang 3y ago

Somewhat related: I believe RISC-V is going to well in the coming decade. I've been trying to figure out what I can invest in to get exposed to it, but have been unable to find anything. If anybody had got any angles, I'd love to hear them!

cinntaile 3y ago
Then your actual bet is that RISC-V based products will outperform products based on competing ISAs, no?
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  They might, on the basis of it being an open unencumbered ISA that will see a lot of investment from parties trying to get rid of Intel/ARM dependencies. Think of it a bit like what happened to JS. Being the open language the web runs, it saw immense competition from multiple particles and today we have a what should be a shitty dynamically typed prototype based scripting language outperform and outoptimize the likes of Java with its static classes and types in some scenarios.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    I would be wary about comparing software to hardware in this way. Open source software is generally only successful in cases when it's a cost center not the actual end product. I don't see how than can work when developing competitive CPU cores is extremely expensive. Why would anyone who does that make them free? (even licensing seems like a poor idea looking at ARMs business model).
  - alostpuppy 3y ago
    Just as God intended
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    Is JS faster than java? Also the web ecosystem is still basically a pile of shit on a few key metrics compared.to (say) boring Microsoft-land stuff a decade or 3 ago, so I'm not so sure if that's such a good argument.
- voytec 3y ago
  It may not overpower other ISAs but could be attractive from the cost-effectiveness perspective.
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    I meant outperform in a general sense. It could be on cost-effectiveness, especially for low-margin chips. It would mean he'd invest in companies that make this transition, but I expect almost all low-margin producers to make this shift. High-margin we're probably looking at proprietary ISA extensions that they don't open source.
prabhu-yu 3y ago
.
- dboreham 3y ago
  I thought parent was asking about potential stock investments that could be expected to do well based on future RISC-V popularity.
  - micvbang 3y ago
    You're right!
photonbeam 3y ago
You could buy private stock for some companies like SiFive on something like EquityZen. Other companies are already public, like Andes Look at names of companies that give talks at https://events.linuxfoundation.org/riscv-summit/ https://events.linuxfoundation.org/riscv-summit/
- rwmj 3y ago
  I'm guessing most of the value will be taken by TSMC. They don't care who wins :-) This move is about Intel Foundry Services (IFS) trying to get some of that action. IFS is now operated separately from the x86 part of the company.
mattnewton 3y ago
Depends on where you think the value will accrue - Maybe cloud providers who are some of x86’s biggest customers today but would switch if workloads work there? But their bottom line is exposed to so many different things it’s not a clean bet. For the processors designers themselves, I wouldn’t bet outside value accrues to them since the instruction set is open and competition could be fierce. Another option would be to figure out who you think will be manufacturing the other peripherals needed to use RISC processors. Something like Supermicro on the server side (which benefitted hugely from a similar relationship making nvidia cards into servers), or find some supplier on whatever market you think will pop because of RISC-V (automotive, military systems, etc). Basically whoever turns these processors into finished systems is probably a good bet, but I haven’t done enough research to know who that would be.
- micvbang 3y ago
  Thank you. Yes, I agree that it's a good idea to look for companies that create divided systems based on RISC-V. It's primarily these I've had trouble to identify :)
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  I can see AWS developing a risc-v based cpu, like with gravitons as a competing offer. disclaimer: this is pure speculation, I am not privy to any information, I am just a rando engineer.
  - dboreham 3y ago
    There's a vast amount of ocean boiling to do first, unless such a thing just emulates x86 or aarm64. It took until...tomorrow for me to be able to run my workloads on arm. That only happened (hasn't 100% happened yet) because we had RPi and then the M1 forcing all the dependency folks to ship arm builds. I've never seen a RISC-V docker container...
upsidedownside 3y ago
[dead]
sobkas 3y ago
I believe RISC-V will recreate balkanization and UNIX wars of the past. There will be just to much incentive for corporations to introduce closed/proprietary extension to distinguish themselves from their competitors. So either users would be forced to use only core specification(that would be not as competitive as new extensions) or be forced to choose extended ISA from one of big players.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  If that happens we will just end up with math libraries with tons of feature detection branches and the return of Gentoo.
- paulmd 3y ago
  Yes. People upthread are talking about how corporations want to recreate the open software revolution with open hardware and this will (and already does) play out exactly like it has with open software: big vendors extract all the value from the product, contribute nothing back, and keep any cool features they come up with internal and proprietary. This is the problem with arm, it’s this foundational technology that underpins everything from Grace to Dojo and TPU and yet arm doesn’t make any fucking money. They lost money during the first year of the pandemic (and the two years prior iirc!) despite the boom in electronics sales! Nvidia buying arm for the synergy of forcing CUDA as the default arm graphics IP (and BYO for higher price) was the good ending. Nobody else is going to pay $40b for a company that makes 0.5b +/- 1b without some other synergy, and the other possibilities are companies like Samsung, tsmc, or Oracle with their own synergies. CUDA as an ai platform was absolutely a play that would be cashing out big right now if they had succeeded. Well, if it’s not nvidia (and it seems any other buyout would be equally unlikely to get approval) then SoftBank is just gonna have to make the existing licensees pay up, and cash out the business that way (revenue and then IPO). So there’s a lot of licensees who are going to find an extra zero on their TCO of ARM usage. That’s the reason you saw Qualcomm pitch a fit and start lying about the terms of their licensing deal last year. And google and meta and Amazon are equally upset. And they’re gonna start funding a competitor. Those companies (and the bulk android market) mostly don’t care about performance, this is the “cheapest thing that works” market. The accelerator (TPU etc) is the thing that really matters now. There may be a minimal amount of collaboration (ala Minix or CDDL) to build that common platform but that’s all they really care about, is some basic P-core and E-core designs. There is no incentive for Amazon to build processors that are way faster than googles, actually everyone is still selling vCPUs based on sandy bridge processing power. They’d rather make cheaper smaller CPUs (this is why zen4c and zen5c exist, in large part) than compete on performance or features. That’s just not where the secret sauce is, and it’s not where the revenue is. So we are going to see the same thing as the software space, where vendors take the fruit of risc-v, build their own stuff around it, and pay nothing and contribute nothing back. Everything important will live in proprietary, non-portable IP that doesn’t need to be shared under open terms. The same problems as always when you BSD/MIT license. The future is a google TPU that you are not allowed to purchase yourself, stamping on a human face endlessly. But the boot will be based on a core of open-source/open-license designs, how wonderful! (with the interesting parts living inside proprietary parts of the core ofc) Nvidia/CUDA dominance is way better than google platform-as-service that you can’t even run on-prem if you wanted to. And for all you can say about them, nvidia has never stopped pushing to the next thing, even when they had an insurmountable lead, and even when nobody else believed in the goal or saw where they were trying to go. Google and Amazon don’t benefit from pushing the limit like this, they just want cheap arm.micro instances and a host for their proprietary accelerators. The difference between BSD/MIT and GPL is fundamentally about who gets the freedom - BSD/MIT let developers do what they want with it, and that sometimes comes at the expense of user freedoms. And when google/Amazon/meta say they want free and open cores, they certainly don’t mean they’ll be giving away their IP. That’s arm’s predicament in a nutshell. Their business model lets other companies extract all the value and revenue. They’re this foundational technology that google/Amazon/meta make billions off of, and arm gets to lick the beaters. And any change to this model is is going to piss off enormous amounts of people, not least google/Amazon/meta. And arm’s play is “ok but if we don’t contribute anything worth paying for, then you won’t mind switching”. There is no BATNA for arm licensees right now. Long term this could mean arm being knocked off its pillar. But that could happen anyway too, eg with the nvidia merger perhaps.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Invest in companies making esoteric accelerators, like Fujitsu, Marvell, Broadcomm, probably many more I don't know about. RISC-V is going to show up more and more in heavily customized stuff like HPC chips or networking accelerators before it starts replacing Xeons, as (right now) thats what its best suited for. Look up what Jim Keller said about RISC-V usage for Tenstorrent and how ARM just doesn't allow for the kind of customization these specialized designs need from a standardized ISA.
spiralpolitik 3y ago
Look into the fabs that make RISC-V processors. At some point Intel Foundry Service will be spun off as a separate company, so invest in that when it happens. Disclaimer: Not investment advice.

roughly 3y ago

To be honest, it’s a little hard to really take this seriously. The number of times I’ve watched Intel make Serious Declarations of Significant Strategic Realignments in the last decade or so only to watch them inevitably shed all the new divisions and product lines to Focus On Core Products makes it hard to really give this the attention it might warrant.

oldgradstudent 3y ago
It's not just the last decade Does anyone remember ViiV, or explain what exactly it was?
- paulmd 3y ago
  just looks like centrino or the multimedia PC standard: a basket of technologies (and like centrino/ultrabook, all intel ones) that define a standard for media PCs and set-top hardware that would support a certain distribution model. now of course a lot of people didn't get what centrino was either (or what vpro is today!). it's a little hard to market these hardware standards when it's not something obvious like "the multimedia PC standard" that consumers grok. But it's the same kind of idea: we're going to need X, Y and Z hardware and feature support to do this workload or customer use-case. If your PC has it, then it's Centrino/Ultrabook/whatever! But again I think it's true that people respond more intuitively to the idea of branding the product and not the platform. "Ultrabook" or “Multimedia PC Level 3” makes more sense as a concept to people than "Centrino" or "Viiv". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Viiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Viiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_vPro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_vPro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook
  - MenhirMike 3y ago
    Centrino was an absolute slam-dunk success that did significantly bring x86 laptop computers forward (it may not be complete hyperbole to say that the Pentium M is the most important Intel CPU of this century), but in some ways it became obsolete by its own success: As all laptop manufacturers followed and gave us Ultrabooks that were amazing, Centrino as a brand didn't become a differentiator anymore, and Viiv just wasn't offering anything important enough - though the brand made perfect sense, given how hot Media Center PCs were for a short while.

meepmorp 3y ago

Oh wow, it's xscale again.

mhandley 3y ago

Seems like this is mostly about making sure that Intel Foundry customers who will inevitably use lots of ARM processors are well supported.

rwmj 3y ago
This is exactly the reason. There are now (in all but corporate legality) two Intels, the one that makes x86 and the one that runs the foundries. Most RISC-V was going to be made on TSMC, and Intel Foundry Services (IFS) wants a piece.

jmclnx 3y ago

No, I do not want Intel to touch anything associated with RISC-V. I do not want to see Intel MI cloned into RISC-V (and other backdoors), nevermind all the SMT Issues Intel is having.

BirAdam 3y ago
Too late, see Horse Creek.

drexlspivey 3y ago

ARM is preparing to IPO next week, their main business is collecting license fees. Here are last year’s income statement: Revenue: $2.67B (down from 2.7) Gross profit margin: 96% Net Profit: $524m And they are planning to IPO at a valuation of 60-70 billion dollars! Thats a P/E of 130 and a P/S of 25. Frankly this is ridiculous for a company that collects license fees, there is no potential for massive growth, all smartphones are using ARM chips already and their biggest client has a perpetual license already. Why is it valued like a tech startup? This is Softbank dumping on retail and they somehow got Apple and Intel to buy a small piece of the IPO (700m combined).

tester756 3y ago
Do I understand ARM's business? They rely on people wanting to design their own ~~ships~~ chips So if we assume that their ecosystem is healthly and mature at this moment, then there's potential that customers wanting to design their own stuff will go to them. So until RISC-V matures, then they'll be making profits, yup? But is there growth potential? Are companies really interested in designing their own chips except a few startups that already license from them and probably google/amazon/whatever that need highly specialized chips, but already license from them? What I'm missing?
- Veserv 3y ago
  Generally speaking, ARM sells chip blueprints in return for a royalty on every chip manufactured using their blueprints (or designed to be compatible). Their growth potential is more chips being made using their blueprints or getting a higher royalty per chip manufactured.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  > then there's potential that customers wanting to design their own stuff will go to them. There is plenty of evidence that anyone 'wanting to design their own stuff' are targeting RISC-V. Licencing ARM for that sort of thing is both costly and a pain in the arse and a distraction from actual processor development. You dismiss startups, but the ripest growth market for processors is in AI accelerators and they are predominantly RISC-V based in the startup world. RISC-V is growing fast and has a structural advantage to ARM's ISA monopoly, in that sense it is a real danger to ARM's business model.

nickdothutton 3y ago

I’m old enough to remember the 1997/8 Intel deal with ARM. https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1998/CN022398.HTM https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1998/CN0223...

SilverBirch 3y ago

This may seem like a dumb question: Do we know how much Intel is paying? I can understand Intel wanting to invest.... but at what price and how much? Because I could imagine Softbank (who seem pretty desparate at this point) punting off big chunks of the company at a discount simply to try and trick retail into inesting. It's certainly not ethical, is it legal?

joachimma 3y ago

Anyone have some insight into why RISC-V seems to be getting traction? Has there not been prior attempts to make an open source cpu? Is there a lot of skill in making the ISA? It seems to me (naively) that most talented EE students could probably come up with their own ISA, or is there some "magic" in the RISC-V one? I assume that there are a reference implementations in VHDL/Verilog and Cadence and good support in compilers. Is this what pushed through, where others failed?

spiralpolitik 3y ago
The big part is royalty-free open-source licenses. If you don't want to pay ARM for an ISA and RISC-V is good enough for your needs then RISC-V might be for you. Plus there are limitations on which countries the latest ARM designs can be shipped to. RISC-V has no such limitation. The RISC-V Foundation is based in Switzerland and so isn't subject to US trade sanctions.
photonbeam 3y ago
Nvidia trying to purchase Arm got a lot of companies noticing that they have a sole-source provider, and instead want options
askvictor 3y ago
ARM also license chip designs that implement the architecture. Not quite sure, but I think they'll do (for a fee) much of the process of making a chip that doesn't involve the fab.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
Because it's a free, well designed, clean and simple ISA.
BirAdam 3y ago
ARM had some blunders with licensing changes for one, and then the split with ARM China was bad. Price plays a part. The next thing is that several open designs, including the reference design from Berkley, did very well at optimizing the most common instructions on which easily 90% of computation actually happens. As a result, very early RISC-V silicon showed seriously good performance at extremely low cost. As things are now, RISC-V is becoming increasingly competitive with ARM and x86 with amazing rapidity. There will be a few more hurdles in making RISC-V as performant as x86 or ARM, but given the ISA's open source nature, many eyes will make all bugs shallow.

gavinray 3y ago

I'm 26 and I don't know anything about finance or stocks. I've never invested before and I'm planning on purchasing ARM stock the day they IPO. Is this a bad idea? I was planning on investing a sizeable chunk of my savings.

wskinner 3y ago
Yes. If you know nothing about investing, the best thing you can do is read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street". It's quick and easy and explains why beating the market by picking stocks is not a great way to invest.
- qznc 3y ago
  For people who prefer a website over a book, this is a solid place to start: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page
Varloom 3y ago
Softbank are dumping their shares in ARM while at peak valuation, before RISC-V eats its market share (they saw it coming, that's why they are rushing to IPO before rise of RISC-V). Most big ARM clients are dumping ARM for RISC-V. Including, Qualcomm: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/qualcomm-one-of-arms-biggest-customers-starts-a-risc-v-joint-venture/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/qualcomm-one-of-arms... Google (Converting whole Android system to support RISC-V): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-announces-official-android-support-for-risc-v/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-announces-off... And Samsung : https://research.samsung.com/news/Samsung-Electronics-Participates-in-RISE-an-Open-Source-Project-for-Enabling-Software-Ecosystem-of-RISC-V https://research.samsung.com/news/Samsung-Electronics-Partic... When you want to invest look for the underdog, not a company that has it's market share ready to be eaten alive by RISC-V in the coming 5-10 years.
- deleted 3y ago
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- 3y ago

dikaio 3y ago

Short