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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

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.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  > There is plenty of evidence that anyone 'wanting to design their own stuff' are targeting RISC-V. At the moment there isn’t though. Really there is basically none. The largest ecosystems making their own chips are using ARM right now, not RISCV.
  - brucehoult 3y ago
    The largest ecosystems that are deployed as production hardware right now, sure. That's because designing a high performance core takes several years, and then getting it into a chip, tested, into mass production, and in to computers in stores or data centres takes another three or four years. RISC-V has only existed as a frozen (ratified) base ISA for four years and a couple of months, and a lot of extra stuff that you want in applications processors for phones or PCs was ratified in November 2021, less than two years ago. You're not going to see a lot of products with the late 2021 stuff until 2025 or 2026. In terms of people starting projects now, or recently, that is indeed mostly RISC-V.
DesiLurker 3y ago
purely from investment perspective the scaling RISC-V development provides a hard cap on the how aggressive their pricing policy can be. At this point all major SoC companies have some interest/activity in RISC-V development so I doubt ARM is is in any form of monopoly position. with basically negates any significant stock growth opportunity. Given that era of cheap/easy money is done I really doubt anything good will come out for the IPO holders. this is just finding a bag-holder.

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

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.

edgyquant 3y ago
> There is plenty of evidence that anyone 'wanting to design their own stuff' are targeting RISC-V. At the moment there isn’t though. Really there is basically none. The largest ecosystems making their own chips are using ARM right now, not RISCV.
- brucehoult 3y ago
  The largest ecosystems that are deployed as production hardware right now, sure. That's because designing a high performance core takes several years, and then getting it into a chip, tested, into mass production, and in to computers in stores or data centres takes another three or four years. RISC-V has only existed as a frozen (ratified) base ISA for four years and a couple of months, and a lot of extra stuff that you want in applications processors for phones or PCs was ratified in November 2021, less than two years ago. You're not going to see a lot of products with the late 2021 stuff until 2025 or 2026. In terms of people starting projects now, or recently, that is indeed mostly RISC-V.

DesiLurker 3y ago

purely from investment perspective the scaling RISC-V development provides a hard cap on the how aggressive their pricing policy can be. At this point all major SoC companies have some interest/activity in RISC-V development so I doubt ARM is is in any form of monopoly position. with basically negates any significant stock growth opportunity. Given that era of cheap/easy money is done I really doubt anything good will come out for the IPO holders. this is just finding a bag-holder.