4 ms·

The desktop market is both saturated and contracting, and GP gave you the example of ARM taking over successfully: Apple silicon. M1-M4 are all ARM based. The p

The desktop market is both saturated and contracting, and GP gave you the example of ARM taking over successfully: Apple silicon. M1-M4 are all ARM based. The performance is exceptional and the battery life is stellar. They're not just a budget CPU anymore. Further, the growth area of the market, mobile and IoT, are both dominated by ARM at the point Intel would compete with. When Google started to push Chromebooks, they used those same ARM processors. Increasingly, people only have their smartphone as the primary, if not the only, Internet device. People don't want desktops. They want that $300 Chromebook to browse the web and do taxes and that's about it. Now Win11 ARM64 is nearly ready to ship. Microsoft is changing strategy to stay competitive, and that means not sticking to x86. There are millions of new devices that require processors every year, and if you're NOT making ARM processors then your fab is not making as much money as the competition. Your competition is going to have bigger budgets, and their engineers and fabricators are going to have much better high production experience. Intel has let themselves fall behind. They've sacrificed the ability to stay competitive in order to stay loyal to their in house and very legacy designs. Intel is trying to sell the same product line that they've had for the past 15 years like the market didn't change, and everyone else has moved on. Now they have this 13th and 14th generation bug/defect, and they're going to look really unappealing.

bsder 2y ago
Apple has 10% of the PC market and has been at that level for years. The ARM transition didn't move that number. > if you're NOT making ARM processors then your fab is not making as much money as the competition. Nope. The profit margin on ARM processors is at least an order of magnitude less than x86, probably close to two orders of magnitude. If you are making x86 profit margins, making ARM processors is business suicide. This is true for both Intel and AMD.
talldayo 2y ago
> The desktop market is both saturated and contracting, Which applies equally to Apple devices, if you're watching the sales. They followed the same trend of moving units during COVID and then relaxed upgrades afterwards. > if you're NOT making ARM processors then your fab is not making as much money as the competition Do you know how ARM works? Or even chip production, for that matter? For one, foundries don't choose to make ARM chips, their customers do. A foundry can and will make the same amount of money as their competition investing away from ARM, as Nvidia has shown on TSMC 4nm. Making "as much money as the competition" only works if you don't have to pay ARM license fees, and Apple is just about the only company in the world with that level of agreement with Softbank. Everyone else is avoiding ARM like the plague for it's dogshit licensing terms and 2-year OEM support contracts. The actual "deal" you get from buying ARM is the choice between their godawful off-the-shelf cores or the ISA itself. There are vanishingly few companies that want either of those things, least of all with ARM Ltd as the middleman. For two, ARM's "golden era" is behind us now. If you've worked in electronics you're probably well familiar with the story of the ESP-32, a wildly successful microcontroller that hasn't been "officially licensed" ARM in years. The rare few ARM chips that are profitable don't respect the ISA license they're supposed to pay for, leaving only Apple and Nvidia as legitimate customers. Of them, Nvidia has been shipping RISC-V in place of ARM for over a decade and Apple would too if they had to pay for the IP. ARM is desperate to find customers that don't want to take advantage of them, but cannot find a single one.

bsder 2y ago

Apple has 10% of the PC market and has been at that level for years. The ARM transition didn't move that number. > if you're NOT making ARM processors then your fab is not making as much money as the competition. Nope. The profit margin on ARM processors is at least an order of magnitude less than x86, probably close to two orders of magnitude. If you are making x86 profit margins, making ARM processors is business suicide. This is true for both Intel and AMD.

talldayo 2y ago

> The desktop market is both saturated and contracting, Which applies equally to Apple devices, if you're watching the sales. They followed the same trend of moving units during COVID and then relaxed upgrades afterwards. > if you're NOT making ARM processors then your fab is not making as much money as the competition Do you know how ARM works? Or even chip production, for that matter? For one, foundries don't choose to make ARM chips, their customers do. A foundry can and will make the same amount of money as their competition investing away from ARM, as Nvidia has shown on TSMC 4nm. Making "as much money as the competition" only works if you don't have to pay ARM license fees, and Apple is just about the only company in the world with that level of agreement with Softbank. Everyone else is avoiding ARM like the plague for it's dogshit licensing terms and 2-year OEM support contracts. The actual "deal" you get from buying ARM is the choice between their godawful off-the-shelf cores or the ISA itself. There are vanishingly few companies that want either of those things, least of all with ARM Ltd as the middleman. For two, ARM's "golden era" is behind us now. If you've worked in electronics you're probably well familiar with the story of the ESP-32, a wildly successful microcontroller that hasn't been "officially licensed" ARM in years. The rare few ARM chips that are profitable don't respect the ISA license they're supposed to pay for, leaving only Apple and Nvidia as legitimate customers. Of them, Nvidia has been shipping RISC-V in place of ARM for over a decade and Apple would too if they had to pay for the IP. ARM is desperate to find customers that don't want to take advantage of them, but cannot find a single one.