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Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

arstechnica.com

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Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#81

Post by beefok »

2bitencryption wrote: post #7

can someone explain how ARM as a business works? My understanding is, they design the specification of the ARM assembly language, and the design of the hardware (not individual chip fab but like... abstractly, somehow?) But if they specify the design of the hardware, why would one chipmaker have faster/better CPUs if they are using the same spec as another chipmaker with slower/worse CPUs? What's the business model?…

Typically fabless CPU/MCU companies design and implement netlists to these CPU designs. It includes all of the logic to implement the CPU. This netlist/VHDL/Verilog design is the protected IP they sell, as well as the rights to re-use, etc.

The IP itself can be placed into semiconductor fabric and combined with many other parts such as peripherals, flash memory, sram, etc.

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#83

Post by close04 »

keanebean86 wrote: post #74
toyg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but losing influence on the core component you've pivoted your whole company around, would also be pretty disastrous. Or in memespeak: scenes when nVidia controls Apple's CPU roadmap.

Or Nvidia raises the license fees to crazy levels. Maybe the contract terms prevent that? If not that would cause some big problems for a few years as companies scramble to find alternatives or design in house.

> Or Nvidia raises the license fees to crazy levels

ARM was founded as a joint venture between Apple and Acorn, and Apple funded, helped design, and built their first joint ARM chip (the 610), and the ARMv3 architecture. I'd say they have a special relationship. They're the first licensee and like all the big names (Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc.) have a far more permissive architectural license that allows them to extend the ISA or modify ARM cores as long as they comply fully with the ARM architecture. They also hold a lot of related patents.

So Apple is the last company that should worry about licensing (nothing to lose), or be interested in buying ARM (nothing to gain).

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#84

Post by ChuckMcM »

Interesting article. I wonder what is really happening.

Looking at moves by Chinese vendors and others, I'm going to hypothesize that ARM said to itself:

"We can't compete with 'free' and RISC-V is 'good enough' that its going to wipe out the commodity micro-contoller licensing stream that is over 50% of our revenue. That means we won't have the resources to invest in designing higher end features in the high margin parts and we're going to die. We should sell now, take our cash, and let the buyer eat the future losses."

I don't know of course. I'm an outsider like most people. But I have been part of, and then watching the semiconductor industry since about 1984.I was personally on the "inside" at the development of the SPARC architecture, and watched it grow, and die, as it was mismanaged by Sun. And I've been associated with American high tech companies for more years than I care to remember :-) and have seen a bit about how such companies survive, grow, and fail to grow. A common theme is that there is a "cash cow", a product that has exceptionally high margins relative to its "class" and that revenue funds the R&D that does the "innovation" work. These businesses live or die on finding "the next thing" before their cash cow dies. Failing to find that thing, as SGI did, as Sun did, and as I think Google is in the process of doing, starves the company of the cash to pay the innovators as they focus more and more on keeping the cash cow alive for longer and longer. The company essentially morphs from a mission of doing cool new things, to one that is preserving the 'one thing' at all cost. That thing eventually dies in spite of their efforts and what is left of the company is bought by a healthier company for its assets and maybe a couple of its projects that were cool, but not good enough to replace the cash cow.

If I am correct, this is the right move for ARM, and a really risky buy for anyone who would buy them now. A smart buyer, knowing how this will evolve, will wait for the desperation to set in so that they have maximum leverage in the acquisition.

And another thing that will be true (if I am guessing correctly here) is that RISC-V is going to really take off and have lots of people making them for cheap.

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#85

Post by ljhsiung »

gaze wrote: post #15
AWildC182 wrote: post #8

I wonder if softbank sees the writing on the wall here. Yea they want cash but ARM is rapidly coming under fire from the open source RISC-V architecture. ARM's licencing model in particular is steering people away from their offerings in new designs and I think they're pretty much at peak value right now with Apple's adoption of their architecture. I know there aren't tons of news articles about new high performance…

I'm curious if ARM sees RISC-V as serious competition. I'm under the impression that the instruction set makes efficient and performant implementations rather difficult.

My personal view is that, for the next few years, no. There are some pretty critical features that RISCV is missing that makes ARM what it is today and so very prolific in your phones and desktops and even, recently, servers. Many hypervisor or virtualization and to some extent security extensions just aren't there for RISC-V, and on top of that, the software ecosystem isn't really all there yet for high performance.

Currently though, RISC-V already is ingrained heavily in the embedded and IoT space and growing astronomically. That's where ARM is losing heavily, although in my opinion, the embedded space wasn't the money maker anyways for ARM

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#87

Post by rurp »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #73
ben_w wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little over a decade ago, a lot of stuff went wrong because a bunch of economically dominant corporations figured they were too big for governments to allow them to fail. And it looks like big tech is developing much the same rich-and-out-of-touch reputation that bankers and stock traders used to have. I don’t know who, but I am assuming one of the FAANGs will be forcibly broken up in the next decade.

How'd that work out for the bankers and stock traders?

It worked out pretty great for them, everyone else though... not so much. The bankers got to enjoy inflated profits and bonuses for years knowing that the government would step in when things eventually blew up.

Privatizing the gains and socializing the losses is a playbook the tech giants are all too happy to keep pushing as long as the government allows them to.

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#88

Post by manuelabeledo »

tmaly wrote: post #23

If ARM is so important, surely the government would give consideration to have an American company own it. I am surprised that Intel in not in talks as a bidder.

Intel has quite a record on screwing up anything ARM related. They bought StrongARM from Digital, then tried manufacturing their own ARM based chips (XScale) for around five years, to finally sell the whole business to Marvell.

On top of that, their mobile business lines are and have always been weak.

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#89

Post by earthscienceman »

mjw1007 wrote: post #47
chvid wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or let me ask in different way: why use ARM if you control and build the whole stack from electronics to operating system to the software running on it? The core instruction set is from the 80es. Surely you can come up with some better today were you to design it from scratch?

The 64-bit ARM ISA was basically redone from scratch, around 2010. It isn't "mostly the same instructions but with 64-bit registers" the way 64-bit x86 is.

Do you (or anyone else) know where I can read about that?

Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

#90

Post by fluffything »

blinkingled wrote: post #64
toyg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but losing influence on the core component you've pivoted your whole company around, would also be pretty disastrous. Or in memespeak: scenes when nVidia controls Apple's CPU roadmap.

Nothing stops Apple from giving no craps about ARM CPU roadmaps though. They could just license what they need and build a completely custom everything on top without needing it to be a standard implementation in anyway. So long as whoever is buying ARM is legally mandated to provide licenses - Apple doesn't have to rely on them actually pushing out new CPUs/modules/features. Historically I think they have just licen…

> So long as whoever is buying ARM is legally mandated to provide licenses

Why would they? With Intel, AMD, IBM with PowerPC, etc. CPU ISAs are not a monopoly.

Whoever buys ARM might want to do that to start cranking up licensing fees, and might not give a damn if this results in customer loses.

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