If I were AMD, I would've done just anything to prevent ARM going to a single vendor in their ecosystem, Nvidia particularly.
Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t
171–180 of 184 posts
Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know exactly how compensation works, but they have basically two products: - The ARM ISA (the "specification") - A series of chip designs implementing such ISA (the Cortex series) Customers can either license the Cortex design to implement in their own silicon or license the ISA and design their own CPU (like Apple did). There isn't one single Cortex core, but many of them at different performance/price point…
Why exactly does one need to license an ISA? AMD doesn't license x86 from Intel, AFAIK. What's the IP that Apple would otherwise be infringing upon if they didn't license? The "ARM" trademark?
Relatively few companies have an ISA license; I doubt it's a significant income source for ARM versus licensing their core designs: only Apple and Qualcomm are left producing parts based on their own implementations in any real volume.
Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t
#173ARM should just go public and IPO. Why do companies rely on acquisitions so much? Let the public buy into these successful tech companies instead of having the gains accrue to already rich tech companies or private equity funds.
ARM IPO'd in 1998; they were publicly held till acquired by SoftBank in 2016.
Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, it's not CPU arch, but there's a much higher chance of having the entire thing open arch if the CPU is. I expect the probability of reaching a de-facto "standard" SoC to be much higher in RISC-V and I'll take the pain of being the early adopter.
I have a lot of sympathy but fear that RISC-V will lead to even more fragmentation than we see with ARM - eg proprietary extensions. PC standardisation is largely due to the level of control that a couple of dominant vendors have not due to the status of the IP in the core.
>I have a lot of sympathy but fear that RISC-V will lead to even more fragmentation than we see with ARM
Don't fear change, it's a cool thing.
Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
A couple of things I've noted: Western Digital adopts RISC-V [1] Microchip's new push [2] Analysts covering the microprocessor marking making some pretty big projections [3] [1] https://riscv.org/2017/11/ee-times-article-risc-v-spins-driv... [2] http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/00002911A.pd... [3] Semico Research estimated that there will be 62.4 billion RISC-V cores shipping in 2025. It’s not just for…
I agree (and hope) that RISC-V will become very, very significant. That doesn't mean that ARM 'is going to die'. RISC-V is not 'free' in the sense that someone has to design an implementation that works for you - and then support it. The economics work for WD but not necessarily for everyone - not everyone has WD's scale. Plus price isn't the only factor in choosing an ISA / implementation.
It's entirely possible that due to the modularity of Risc-V some kind of common ground will be found in terms of common extensions( a de facto standard, i.e. a standard that people actually follow). Then you might have companies licensing designs for bits of the SoC so the total cost of developing a full SoC drops. This is happening to an extend already seeing as you can buy gpu or hardware accelerator tech from various companies.
Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, it's not CPU arch, but there's a much higher chance of having the entire thing open arch if the CPU is. I expect the probability of reaching a de-facto "standard" SoC to be much higher in RISC-V and I'll take the pain of being the early adopter.
I have a lot of sympathy but fear that RISC-V will lead to even more fragmentation than we see with ARM - eg proprietary extensions. PC standardisation is largely due to the level of control that a couple of dominant vendors have not due to the status of the IP in the core.
If risc-v ends up fragmented then it will eventually evolve to a couple main vendors having a good level of compatibility between them and then the market will just agree to include those. Whatever the majority uses.
Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree (and hope) that RISC-V will become very, very significant. That doesn't mean that ARM 'is going to die'. RISC-V is not 'free' in the sense that someone has to design an implementation that works for you - and then support it. The economics work for WD but not necessarily for everyone - not everyone has WD's scale. Plus price isn't the only factor in choosing an ISA / implementation.
It's entirely possible that due to the modularity of Risc-V some kind of common ground will be found in terms of common extensions( a de facto standard, i.e. a standard that people actually follow). Then you might have companies licensing designs for bits of the SoC so the total cost of developing a full SoC drops. This is happening to an extend already seeing as you can buy gpu or hardware accelerator tech from vari…
I'm not sure what the gain is here. We have to hope that a standard emerges from a range of extensions - when there are standard ISA's that do the job already. In the meantime we get lots of incompatibilities. Plus there is the possibility of proprietary extensions which are not available for licensing more widely.
Licensing IP to put on SoCs has been common for over 25 years - in fact its the whole basis of ARM's and others business models.
Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t
#178I 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…
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Re: Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t
#179I did a quick CTRL+F and found no mentions of Oracle. There's no way they wouldn't be interested in ARM. I sure hope someone else buy it though, Nvidia could be nice.