It sort of make sense for Nvidia's shareholders. The initial offering for ARM was only worth $38.5bn, which was already expensive due to SoftBank initial purchase price and not wanting for a loss. But at Nvidia's peak this deal was worth " $87bn ". For a company that makes less than $2B in revenue and at best ~$300M in Operating Income. Remember this isn't something you can buy and milk the crap out of other market p…
ARM licenses are mostly for complete cores and associated IP blocks that work on your process. No reason they can't make RISC-V ones.
Does anyone believe that this IPO has value, when ARM china has already been stolen and Apple has a perpetual technology license?
If ARM debuts all future designs under 10nm, then ARM China is out of the game (for now), unless they want to try to backport to 14. Some useful contract language will also forbid access to ARM's customers.
ARM processors are also in many, many things besides Apple products.
It sort of make sense for Nvidia's shareholders. The initial offering for ARM was only worth $38.5bn, which was already expensive due to SoftBank initial purchase price and not wanting for a loss. But at Nvidia's peak this deal was worth " $87bn ". For a company that makes less than $2B in revenue and at best ~$300M in Operating Income. Remember this isn't something you can buy and milk the crap out of other market p…
"perceptual licensing agreement" ?
Could you clarify in what sense the agreement is "perceptual"?
It sort of make sense for Nvidia's shareholders. The initial offering for ARM was only worth $38.5bn, which was already expensive due to SoftBank initial purchase price and not wanting for a loss. But at Nvidia's peak this deal was worth " $87bn ". For a company that makes less than $2B in revenue and at best ~$300M in Operating Income. Remember this isn't something you can buy and milk the crap out of other market p…
"perceptual licensing agreement" ? Could you clarify in what sense the agreement is "perceptual"?
It sort of make sense for Nvidia's shareholders. The initial offering for ARM was only worth $38.5bn, which was already expensive due to SoftBank initial purchase price and not wanting for a loss. But at Nvidia's peak this deal was worth " $87bn ". For a company that makes less than $2B in revenue and at best ~$300M in Operating Income. Remember this isn't something you can buy and milk the crap out of other market p…
It sort of make sense for Nvidia's shareholders. The initial offering for ARM was only worth $38.5bn, which was already expensive due to SoftBank initial purchase price and not wanting for a loss. But at Nvidia's peak this deal was worth " $87bn ". For a company that makes less than $2B in revenue and at best ~$300M in Operating Income. Remember this isn't something you can buy and milk the crap out of other market p…
Intel have been ARM licensees and made ARM chips before (StrongARM which they acquired, XScale which they developed).
They've always managed to display ambivalence about it. We should be glad they never owned ARM and hopefully never will; they'd have killed it with indifference.
The thing that stands out about ARM is that the user has less control of the hardware. The manufacturers try and succeed in keeping an extremely closed ecosystem. Why would you want that? The Intel+AMD duopoly seems like nirvana compared to the Ampere and M1. In fact, Ampere and M1 are a hint of the most dystopian future of computing I can imagine.
This has nothing to do with ARM. Unlike the PC there is no standard for system architecture (including boards). ARM based designers like Qualcomm, NVIDIA etc can choose to have their own board and system architecture. For example, they can boot of any memory location or lock the user out of using an exception level like EL3/EL2 etc. That is why the ecosystem looks closed. Nothing stops a SoC designer from giving comp…
There are standards like the Arm Server Base System Architecture but companies don't have to follow it. Most of the ARM servers are custom things for big datacenters. As you said the smaller systems like phones and other embedded systems have their own boot systems and memory layout etc.
Wanted to see where your brilliant phrase "Riscy Silver Bullet" was from so had a google, I think you are trying to start a trend ;-) > ksec 67 days ago > The unwritten rule of HN: > You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29422032
Those RISC-V supporters are so annoying. They never seem to understand the difference between an open-source instruction set , versus an open-source chip which anyone can synthesize, versus closed-source drivers for an open-source instruction set which contains closed-source additional instructions. RISC-V literally has no "openness" advantage over ARM other than that there's no licensing fee. Apple could make a RISC…
One is required for the other, though - you're not going to get any good open hardware for a closed ISA, and RISC-V and OpenPOWER seem to be the two shots we've got.
We practically need an open ISA to succeed as a prerequisite for open hardware to do the same.
RISC-V seems to me to have two major opportunities. - Where a free ISA allows innovation and experimentation in a way that Arm would not permit. - Where companies can shave cents off mass market products due to lower licensing fees. Will RISC-V replace Arm in your smartphone though - seems like a big ask at the moment.
Google maintains two parallel Android platforms right now, so the idea of porting everything over to a third is not _too_ far off. There's a lot of effort in getting JIT up-to-speed on RISC, but most everything else is a recompile away.
Whether it'll make it into a phone is a whole other matter, but there has been at least one RISC-V port of AOSP: