After Amazon, Google, and Apple all have had successes with in house ARM, I had naively assumed Meta would do the same. Given the speeds with which they have been developed, it must not be "that hard" to spin up a chip. You could have easily framed it as a long-term plan - custom chips for the Occlus.
Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
#22This is going to be a strategic challenge for ARM unless they are going to focus on chips that nobody else wants to make. And given the AI focus, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I would think that the RISC-V folks would be salivating at the prospect of flipping some existing ARM licensees to RISC-V.
focus on chips that nobody else wants to make
That's what happened here. Meta wants a Neoverse V3 CPU but no one will make it for them. So Arm has to make it.
Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
#23This is going to be a strategic challenge for ARM unless they are going to focus on chips that nobody else wants to make. And given the AI focus, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I would think that the RISC-V folks would be salivating at the prospect of flipping some existing ARM licensees to RISC-V.
focus on chips that nobody else wants to make That's what happened here. Meta wants a Neoverse V3 CPU but no one will make it for them. So Arm has to make it.
ARM does not have their own fab, someone else is doing the actual making. ARM helped Meta design the thing.
Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
#24"in-house" is misleading > Like nearly all fabless AI chipmakers, Arm currently manufactures its CPU at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ’s fabrication plants.
It's not misleading for people in the industry. ARM so far was selling IP (Verilog source code) that other chip makers would include in a full chip design. Now ARM for the first time (this century) is making its own chip [design], which like most of its customers, is manufactured by a fab like TSMC. The title is clear.
Similarly Apple doesn't manufacture any of its own computers or iPhones (it's all contract manufacturers like FoxConn) but it would clearly be wrong to say "Apple doesn't make computers! Foxconn does!"
Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
#25This is going to be a strategic challenge for ARM unless they are going to focus on chips that nobody else wants to make. And given the AI focus, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I would think that the RISC-V folks would be salivating at the prospect of flipping some existing ARM licensees to RISC-V.
Meta bought a RISC-V startup six months ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=meta+rivos
Guess at the end of the day, no-one ever got fired for building ARM.
Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
#26The Acorn Archimedes came with Acorn branded CPUs (the "ARM250" IIRC) already in the late 80s. I can't recall what company made the chips for ARM at that time, but in the later Archimedes models it was VLSI.
VLSI from the very start according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#ARM1
A quick Google image search shows me ARM250TG chips, Acorn-ARM branded, from "MITEL" and "GPS".
Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> duplicate discussion for the same link I hate to be the bearer of bad news but this is incorrect per moderator dang at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43765252 : > On HN, dupeness is more a question of whether the underlying story is substantively the same or not I believe dang's most recent in-depth explanation can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43738815 and you can search for more at htt…
But one is a press release from ARM and the other is a report from CNBC. How are the two the same? By your logic, there shouldn't be a gazillion posts about Apple Events the day it happens.
When the two submissions aren't the exact same link, it becomes a subjective question as to whether they're similar enough to count as a dupe or not. They aren't automatically always a dupe just because the overall general topic is the same, but nor are they automatically considered not a dupe just because they're not identical.
In this case the consensus (that I agree with) certainly seems to be that they're similar enough to be considered a dupe. Though that doesn't force the moderators to have to treat it like a dupe and merge comments.
Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
#28"in-house" is misleading > Like nearly all fabless AI chipmakers, Arm currently manufactures its CPU at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ’s fabrication plants.
It's called fables.
Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
#29"in-house" is misleading > Like nearly all fabless AI chipmakers, Arm currently manufactures its CPU at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ’s fabrication plants.
It's not misleading for people in the industry. ARM so far was selling IP (Verilog source code) that other chip makers would include in a full chip design. Now ARM for the first time (this century) is making its own chip [design], which like most of its customers, is manufactured by a fab like TSMC. The title is clear.
Not really verilog source code. TSMC probably provides libraries to Apple
Apple is just a systems integrator
Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
#30Meta only recently announced a “long term” partnership with Nvidia:
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/02/meta-nvidia-announce-long-...
So how does this fit in? Is it a replacement for Nvidia’s portfolio of chips? Or just an alternative option to avoid dependency on one vendor? Something else?