Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer • Hacker News Board

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#51

Post by hedayet » Sun, Mar 29, 2026, 7:28 PM UTC

Melatonic wrote: post #42

hedayet wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook's strength has never been innovation, but adapting to the changes; mostly through acquisition. With the 20/20 hindsight - I'd say the VR bet was too early for Facebook. Instead of trying to build a future tech, they should have acquired it another few years later, only after the tech has reached a more mature stage. Meta still has a chance to catch up in the AI race given they are not trying to build afresh,…

I think they were just early with VR in general (they did buy the best VR at the time). And then severely miscalculated what VR would actually be great for. Eventually we'll get super cheap and light headsets or glasses and gaming will be pretty cool. They should have focused all in on that. It's already a huge industry

yes. Once some other company figures out how to build light cheap headsets, Meta can acquire or copy that tech - and scale.

That's indeed Meta's strength area.

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#52

Post by camel-cdr » Sun, Mar 29, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

LeFantome wrote: post #35

tsukikage wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rivos is about making GPUs. It will be interesting to see how this all nets out. It is going to be a huge 24 months for RISC-V. My biggest concern is that everybody will have already placed their bets before then.

Idk, it seems to me like the Rivos people are still doing their RISC-V CPU work.

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#53

Post by giancarlostoro » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 12:39 AM UTC

mortsnort wrote: post #49

giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.

Is being a serious competitor to OpenAI a good business proposition? OpenAI burns through insane amounts of cash and it seems pretty likely that it will ultimately just be replaced by cheaper Chinese models/inference. The real product is the agent harnesses, which to be fair can be trained specifically to work with an in-house harness, but not sure it's necessary to own the models, especially if Chinese companies are…

Google is a good example of this, they aren't at the very top, but they're very competitive, and they can afford it, and it may one day pay for itself. Eventually it will be just good enough that in theory you don't need to keep chasing the #1 spot if it just works. I think that's something we all forget too easily.

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#54

Post by drob518 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 9:57 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #22

drob518 wrote: post #15

This 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.

I don’t believe that nobody else would build it for them. This chip is not purely custom to Meta, as I understand it. Rather, ARM is going to be selling it to others and entering the market for “AI chips,” which is surely a market that some other ARM licensees want to be in. So therefore, ARM is competing with its other licensees, and in a potentially very lucrative, leading edge market, which is never a great place for an IP-focused company to be. Qualcomm, for instance, is undoubtedly annoyed at this.