[HN Gopher] Arm IPO to kick off today
___________________________________________________________________
Arm IPO to kick off today
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 213 points
Date : 2023-09-14 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the weird self-
| dealing and tiny float that softbank are going for indicate a
| strong chance that this is going to fall through the floor.
| Softbank should've learned by now, you can bully the market when
| you're buying, but you can't bully the market when you're
| selling. I'd be surprised if this stock weren't down 50% within
| 12 months. There's too much sell pressure from Softbank and
| there's _no_ buy pressure.
| lvl102 wrote:
| But they have strong support from the likes of Apple to keep
| ARM independent.
| intrasight wrote:
| I've read that some big tech names are anchoring this IPO: Apple,
| Google, NVidia. What's in it for them? Or are they getting a
| sweetheart deal on their shares of Arm?
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| They don't appear to be saying, but the investment makes sense
| for Apple and Google even without a sweetheart deal. It ensures
| a successful IPO and continuing viability of their primary chip
| supplier, and protects it from a takeover by some entity
| hostile to Apple or Google. Nvidia I'm not sure about though.
| coder543 wrote:
| Nvidia has been selling ARM chips for years (the Nintendo
| Switch's SoC, for example), and they're currently in the
| process of massively growing their ARM business with the new
| Nvidia "Grace Superchips". Not to mention the expected sales
| boom of the new Switch 2 SoC that should happen within about
| a year.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Probably a pump-n-dump onto retail investors to make a quick
| buck... or they're paranoid and want to retain enough ownership
| to have some say in the future direction of the architecture...
| or both.
| xyst wrote:
| Anybody buying ARM stonk at IPO price will be bag holding. $54B
| valuation is insane
| varjag wrote:
| That's two LinkedIns
| pkcsecurity wrote:
| Comment on the timing of this IPO: for a company to IPO
| "unfavorably" compared to previous valuations likely means ARM's
| hand was forced by timing considerations, unless they are running
| out of cash, which I don't think is the case.
|
| My interpretation of this is that their investors suspect that
| whatever boost ARM is getting from AI optimism will likely peak
| soon, so the timing has to be now.
|
| I know that's not fully rational because they're mostly
| unrelated, but certainly the optimism because of AI has to be
| good for them. Curious to see if this "signal" plays out -
| investors tend to be pretty savvy about timing.
| jsnell wrote:
| > I know that's not fully rational because they're mostly
| unrelated, but certainly the optimism because of AI has to be
| good for them. Curious to see if this "signal" plays out -
| investors tend to be pretty savvy about timing.
|
| The "investors" are SoftBank; they've been pretty much the
| stupidest money in the world for years.
|
| While it's possible that they're being more savvy about the
| timing of this sale than about their investment decisions, I
| don't know that it should be the default assumption.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Arm itself may not be running out of cash but their major
| investor might be looking to cash out
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| ARM was wholly owned by SoftBank. They did not have their own
| cash, it was all Softbank's cash. And obviously SoftBank
| selling ARM means SoftBank wants to cash out, for whatever
| reason.
| pokerhobo wrote:
| SoftBank made a ton of stupid investments like WeWork and
| was bleeding money. They needed to cash out their ARM
| investment to recoup major losses.
| monocasa wrote:
| In fact, SoftBank is known for being the one of the
| stupidest big investors there is. They got lucky being an
| early investor in Alibaba, but have managed to piss most
| of that money away on getting left holding the bag on the
| peak.
| zzbn00 wrote:
| There is one timing-related disclosure in the F-1: The Kronos
| guarantee
| adolph wrote:
| As an IP holding company for an ISA, how is Arm Limited different
| from any other patent troll?
|
| https://www.arm.com/glossary/isa
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/31/a_star_star_domains/
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/12/arm_markstedter_domai...
| devnullbrain wrote:
| If anyone replying to this needs you to define ISA for them,
| their input isn't very useful.
| codazoda wrote:
| This feels different to me because Arm is designing these
| chips. It feels a bit more like a drafting company who draws
| plans but doesn't build anything. They don't just have some
| loosely defined patent.
|
| The linked articles are about the brand name, Arm, used in a
| domain. You wouldn't put "intel" or "nvidia" in your domain
| name without drawing attention. Maybe we need a moniker similar
| to x86 to define the arm architecture more generally.
| deelowe wrote:
| I would add to this that people who make statements like the
| parent did are woefully ignorant of how the industry really
| works. Board producers rarely design the entire PCB. PCB
| designers rarely produce the board. Chip designers rarely
| produce their chips. Chip producers often do some portion of
| the design process. And on and on.
|
| Computing is a complex business and few companies do
| everything in house. ARM's business model of focusing solely
| on the IP seems to have worked well for them. From the
| engineering side, it's certainly nice to have the ability to
| pick and choose which IP blocks we'd like to use and then
| shop around the design ourselves versus having to battle with
| Intel to get what we need while trying to poke through the
| various layers of obfuscation they tend to put in place.
| uxp8u61q wrote:
| Both cases you link to are about trademarks. Patents and
| trademarks are unrelated.
|
| "Patent troll" has the connotation of an organization or
| individual who buys cheap patents and sue other organizations
| on mostly bogus claims related to these patents, hoping that
| the other side won't want to bother and just settle the matter.
| That's not Arm's business model.
| chmod600 wrote:
| The links you provided are about copyright and trademark law,
| not patents.
| [deleted]
| deelowe wrote:
| Patent trolls patent things that already exist in some form and
| then seek to extract revenue through the legal system.
|
| You can't call a company that literally developed the IP they
| patented "trolls."
| The_Colonel wrote:
| They don't just hold the patents, but actively develop the ISA
| / designs too.
|
| ARM doesn't have a big enough moat to stay static and just
| troll. There are competing ISAs, some free, and there isn't as
| big of an lock-in as for e.g. x86.
| throwaw12 wrote:
| isn't it slightly high for ARM? what is fair value for them?
| psychlops wrote:
| Have you seen Nvidia's stock price?
| 01100011 wrote:
| Irrelevant given they have completely different business
| models.
| xorcist wrote:
| This is literally how ARM is being sold by stock analysts.
| It is supposedly the "primary competitor" to nVidia in
| "AI".
| relativ575 wrote:
| That's new to me. Who are those analysts?
| ta988 wrote:
| I heard that's what market exchanges are supposed to be doing.
| /s
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Can you define fair?
| ravenstine wrote:
| You can't. Valuations are based on opinion and feelings.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You can certainly try to define it.
|
| https://www.ifrs.org/content/dam/ifrs/publications/pdf-
| stand...
| wredue wrote:
| Tech valuations are all fairies and unicorns right now. I don't
| know what their "actual fundamentals" valuation should be, but
| actual fundamentals haven't dictated tech stock pricing for at
| least a decade.
| sapiogram wrote:
| Anyone who is able to reliably predict which stock valuations
| are _actually_ fairies and unicorns can become insanely rich
| doing so. With this great insight, surely you 'll be a
| billionaire in 10 years through short selling?
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| I thought the substantial increase in interest rates mostly
| pissed away the fairies and unicorns, and people needed to
| prove they made real money now.
| wredue wrote:
| NVDA is up 200% YTD and was already massively overvalued at
| the start of the year.
|
| Others do seem to be backing off, but there is still
| definitely a lot of way overvalued tech out there.
| linuxftw wrote:
| NVDA forward PE is 42.48, which isn't super crazy
| relative to other big tech companies (MSFT over 30). I
| suspect ARM's forward PE is double that ratio (>80).
|
| If NVDA's forward projections are correct, and they can
| maintain that same growth, then there is still room for
| upside. Personally, I'm not playing this game of musical
| chairs because I don't think these valuations are
| sustainable, but as they say, the market can stay
| irrational longer than you can stay solvent, so shorting
| is a terrible idea.
| wredue wrote:
| Pricing stocks today at what a company might be worth in
| 10 years is pretty much fairies and unicorns.
|
| Other sectors do not price in the way tech does.
| [deleted]
| itsoktocry wrote:
| 50 terrible investments by Softbank possibly recouped in a single
| IPO. Crazy world.
| boringg wrote:
| I don't think that's the case here.
|
| "At this price, the IPO is reportedly set to raise about $4.9
| billion for Arm's parent company, Softbank, which is less than
| the $8-$10 billion the Japanese investment outfit had
| previously said it hoped to generate. Softbank itself posted a
| record $39 billion loss earlier this year."
| goodmachine wrote:
| "With the financial world anxiously awaiting the start of Arm's
| roadshow in the hopes that Son can reignite the flaccid IPO
| market, Son has decided that his chip-maker is worth $64 billion
| because Son agreed to buy a chunk of it from Son for that price.
|
| In so doing, Son agreed to pay Son twice what Son sold it to Son
| for six years earlier."
|
| https://doomberg.substack.com/p/arms-length
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| What I would like to know is why ARM - or its owners - needs the
| cash. Are there any major projects they are undertaking that
| justifies this flotation?
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Softbank is in a bit of financial trouble -
| https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/softbank-vision-fund-loses...
| bdcravens wrote:
| Investors demand exits.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| I wonder how well SoftBank did with this IPO. If it was a decent
| enough return, I'd say it's good news for new SoCs and chipmakers
| that want to innovate.
| 1-6 wrote:
| ARM IPO will make it another patent house like Qualcomm.
| samwillis wrote:
| Our first family computer was an Acorn Archimedes, we had it for
| maybe a year before it was replaced by a PC with an Intel.
|
| Now here we are 30 years later and I'm typing on a laptop running
| on a ARM (nee Acorn RISC Machines, then Advanced RISC Machines),
| I have an ARM in my pocket, another in a tablet in my bag. My
| wife is next to me on an ARM laptop, she's also got an ARM on her
| arm... we're listening to music on a wifi speaker running on an
| ARM. There are probably 30-40 ARMs in one way or another around
| our house. Amazing really.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Apple bought out Acorn and used them to design their chips.
| monocasa wrote:
| I wouldn't go that far. Apple's strategy in a lot of cases is
| more like that of automobile manufacturers where they invest
| heavily in a company as sort of a king maker, but then hold
| them over a barrel on later margins with the threat that they
| can make another king. That's what they did with TSMC, pre
| purchasing chips to the tune of ~$15B which allowed TSMC to
| go ahead and buy a bunch of the first EUV steppers.
| acomjean wrote:
| About 10 years ago, my partner turned to me and said, there is
| an ARM core for every person on the planet. Her company was
| designing printer chips and using ARM cores. They bought the
| reference design to use. "Arm and a Leg" they nicknamed it due
| to high fees even back then.
|
| I bought some "Armh" (ARM's old ticker symbol) which did really
| well before they got bought by softbank. Oddly hard to find any
| info about historical stocks on the interwebs.
| deepspace wrote:
| > Acorn Archimedes
|
| Newb /s
|
| I cut my teeth on an Acron Atom in 1982, and upgraded to a BBC
| Micro (a renamed Acorn Electron) the next year.
|
| But, yes, I never would have thought that, 40 years later, most
| of the CPUs in my house would still be derived from that
| scrappy British's company's designs.
| TX81Z wrote:
| One of my favorite examples of the benefits of public
| interest spending and investment. There very likely wouldn't
| be an ARM today if it weren't for the Micro.
| klelatti wrote:
| > renamed Acorn Electron
|
| Actually renamed Acorn Proton. Electron came later.
| jamesblonde wrote:
| It was disappointing for the UK not to get a dual listing,
| despite Rishi Sunak's best attempts. I guess Europe is just not
| attractive enough for capital from the rest of the world for IT
| investments.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/03/uk-chip-des...
| dom96 wrote:
| What would be the point in a dual-listing? How does one
| actually work?
| jamesblonde wrote:
| It would mean you can buy and sell ARM shares on more one
| stock exchange.
|
| One basic rule for making money as a country is to ensure
| capital flows through your country (e.g., services,
| manufactured goods, FDI, etc). Then skim off some of the
| captial that flows.
|
| If ARM were listed in the UK and say, $30b of shares is
| traded anually, of which say $10b is in the UK, then some of
| that will go to UK ltd.
| pc86 wrote:
| What incentive would ARM have to do that, though? Just so
| the UK can "skim off some of the capital" (which is a very
| generous way of describing what's actually occurring).
| globular-toast wrote:
| They're a UK company based in the UK. It's preferable
| that any skimmings stay within your own country isn't it?
| But obviously the top people would decide on whatever
| would personally benefit them the most.
| pm90 wrote:
| Access to more investors. Probably they could tap into
| some kind of nationalist sentiment since they are HQd in
| the UK.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Are there more than 0 serious investors in the UK that
| can't access the US capital markets?
| [deleted]
| binarymax wrote:
| Is LSE Europe though? Perhaps pre-Brexit it would have been a
| more obvious choice.
| steve1977 wrote:
| It is Europe, but not EU
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Bought some earlier and it's already up 20% today.
| sneak wrote:
| Technical question: why do people need ARM licenses? Surely you
| don't need anything from them to design a chip from scratch that
| implements the same instruction set, as Cyrix and AMD famously
| did to the ia32.
|
| Are the licensees using parts of the actual chip design? Are
| their own designs too far down the "derivative work" rabbit hole
| due to not being cleanroomed that they have no hope of ever not
| licensing?
|
| What are the specifics?
| ip26 wrote:
| Only a few licensees are capable of designing their own core
| from scratch. Most customers are licensing some form of
| reference design.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The ISA isn't very useful IMO, outside of the compiler
| framework.
|
| The crux of modern chip design is the tradeoff in MHz,
| peculiarities of Tomasulo's Algorithm (out of order buffers,
| tuning sizes and number of pipelines, etc. etc.).
|
| Lets take an example: should you have 200 64-bit words in the
| reorder buffer, or should you have 800 (Apple M2). What's the
| tradeoffs? How much slower does accessing the reorder buffer
| get when you need to go from 8-bits to 10-bits to address the
| various locations?
|
| How many multiplication units should you have? I know Intel has
| 3 of them per core, is that enough? Or do you go IBM Power
| route and go for like 20 pipelines wide?
|
| Etc. etc. etc.
|
| ARM Neoverse N2 makes a lot of these decisions, packages them
| up into an easy moniker ("General Purpose"), and also has
| customizations towards V-cores (higher performance but bigger)
| vs E-cores (lower-performance but smaller and more power-
| efficient).
|
| You then make decisions based off of the core as a whole,
| rather than designing a core. Ex: do you use 128kB of L1 cache?
| Or 64kB? Do you do L1 / L2 / L3 cache like Intel? Or do you do
| L1 / L2 cache like Apple?
|
| You still need to make these "uncore" decisions, including the
| important MESI (core-to-core communications: Modified data vs
| Exclusive data vs Shared data vs Invalid data). Even _IF_ you
| buy an off-the-shelf core like Neoverse N2, you're no where
| close to finishing an actual chip yet cause the darn thing
| can't even talk to RAM yet.
| pid-1 wrote:
| People don't want to design chips from scratch. ARM gives you a
| lot of working stuff to bootstrap a product.
| monocasa wrote:
| > Surely you don't need anything from them to design a chip
| from scratch that implements the same instruction set, as Cyrix
| and AMD famously did to the ia32.
|
| Cyrix and AMD had licenses to do so, ultimately deriving from a
| time when Intel needed second sources of their CPUs in order to
| win defense contracts.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Cyrix and AMD licensed tech from Intel back then.
| papercrane wrote:
| Originally Cyrix did not license from Intel. Intel sued for
| patent infringement and lost badly enough they had to give
| Cyrix a few million to settle their counter claims.
|
| Cyrix has also sued Intel over their Pentium chips. In the
| end the results of all the lawsuits are cross-licensing
| deals.
| sneak wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't know that. Why would Intel do that?
|
| What is the legal interpretation of IP law that says you need
| permission to design a chip that implements an ISA?
| ip26 wrote:
| Intel licensed x86 to provide a credible second source,
| which they needed for some of their early business deals.
| papercrane wrote:
| For AMD the primary driver was IBM.
|
| In order to get the contract for the IBM PC, Intel had to
| agree to have a second-source manufacturer for their CPUs.
| Intel already had a relationship with AMD so it made sense
| to use them.
| uxp8u61q wrote:
| You also don't need anything from your architect to design a
| building from scratch. But unless you're an architect yourself,
| it's going to be prohibitively difficult, or even impossible.
| So people hire architects.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Making and more importantly verifying a high performance CPU is
| extremely hard. AMD has taken a lifetime to get where it is.
| delfinom wrote:
| ARM uses a mix patents, copyright and trade secret protections
| for their ISA. The give you the RTL/vhdl/verilog for the core
| when you license it and they forbid you from changing the core
| in the license agreement to use it.
|
| You can clean room implement the trade secret part, but the
| patents would be an issue and ARM could still sue and drag
| things out.
|
| You also could never legally call it ARM because it's
| trademarked. This makes it harder for semiconductor vendors to
| sell chips.
|
| See the Qualcomm lawsuit shitshow which is now causing Qualcomm
| to invest big in RISCV.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Chip IP is usually encrypted verilog. Your EDA tools compile
| it in a secure enclave, basically. You have no real options
| to modify it.
| monocasa wrote:
| Well, encrypted OASIS these days for something like a
| higher perf CPU core, but close enough for the point you
| were making.
| [deleted]
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Surely you don 't need anything from them to design a chip
| from scratch that implements the same instruction set, as Cyrix
| and AMD famously did to the ia32._
|
| Cyrix and AMD got (cross-)licenses from Intel:
|
| *
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236...
|
| * https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-
| clar...
|
| This has been true since the very beginning:
|
| > _Early 1980s--IBM chooses Intel 's so-called x86 chip
| architecture and the DOS software operating system built by
| Microsoft. To avoid overdependence on Intel as its sole source
| of chips, IBM demands that Intel finds it a second supplier._
|
| * https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/intel-and-amd-a-
| long...
|
| * https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/intel-and-
| the-x86-archit...
|
| The reverse engineering happened with Compaq doing the BIOS:
|
| * https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-
| comp...
|
| This was a major plot point in AMC's (very good) show _Halt and
| Catch Fire_ :
|
| * https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/05/the-
| incredibl...
|
| * https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/05/review-halt-and-
| catch...
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
| Keyframe wrote:
| Would it be possible now for Nvidia to move onto a hostile
| takeover? Or any form of takeover is done due to regulatory
| decisions?
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Not as long as SoftBank owns 90% of the shares.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Why would that be relevant? SoftBank wanted to sell to
| Nvidia, but the government did not stop the sale just because
| SoftBank owned it.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Because they would need to sell those shares for there to
| be a takeover.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| But they already wanted to sell their shares to Nvidia
| before, what would have changed now? They want to reduce
| their ownership of ARM, hence them doing an IPO in the
| first place.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| The regulators would stop it like they did last time.
| pc86 wrote:
| Regulators stopped a coordinated purchase, which they are
| totally within their right to do. And if Softbank and
| NVIDIA try to coordinate a purchase another way, they'll
| stop that too.
|
| It's not as cut-and-dry if Softbank just puts the shares
| on the open market, and NVIDIA pays market value for
| them. Are there reporting requirements around NVIDIA
| buying stock on the open market? Freeze-out periods?
| Regulatory delays? If there's collusion it might be a
| crime but even if you're cynical and refuse to believe
| that there might not be, you still have to prove it.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Even if Nvidia wanted to go that route, they still wouldn't get
| through regulators, and no one else will try for the same
| reason.
| pianoben wrote:
| Softbank still controls what, 90% of the stock? It would seem
| mathematically impossible for anyone to execute a hostile
| takeover.
| Keyframe wrote:
| If Softbanks starts releasing stock.
| bhouston wrote:
| The strategy they are using to establish a revenue stream that
| justifies this valuation is to continue to raise prices on their
| customers. I think this works in the near term (next 5 to 10
| years), and generate a ton of money for ARM, but it will drive
| additional momentum to RISC-V.
|
| The legendary Jim Keller is going all in on RISC-V, if you don't
| know Google him. His company has many core designs coming as well
| chiplets: https://tenstorrent.com/risc-v/
|
| Because of Jim Keller and similar efforts I wouldn't be surprised
| for RISC-V to see both core count as well as per core performance
| meet ARM over the next few years. Maybe even exceed if Jim can
| push the chiplet approach faster than ARM can roll theirs out.
|
| Hopefully this drives a lot of innovation and we all benefit as a
| result.
|
| I think that using ARM is going to be viewed as being locked into
| ARM's ever increasing licensing fees, where as if you go RISC-V,
| you are free to switch CPU providers.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Building out tooling and even chips based on RISC-V is handing
| the future to China. They're going all in because it's an ISA
| that the west generated and builds support for but is free to
| use, which plays into their strengths of lowest cost and their
| ambition to own the future chips of the world.
| bhouston wrote:
| You are right that China is going on in on RISC-V in part
| because of Western sanctions. It is yet another reason why
| RISC-V has so much momentum. It is in China's interest to
| destroy Intel's and ARM's competitive advantages and it is
| pouring money and people into it.
| azinman2 wrote:
| They wouldn't be producing ARM or x86 even if no sanctions.
| They want to own an entire ecosystem.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Softbank has spent 7 years and a CEO finding out how difficult
| just raising prices is.
| boringg wrote:
| Especially when your lifeline is tied to Apple. No way are
| they going to negotiate to raise prices in a meaningful way
| against their largest client.
|
| Actually> "Apple (AAPL.O) has signed a new deal with Arm for
| chip technology that "extends beyond 2040," according to
| Arm's initial public offering documents filed on Tuesday."
| londons_explore wrote:
| The deal with apple is probably 0.1% of revenue from all
| hardware sales that contain ARM IP or something similar.
|
| Which means that if Apple decide to switch to RISC-V to
| save money, the deal is still in effect, but no money will
| be paid, so there might as well be no deal.
| boringg wrote:
| You think it's that low?
| sapiogram wrote:
| > No way are they going to negotiate to raise prices in a
| meaningful way against their largest client.
|
| Why not? It's not like Apple will have anywhere else to go
| for the next 8 years. x86 cores are too slow and power-
| hungry for the foreseeable future, and building their own
| risc-V core will take... at least 8 years.
| wtallis wrote:
| 8 years sounds like an absurdly long time to retrofit a
| different instruction set onto an existing CPU core
| design.
| scrlk wrote:
| Apple was one of the founding investors of ARM back in 1990
| - it's likely they have an extremely generous licence and
| pricing terms as a result.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Apple's involvement with ARM's founding has zero impact
| on their negotiations or pricing.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| It does when that involvement means they're one of the
| few architecture licensees. Allegedly.
| klelatti wrote:
| They have an architectural license (for Arm v8/9) because
| they are a huge customer with deep pockets not because of
| a shareholding they sold a decade before that
| architecture was announced!
| monocasa wrote:
| It's not the deep pockets per se, but the hand Apple had
| in designing AArch64. Apparently their relationship with
| ARM is more like the Intel/AMD relationship, ie. cross-
| licensing.
| miohtama wrote:
| Unity IPO'ed three years ago. Their stock is down 80%, common
| among tech stock since money printer stopped. However now their
| plan to turn the tech company to cash cow and milk existing
| customers seem to have backfired.
| bhouston wrote:
| A lot of games can not just drop Unity quickly. So a bunch
| will be forced into paying Unity. Also remember Apple just
| made Unity "the way" for making full screen VR apps on their
| new VR device. Don't underestimate how much Unity can make
| this way... while a lot will drop Unity many games simply can
| not in the medium term.
| miohtama wrote:
| Exactly. Milk the cow until its dead and preferably little
| longer.
| packetlost wrote:
| > where as if you go RISC-V, you are free to switch CPU
| providers.
|
| Idk, this really isn't as true as you'd think. Yes RISC-V is an
| open and free ISA which will cut out some fees, but you'd still
| have to license IP/chip designs (if you can't make your own)
| and they could only undercut ARM by a little bit. Further, the
| lack of mobility across chips/boards/whatever is not _usually_
| from the ISA, but from the BSP, SDK, etc. so you still would
| have substantial lockin unless we somehow standardize on that
| (lol)
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Part of the issue here is that nobody is going to build
| something free on top of someone else's property. What good
| is a "free" design if you still have to pay ARM?
|
| Whereas once you have a free ISA which is actually in
| widespread use, you could get some designs out of
| universities or major corporations which intend to use them
| rather than sell them as their primary business and then
| release the design for the same reason they do for Linux
| code, potentially under a copyleft-style license.
|
| Those designs aren't going to be competitive with the state
| of the art, at least in the beginning, but they don't have to
| be. All they have to be is low power enough to stick in an
| embedded device and fast enough to run the display on a
| refrigerator and the lack of a license fee would cause them
| to replace a zillion ARM chips that currently go into every
| IoS device and <$200 phone and consumer internet router.
| That's a huge chunk of ARM's market.
|
| Then someone like Amazon evaluates this thing for something
| like the Kindle and finds that it's _almost_ good enough, all
| they have to do is throw a couple of engineers at it for a
| short period of time, so they do and it gets released because
| what do they care of some non-competitor uses it in some
| cheap laptop. Commoditize your complement -- now laptops are
| cheaper and people buy more laptops on Amazon.
|
| Meanwhile the "small project" uncompetitive boards start to
| have their own open source BSP and SDK under the BSD license,
| which means anybody else can fork it for their own thing, and
| that's a competitive advantage so it happens a lot. But now
| it's way easier to reverse engineer the code because 95% of
| it is unmodified, so you start getting community replacements
| for that stuff and with any luck the OEMs stop even producing
| it and point you to the open source repository.
|
| It could be a long time before that takes over the high end,
| if that ever happens, but the low end? It's almost
| inevitable. And the high end is AMD64 and Apple, the latter
| of which has all the leverage in the world over ARM because
| they could always switch to RISC-V.
| packetlost wrote:
| Honestly, this is conjecture at best, there have been other
| open ISAs that didn't manage to capture the market like
| this. That isn't to say I don't think RISC-V will capture a
| lot of market share, but I'm not going to make specific
| predictions about how much and where.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Of course it's conjecture. If you know anyone who can
| reliably predict the future I'd like to meet them.
|
| But previous open ISAs were in the wrong market segment.
| Okay, SPARC is open, but it's also Oracle and no one
| trusts them, and the existing SPARC ecosystem is the
| enterprise market which expects big, hot hundred-thread
| systems and has no use for a simple dual-core CPU at 800
| milliwatts. But that's the thing you can produce with a
| low budget, so it never goes anywhere or no one even
| makes one.
|
| People are starting to use RISC-V for the thing where
| that actually works.
| xorcist wrote:
| MIPS? PowerPC?
|
| They're all open, albeit with somewhat varying
| definitions of the term.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| MIPS wasn't opened up until they were already dead, and
| then almost immediately threw in the towel and joined up
| with RISC-V.
|
| PowerPC basically the same, not opened until after it was
| irrelevant. OpenPOWER is in the same enterprise market as
| SPARC and IBM is not far from Oracle on the "do not
| engage litigious bureaucracy" chart.
| monocasa wrote:
| MIPS didn't really open. They made a big deal about it,
| but it turned out to mean something to the effect of
| 'we'll open more of our build system to partners who pay
| for a traditional MIPS license. No third party MIPS
| cores. No general release of MIPS RTL.'
| deaddodo wrote:
| > Whereas once you have a free ISA which is actually in
| widespread use, you could get some designs out of
| universities or major corporations which intend to use them
| rather than sell them as their primary business and then
| release the design for the same reason they do for Linux
| code, potentially under a copyleft-style license.
|
| We've had open ISAs for decades. The problem isn't with ISA
| licensing, the problem is cost-of-entry.
|
| Most people have a computer...it costs nothing to install
| Linux and GCC/rustc/Python/etc and start contributing to
| open source software. For open hardware, you need (at
| minimum) a decent FPGA for testing/development; but access
| to fabrication resources to be in anyway competitive.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm generally pro on RISC-V; I just
| don't think it's the revolution everyone is making it out
| to be.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Most people have a computer...it costs nothing to
| install Linux and GCC/rustc/Python/etc and start
| contributing to open source software. For open hardware,
| you need (at minimum) a decent FPGA for
| testing/development;
|
| That wasn't even true when open source got started.
| Typical access was to expensive mainframes and VAXen
| available only in universities and major corporations.
| PCs were only starting to become a thing and most people
| didn't have one.
|
| That model still works if you need something expensive.
| Get your university to buy one, or your company if it
| will save them $0.05/unit on the millions of devices they
| sell. Or you rent one in the cloud.
|
| You also might not need your own. A project gets started
| by someone who _does_ have access to a decent FPGA, you
| want to contribute to it, great. They give you remote
| access to the FPGA.
|
| Meanwhile FPGA prices keep going down.
|
| > but access to fabrication resources to be in anyway
| competitive.
|
| Which is available to anyone, if you have customer
| demand. They've made millions of Raspberry Pis.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > That wasn't even true when open source got started.
|
| Which is why it took off when computers became
| accessible; and continued growing with even further
| ubiquity.
|
| > You also might not need your own. A project gets
| started by someone who does have access to a decent FPGA,
| you want to contribute to it, great. They give you remote
| access to the FPGA.
|
| Cool, so we're back to bottlenecked accessibility.
|
| > Which is available to anyone, if you have customer
| demand.
|
| Not hobbyists. To reiterate, open hardware (including
| ISAs) is as old as open software.
|
| You're delusional if you think either are anywhere
| equivalent.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| As a layperson though, how would I be able to tell whether
| any of this is true? When I have to target platforms as a
| software developer, the truth is, I'll do whatever
| Microsoft and Apple tell me to. By the time Apple is
| shipping a RISC-V phone I hope to be retired!
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| For any kind of high-level code, "platform" is something
| like win32 or Android or Qt. The underlying hardware
| architecture is the compiler/interpreter's problem.
|
| The people dealing with assembly know who they are, but
| much of that is the sort of work that cares a lot about
| shaving off a few cents worth of license fee for an
| embedded device.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > As a layperson though, how would I be able to tell
| whether any of this is true?
|
| You probably won't ever know. Do you know the
| architecture of the microcontroller on your first
| computer's hard drive? I don't.
|
| The stuff that RISC-V will replace first is the low-
| margin hardware that can be mass-produced by China et. al
| and exported without license violation. ARM's goose was
| already cooked in this sense, and even _ARM China_ won 't
| fix it. For IO controllers, ICs and network switches,
| it's hard to see why manufacturers would stick with
| higher-margin ARM hardware. If RISC-V cores are cheap,
| stable and available, you could replace them without the
| user ever noticing.
|
| > By the time Apple is shipping a RISC-V phone I hope to
| be retired!
|
| Apple is reportedly looking to replace some of their
| A-series ICs with RISC-V ones:
| https://www.techpowerup.com/298936/report-apple-to-move-
| a-pa...
|
| Hopefully you don't intend to retire _this_ soon :p
| AprilArcus wrote:
| Apple holds a rare Architecture license to the ARM ISA
| due to their role as a founding partner, and can make
| original implementations without incurring licensing
| dues, as they do with the A and M series CPUs. I
| understand why they would want to switch to homegrown
| designs instead of licensing ARM reference designs (which
| they do have to pay for), but why migrate instruction
| sets too when RISC-V doesn't save them any marginal cost
| over novel ARM designs that would be binary compatible
| with the existing firmware?
| klelatti wrote:
| > Apple holds a rare Architecture license to the ARM ISA
| due to their role as a founding partner, and can make
| original implementations without incurring licensing dues
|
| Sorry, the architecture license wasn't a thing when Arm
| was founded and there is no way that Arm would hand out
| free licenses at a later date. It's just a myth.
| zie wrote:
| "We have entered into a new long-term agreement with
| Apple that extends beyond 2040, continuing our
| longstanding relationship of collaboration with Apple and
| Apple's access to the Arm architecture," - ARM's IPO
| Document.
|
| I assume they paid something for it, but who knows how
| much, ARM and Apple have not decided to tell us.
|
| Source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1973239/0
| 00119312523...
| NortySpock wrote:
| Western Digital announced an open source core ("SweRV")
| in 2019, so I assume they already use them now that we
| are a few years on from that announcement.
|
| https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25002448
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| ARM actually has a pretty good story for how they can
| undercut RISC-V prices in that they can design the ISA rather
| than accepting the decisions of a committee. That committee
| used to make good choices, but things like the vector ISA
| seem more suspect.
| packetlost wrote:
| The general consensus I've heard is the vector extension is
| good? I do agree the design by committee is less than
| ideal, but the ability to add vendor extensions at all is
| nice for certain markets.
| monocasa wrote:
| The vector ISA seems alright to me. Particularly compared
| to Neon, but even compared to SVE.
| aristus wrote:
| You're not wrong, but having two choices of supply does
| wonders for squeezing profit margins from both back to the
| customer. Duopolies are terrible but better than monopolies.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| I think everyone in this thread underestimates this part of
| ARM's business (from the F-1):
|
| * Expand our System IP and SoC Offerings. To enable further
| improvements in performance and efficiency, we continue to
| develop a broader set of configurable systems IP offerings,
| including proven on-chip interconnect, security IP, memory
| controllers, and other design IP to be used with our
| processors, including the integration of multiple IP
| technologies into a subsystem and additional information to
| assist in fabrication. More recently, we have invested in a
| holistic, solution-focused approach to design, expanding beyond
| individual design IP elements to providing a more complete
| system. By delivering SoC solutions optimized for specific use
| cases, we can ensure that the entire system works together
| seamlessly to provide maximum performance and efficiency. At
| the same time, by designing an increasingly greater portion of
| the overall chip design, we are further reducing incremental
| development investment and risk borne by our customers while
| also enabling us to capture more value per device.*
|
| ARM doesn't just give you the architecture, they give you a
| _reference design_ that _already works_ and then lets you
| customize it however you want.
|
| Companies like Apple don't care about that, but MediaTek, NXP,
| etc. use it to speed the design process meaningfully.
| monocasa wrote:
| ARM already does that though. Their dev systems like the Juno
| boards are ARM designed chips with ARM IP through and through
| covering just about every accelerator and integration niche.
| CPUs, NoC fabrics, GPIO, sound, just about every hardware
| interface master and slave, AI inference, display scanout,
| etc.
|
| Integrators don't typically go all in on ARM IP though for a
| couple major reasons. 1) They want to provide some value add
| beyond the standard offerings or else why pick them over a
| competitor? 3) They have massive collections of IP blocks
| already that they don't have pay ARM for. Maybe it takes some
| engineering to convert to the next chip, but that's probably
| cheaper than what ARM is asking for.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Sure, I'm not saying that ARM is in a _good position_ per
| se, but that RISC-V has _way_ more catching up to do than
| people realize.
| bhouston wrote:
| I am giving RISC-V 5 to 10 years to catch up in my
| estimates. I think that is fair. The momentum behind
| RISC-V is massive and even then I am not saying it is
| fast.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| 5 years is a flash in chip design. Initial design to
| tape-out is 3 years at the leading edge if you're really
| good.
|
| Maybe in 5-10 years, RISC-V gains share in initial
| designs, but the semiconductor design process is loooong.
|
| And if you're going to talk about Microcontrollers and
| simpler chips, keep in mind we _had_ a bunch of other
| RISC architectures a decade ago that all lost to Cortex-M
| for simplicity /cost reasons (RIP MIPS).
| bhouston wrote:
| I think RISC-V eats ARM's lunch at the low end across the
| board over the next 5 years. Financially that is okay in
| the near term for ARM as the major profits are all in the
| high end designs.
|
| But all that will be left in a few years is the high end
| areas and where there is a lot of lock in to the ISA.
|
| It isn't yet clear when RISC-V will be ready to compete
| at the highest end of things, but that is where Jim
| Keller comes in.
|
| RISC-V is a classic market disruptor for ARM, just as ARM
| was a disruptor to Intel.
| monocasa wrote:
| It's less than you would think. Despite having offerings
| in about every IP block segment about the only ARM IP
| blocks that get heavy use are the pieces that have some
| other ecosystem thing going on. PL011 uarts are de facto
| required for some initial consoles. Mali GPUs were being
| sold in what was frankly a move that needed some anti-
| trust scrutiny (ARM saw Apple taking the piss out of IMG
| and decided to go in for the kill by offering CPUs+GPU
| for cheaper than CPUs on their own, overnight destroying
| IMG's market). Beyond that it's easier to not pay ARM for
| their IP. NoC fabrics and IP blocks that touch pads are
| better coming relatively straight from the foundry.
| Simple serial controllers are essentially commodities at
| this point. Etc.
|
| So RISC-V really only needs to focus on CPU cores to be
| an existential threat to ARM.
|
| At this point their biggest most is probably the patents
| on AMBA specs, but if they tried hard to enforce those
| the industry would switch to something like TileLink in a
| relative heartbeat.
| hunson_abadeer wrote:
| > if you go RISC-V, you are free to switch CPU providers.
|
| That's not even true within the ARM ecosystem itself. The chips
| from Infineon are not source-code compatible with STM, STM is
| not compatible with Microchip, Microchip is not compatible with
| TI...
|
| The problem is that the ARM core is just a portion of the
| architecture. Everything on top of that - GPIO, memory
| interfaces, timing, etc - is vendor specific, and will stay
| that way for RISC-V. RISC-V is just an instruction set
| architecture (with some appendages), not a blueprint for a
| complete CPU / MCU / SoC.
|
| Not to mention, the chips also won't be electrically-
| compatible. Your hardware architecture can be as daunting to
| redesign as the code, if not more so.
| FredPret wrote:
| Here's a list of companies that can be bought for $50b:
|
| Valero Energy. Profit: $10b. [valustox.com/VLO]
|
| DR Horton home builders. Profit: $5b. [valustox.com/DHI]
|
| General Motors (!). Profit: $10b. [valustox.com/GM]
|
| Aflac Insurance. Profit: $5b. [valustox.com/AFL]
|
| Nucor steel. This one is selling for only $40b. Profit: $5.6B.
| [valustox.com/NUE]
|
| Microchip Technology Inc. Also $40b. Profit: $2.4b.
| [valustox.com/MCHP]
|
| Arm has it's work cut out to raise their profits from the rumored
| $1b. I'm not sure why an investor would consider them without a
| strong plan to 10x-100x their profits when there are companies
| selling at a similar rate but making much more money in boring
| product categories. Hope they can do it while staying true to
| their mission.
| alberth wrote:
| Why are Arm's expenses so high?
|
| They don't manufacturer anything, correct?
| sharedbeans wrote:
| I remember reading that ARM makes more money from embedded than
| they do from mobile, but I can't find this source any more. Does
| anyone know anything about this? Was this true in the (recent)
| past but no longer true?
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