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  • Arm Ltd Making Chips Now

    From Lawrence D'Oliveiro@21:1/5 to All on Fri Feb 14 22:11:14 2025
    Up to now, Arm (the company) has never made chips, only chip designs
    (and designs for chip components) that it has licensed to other
    companies. This model has been spectacularly successful, making ARM
    (the architecture) the most successful computer architecture ever,
    shipping more chips per year than the entire population of the Earth.

    Now they want to move away from that model, and start making chips
    themselves. In effect, they are now competing with some of their own
    customers. Will this, and other slightly worrying moves from the
    company, make some licensees think twice about being so committed to
    ARM, and start looking to other more freely-licensed alternatives,
    like RISC-V? Will this, if not kill the goose that laid the golden
    egg, at least severely clip its wings?

    <https://www.computerworld.com/article/3825123/arm-secures-meta-as-first-customer-in-chip-push-challenging-industry-giants.html>

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  • From Retrograde@21:1/5 to Lawrence D'Oliveiro on Sun Feb 16 16:35:26 2025
    On 2025-02-14, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
    Up to now, Arm (the company) has never made chips, only chip designs
    (and designs for chip components) that it has licensed to other
    companies. This model has been spectacularly successful, making ARM
    (the architecture) the most successful computer architecture ever,
    shipping more chips per year than the entire population of the Earth.

    Now they want to move away from that model, and start making chips themselves. In effect, they are now competing with some of their own customers. Will this, and other slightly worrying moves from the
    company, make some licensees think twice about being so committed to
    ARM, and start looking to other more freely-licensed alternatives,
    like RISC-V? Will this, if not kill the goose that laid the golden
    egg, at least severely clip its wings?


    I don't know if this is a good idea or a bad one, but was just thinking
    it's like Intel went full-speed down a very long, dead end street and
    are now in serious jeopardy. ARM in the server room is a big deal.

    At work I'm conscious that 90% of what I do can be done on a low-powered Android tablet requiring an occasional charge, but perfectly usable on a
    plane, or with a battery pack etc. But that one stupid Windows app
    requires I lug around a heavy laptop/charger, and run a Win10/Intel
    machine that lasts <3 hours on a charge while running hot.

    Ask me which one I'd rather travel with. Go ARM, go!

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  • From Lawrence D'Oliveiro@21:1/5 to All on Mon Feb 17 03:36:06 2025
    On Fri, 14 Feb 2025 22:11:14 -0000 (UTC), I wrote:

    Now they want to move away from that model, and start making chips themselves. In effect, they are now competing with some of their own customers.

    Something else that seems calculated to get up the noses of their
    customers is they are poaching staff from some of those very
    customers, to work on these in-house chips.

    <https://www.computerworld.com/article/3825123/arm-secures-meta-as-first-customer-in-chip-push-challenging-industry-giants.html>

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  • From Scott Dorsey@21:1/5 to ldo@nz.invalid on Mon Feb 17 22:19:58 2025
    Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
    On Fri, 14 Feb 2025 22:11:14 -0000 (UTC), I wrote:

    Now they want to move away from that model, and start making chips
    themselves. In effect, they are now competing with some of their own
    customers.

    Something else that seems calculated to get up the noses of their
    customers is they are poaching staff from some of those very
    customers, to work on these in-house chips.

    <https://www.computerworld.com/article/3825123/arm-secures-meta-as-first-customer-in-chip-push-challenging-industry-giants.html>

    So... they are moving from only licensing the architecture to becoming a fabless chip house using that architecture? Or are they actually
    setting up a chip fab?
    --scott
    --
    "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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