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Comment by pmg | Hacker News Reader

The press release linked by OP doesn't give the full story. For a better perspective see https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip...

If you're just joining us, Arm very much sees the up and coming RISC-V stack as an immediate threat to the future of their business and is taking pro-active countermeasures - doing everything from awkward, backfiring smear campaigns against RISC-V[1] to straight up license dumping their own product to prevent developers jumping ship.

It's interesting to see because RISC-V is wonderful and Arm seems to recognize that. Arm Holdings is acting rationally as someone in a privileged competitive position would do. At the same time, big players like Western Digital are migrating to RISC-V so Arm is internally freaking out [2].

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/

[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_str...

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Pretty much exactly right.

What I found interesting initially was how the 32 bit CPU was disrupting the 8 bit CPU market. People using Cortex M0 chips where they used to use ATMega chips. Identical package size, faster, more resources, not too much more memory. And some unreal bargains[1].

And now as FPGAs get cheaper and cheaper, RISC-V was becoming the default 'soft' processor because everything else cost money and didn't have any sort of ecosystem. Amazing times.

[1] Not sure how these folks make money -- https://satoshinm.github.io/blog/171212_stm32_blue_pill_arm_...

Big and small players are interested indeed, from WD, Alibaba and Huami to 'some 300 companies already looking at or developing with RISC-V in China'[1], but not because RISC-V is so wonderful, it's just not bad and just enough for many tasks - and it's basically free.

[1] https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1333...

What I don't understand is does it really cost a company like WD that much to license or just buy already manufactured chips?

It would seem taking risks on new architectures, and all the extra development time (both chip and tooling) would far outweigh the cost of just licensing arm.

Can someone explain the economics of it all?

Don't get me wrong, I am all for a free competitor to ARM's near monopoly on the mobile embedded space. I don't just get it.

I think the issue is really just one of scale. If you ship 400M drives a year (as the global hard drive industry did last year), a cost savings of $1 is a lot of money that goes into your pocket/R&D. If you're making 10000 of something, making a custom chip is almost certainly going to cost you a fortune; if you're making tens or hundreds of millions of something, that cost gets amortized very quickly, I imagine.

If WD is making their own chips, it almost certainly isn't to save a couple grand a year; it's probably to save many millions.

I spent a little bit of time Logitech's R&D department back in the late 90's, they were doing all they could to shave two pins off a chip. It cost them a terrible amount of money, including a custom package and the difference in price per mouse must have been on the order of a few pennies. But the enormous amount of devices shipped more than made up for the R&D investment.

Yeah, in consumer electronics the hardware engineers have knife fights in the hallways over resistors. Well, not that bad. Probably.

"Can't you do that in software?" 50M units later you understand the reason why that hardware guy made your life a living hell for two weeks just before release, because what he did saved ten cents on the motherboard and at scale that's real money.

Oh man, so much this. I'm going to steal the "knife fights ... over resistors". That so perfectly captures the whole process.

It is not uncommon to have lots of simple processors in one chip. One could manage low power mode, another encryption and boot, and another core functionality required in a hard drive. When you have 3-4 cores per device the license fees start to add up.

When you get large enough, doing it yourself can become cheaper than buying it, and small %0.5 improvement projects can have big benefits since they accumulate.

RISC-V feels like CPU hardware's linux moment right now.

My favorite part of RISC-V is that it has 30+ years to prove it is the correct solution (for most situations).

Well WD has total sales of $15.13bn with a cost of goods of $10.8bn if the chip and license for arm costs $3 and they can get the costs to $1 with the chip doing exactly and only what they need at that scale it’s a meaningful impact on cost of goods thus bottom line.

they are less than 0.3, not 3.

The killer your missing is 'architecture license' versus 'IP' license. The former gives you the right to modify the architecture in your designs (add instructions, non-standard peripherals, alternate memory buses, Etc.) a standard 'IP' license just lets you essentially plop down a standard chip and innovate in the peripherals without touching the system controller at all.

Folks like WD want a processor that is cheap, and specialized like running an error correcting algorithm across spectrum. Generic CPU is too slow, custom CPU is fine. Custom CPU where there is already a lot of other support because other people are using it, is super fine.

Unlimited right to use / modify is a really valuable thing for these companies.

It's probably impossible to satisfy the level of 'wonderfullness' you'd demand in a modern (even if minimalist) processor. There are a lot of competing demands on what it should do. RISC-V seems to have made good decisions w.r.t. modularity and efficiency at least.

Kinda off-topic, but I feel like they could gain a lot by opening their graphics stacks or simply by letting FOSS devs work on them, instead of making their work more difficult/impossible (see: history of the FOSS lima driver).

The problem with graphics is that it's a patent minefield. This is one of the main reasons why graphics stacks are usually so closed.

How do Intel and AMD manage to make their own drivers mostly open-source, then?

Having spent a few years focused on this (and other semiconductor enablement-related problems) my guess is they have evaluated their own patent portfolios and the risk of their implementations triggering a war, and have concluded it was worth doing. Note that Intel's GPUs are relatively simple, so AMD would seem to be bolder here, but I haven't dug into the detail to see how they have limited their exposure.

I find Intel is pretty solid about open sourcing everything they provide for Linux that runs on the host — it's a pity they haven't applied the same policy to the ME.

patents and cross licensing agreements

https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/10/intel_and_nvidia_...

Yes but if it is patented that doesn't mean it is secret -- in fact the opposite. I can copy the code but I can't sell a product using it without getting a licence or risk being sued. Obviously I can't licence it as GPLv3. But I don't see why the driver implementation should be so closed.

Because you don't hide the driver to hide what's in your patent. You hide the driver to hide code that violates someone else's patent.

'Patent minefield' means there are so many patents for so many basic things it's impossible to do anything without violating something. You'll never know you've violated a patent until your competitor sues you. A lot of these patents are probably invalid, but the fights in court will take years, judgement will sometimes happen by someone without know how, and losing 1 fight will cause you severe damage.

The 'solution' is trying to hide all your violations by closing the driver. Reverse engineering costs a lot, so if someone is doing it to find your patent violations, you build your own patent war chest and cross license with them - they have engineers so they probably produce something that has violations for your patents.

Ah, that makes total sense. Makes you wonder how they avoided this situation with RISC-V (they say via identification of prior art), but graphics does seem to be worse patent-wise (though ARM is notoriously litigious).

If you're just joining us, Arm very much sees the up and coming RISC-V stack as an immediate threat to the future of their business and is taking pro-active countermeasures

By any chance, does anyone know if Intel is funding RISC-V? According to the logic of "Commoditizing the Complement" one way of hurting a competitor is to make their product a commodity.

Intel Capital participated in SiFive's Series C funding round. Besides that I don't know of anything else Intel has done for risc-v.

They were one of the funders for RISC-V at Berkeley but that may have been funding EECS rather than RISC-V.

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/Data/106902...

Intel was the original sponsor of RISC-V because they sponsored Berkeley. They just didn't really know about it.

Since then they also invested in RISC-V startups, like SiFive.

Ok, we changed the URL to that from https://www.arm.com/company/news/2018/10/arm-expands-design-.... Thanks!

Why did we change from an official press release with some content to some random blog post?

As the GP said:

> The press release linked by OP doesn't give the full story. For a better perspective see [the random blog post].

The blog post doesn't even cite the source of the news.

If you know of a more substantive link we can switch to it. Corporate press releases don't tend to be a good fit for HN.

Is there some way ARM could make money supporting an open IP like RISC-V, analagous to Red Hat for Fedora Linux? Obviously, not a perfect analogy, but...

Donations.

Build RISC-V chips with proprietary extensions. License the extensions to third parties.

That would require the extensions to be popular, though, and having a corner of one fort is less ideal than having an entire fort.

Custom design services. Which is more of a consulting business, so does not scale in same way as IP licensing.

Could also integrate manufacturing services, but fabs is incredibly capital intensive, making it another kind of business.

Could also keep IP licensing as a model, but open the core and push it further and further out into peripherals. Problem is that would probably kill the surrounding ecosystem of partners that do this today.

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