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Comment by AWildC182 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if softbank sees the writing on the wall here. Yea they want cash but ARM is rapidly coming under fire from the open source RISC-V architecture. ARM's licencing model in particular is steering people away from their offerings in new designs and I think they're pretty much at peak value right now with Apple's adoption of their architecture.

I know there aren't tons of news articles about new high performance chips being offered but where I work we are seeing a ridiculous level of interest from other companies particularly given our industry...

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I am a huge RISC-V fan, like Cathy Bates level, but there is so much that ARM can do over the next 5,10,15 years but it looks like they are incapable of the required transformations. Everything that is good about RISC-V is already at ARM's disposal.

Currently it looks like SiFive was borne out of a solution for the organizational issues that plague innovator's dilemma companies. I am envious of SiFive's position right now. I hope they don't get swallowed by a dinosaur.

The only reason NVidia wants ARM is because they can't have an x86 license.

Apple doesn't care because they probably have an escape/hedge clause on their ARM license and they will soon be shipping an IR. They have ISA hopped so many times it is old hat to them.

What is an IR?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_representation

I don’t know if this is right. The money seems to be in customized Arm-based chips for now and I think for quite a while still. Apple and Nuvia might take Arm to crazy new levels with their customizations but all their chips will still be Arm at their core, which seems to be a pretty nice place to be in for SoftBank. Surely once Apple blows the doors off everything else more new licensees will follow, no? I think Arm has a lot of growth left in it, even if RISC-V takes off.

I'm curious if ARM sees RISC-V as serious competition. I'm under the impression that the instruction set makes efficient and performant implementations rather difficult.

My personal view is that, for the next few years, no. There are some pretty critical features that RISCV is missing that makes ARM what it is today and so very prolific in your phones and desktops and even, recently, servers. Many hypervisor or virtualization and to some extent security extensions just aren't there for RISC-V, and on top of that, the software ecosystem isn't really all there yet for high performance.

Currently though, RISC-V already is ingrained heavily in the embedded and IoT space and growing astronomically. That's where ARM is losing heavily, although in my opinion, the embedded space wasn't the money maker anyways for ARM

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