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Comment by Nokinside | Hacker News Reader

There are significant inaccuracies in this take

(2) "controlling tech" All big players: Apple, Nvidia, Samsung, Amazon, Qualcomm, Intel, .. have so called Architectural license with heavily crafted clauses in them that make them free from Arm control except for some minor details. They use just the instruction set and make their own microarchitecture.

(3) Arm China was robbed from Arm. The CEO stopped taking orders and just kept IP and is running company like their own. Chinese courts did nothing. China does what it wants inside China.

(5) No difference. There are too many cross-atlantic IP and design tool connections. Arm must comply completely to US government sanctions.

(6) Just like Nvidia. Both fabless hw IP companies. Difference is that Nvidia sells chips, Arm sells IP. Nvidia wanted Arm because they want to sell Nvidia IP to others. Nvidia has Arm architecture license, they don't need Arm IP to use Arm.

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> (3) Firstly, Arm China was robbed from Arm. The CEO stopped taking orders and just kept IP and is running company like their own. Chinese courts did nothing. China does what it wants inside China.

Did ARM cut off any new IP access from ARM China? Seems like a logical next step. And how is ARM China going to continue innovating? On their own?

> And how is ARM China going to continue innovating? On their own?

Why not?

When I was young, the common wisdom was that Japan couldn't innovate, and once I saw an old bit of early 20th century analysis that said Germany couldn't either.

Both of those were wrong, why is China so different that it would be otherwise?

Unhelpfully-successful innovators in China have a way of ending up in jails or unofficial house arrest

I'm curious about the origin of the fallacy that intelligence/innovation can only be found in anti-authoritarians/rebels (this is often deployed as "Our Freedom(TM) is why the US will always be number 1!"). Pro-government people can innovate just fine (e.g. GCHQ, NSA & defense industry)

Well we now have a natural experiment, let's see if more innovation comes out of the US or China in the coming years. I'm confident it won't be China, but certainly no guarantees.

> how is ARM China going to continue innovating? On their own?

Yes. Thery may do badly, but this isn't going to be much of a problem for China for ages. They are unlikely to do that badly though - among 2 billion people there will be plenty of good people.

Their much bigger problem though is their lack of access to cutting edge semi-conductor manufacturing technology. I imagine they are on this though, probably through industrial espionage (invading Taiwan would help, but they will face similar issues for acccess to tech long term unless they also get access to ASML work I think).

SMIC is already at 14nm, and ASML is allowed to continue to sell equipment for this process. The more advanced process nodes have several drawbacks; the domestic market could likely adjust to 14nm long-term.

The MIPS processor was copied for production in China (illicitly, until fully licensed), as was the DEC Alpha. There is significant processor design knowledge, and ample ability to copy any new designs produced by ARM-UK, even if they have to be scaled up to 14nm for domestic production.

Oddly enough, I learned recently that Russia prefers SPARC (known as Elbrus).

Elbrus are not SPARC. They are developed by Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies(MCST) though, that's where your confusion comes from(and there were few SPARC machines under Elbrus brand, but that was a long time ago). They were basically design team for hire in the 90s and were named such to attract customers. Then Intel wanted to acquire them in mid-2000s, but ended up just hiring almost everyone and leaving company as an empty shell. Now they are doing their own ISA and it's very different from SPARC. For starters, they are the only ones who are doing VLIW in CPUs nowadays(outside of CPUs I can think of only one other company, Groq).

Thanks, I just saw their association with SPARC from 1993 to 2010, so I assumed it was their main architecture.

On the subject of VLIW, Sophie Wilson was talking up Firepath as late as 2020.

"In 1992 a spin-off company Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies (MCST) was created and continued development, using the "Elbrus" moniker as a brand for all computer systems developed by the company."

"Elbrus-90micro (1998–2010) is a computer line based on SPARC instruction set architecture (ISA) microprocessors."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_(computer)

Elbrus is a custom VLIW, not a Sparc.

Yes.

Arm China is now AnMou Technology. They have "two wheels" strategy. ARM CPU architecture development for local customers and new Core Power architecture.

According to [1], the IP theft narrative is not actually true.

> There is an ongoing dispute between ARM and ARM China.

> But the accusations that ARM China had stolen ARM IP and was relaunching it under its own banner? Those don’t appear to be true.

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326617-arm-refutes-acc...

Yes.

Technically Soft Bank still owns 49% of arm-china subsidiary, and they could theoretically take control back... but the belligerent CEO of arm-china has supposedly setup private security forces barring access to the facilities, and there is something about a legal seal. So far Soft Bank has opted not to escalate the situation any further. There is of course a lot more to the story.

> there is something about a legal seal

for those not aware: seals are a big cultural thing in asian cultures (at least Japan and China for sure). I saw some surplus processors shipped from china with a stamp on them, I asked a Chinese friend about it thinking it was some kind of disposition mark (trying to make sure it didn't say "DEFECTIVE" or something ;) and she told me it was the seller's name, and that was his personal stamp, basically like his signature.

That got me looking into it and a signature is a pretty good analogy. In Japan at least it appears you need a seal to do any sort of serious transaction (buying a house, etc). The seals are officially registered and indeed basically like a signature, if you stamp a document that means it's "signed".

For a business, control of the seal is pretty much control of the business, I'm guessing. It's certainly going to be difficult to do any governing of the company without it, even if you otherwise have legal ownership of the company it's going to be difficult to exercise it without the seal.

Bit of an interesting cultural touchstone, seems minor to westerners but it's apparently a big deal to them.

It’s like when the Portuguese seized Macau. Even if it was wrong there was no higher authority who was going to step in and put things right.

(2) is untrue. Most players use ARM core designs, not just the instruction set.

Qualcomm used to make their own (back in 2014 or so) but hasn't since. Samsung tried after and quit in 2019. The cloud cores are all standard ARM designs (neoverse).

More importantly, both Apple and Fujitsu use custom designs.

Fujitsu has the fastest-ranked supercomputer with their custom ARM, and Apple felt confident enough in their M1 ARM to evict Intel.

I'm not claiming that all ARM licensees use ARM cores. Rather, if ARM stopped offering competitive core designs (or limited them to just Nvidia), it would have a big impact on the ecosystem.

A few players doing otherwise doesn't change that, regardless of how well they execute.

They have bought architecture licenses that allow them full control. They can still buy and use ARM core IP if they want.

Sure, but allow and use are different things.

Not "full controll". They need to meet a ton of requirements towards ARM.

And many of these "completely resigned" CPUs are nothing more than small (but important) adjustments of the pipeline and memory subsystem.

“They use just the instruction set and make their own microarchitecture.”

Is that really the case? My understanding is that while, yes, they make their own microarchitectures, they rely heavily on IP from ARM to make that happen

Do they write their own instruction decoders, FPUs, etc? I thought they started with the reference designs for a core and then tweaked them to their liking, some companies tweaking more than others

A peek inside Qualcomm’s upcoming chips, for example: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17091/qualcomm-announces-snap...

All of the main cores are ARM reference designs. Qualcomm does add proprietary IP, but it is more oriented around their strengths, like integrating their 5G modem into the die, which is something that none of the other big chip manufacturers can do at the moment (to my knowledge)

All of those companies except Amazon have shipped ARM CPU cores fully designed in-house, yes. But all except Apple and NVIDIA have since completely dropped their custom core design, and NVIDIA goes back and forth.

Qualcomm did buy Nuvia though, so they might yet come back with something new.

As uluyol corrected me, most of these seem to se ARM cores today. Few years back Samsung and Qualcomm had their own architectures. But the fact remains, if they have architecture license, ARM can't control them too much.

Apple designs everything by themselves.

If they have an architecture license, they can make their own implementations of the ISA.

Certainly, they may choose to derive their implementations from ARM's designs (or use them wholesale), but the license allows them to make their own.

That said, in the mobile space, AIUI only Apple and ARM are nowadays developing their own implementations. In the HPC space, there are others (Fujitsu, Marvell, etc).

(ARM also sells more limited licenses which only allow their cores to be used.)

(3) Arm is refuting that there was IP theft, see https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326617-arm-refutes-acc...

(2) *I thought Apple had complete control over their Arm(TM) based chips as in they can do anythign they want and pay no licensing fee as long as they keep the Arm branding?

Point 3: New New internet!

> Chinese courts did nothing. China does what it wants inside China.

Lots of people calling this out as 'a bad thing', but at the end of the day the Chinese government/courts handled in what it thought was in the best interest of Chinese citizens.

For other countries that might look like respecting IP clauses but for China it doesn't seem to be. I think it makes perfect sense and is perfectly moral for a country to do so.

and for 6) I think one of the fears there is that nVidia would use ARMs near de-facto monopoly to force their tech onto the market and push out competitors, like qualcom on the mobile GPU market.

Whether it be trough integrating nVidia tech more deeply into the architectural offerings essentialy forcing competitors to license both techs, or by using the ARM IP to in the future outcompete direct competitors by charging more for the IP that they can now use without any cost. Even if they're not planning any of that, I think the fear that they might in the future is what's giving many people (and regulators) pause.

ARM itself is never in direct competition with its customers _because_ it only sells IP, nVidia sells chips and is in direct competition with others who depend upon ARM for their chips.

>but at the end of the day the Chinese government/courts handled in what it thought was in the best interest of Chinese citizens

In the short-term, you're absolutely right. In the long-term, no one will continue to invest in Chinese businesses if China gets a reputation for banditry like this. Is it in the best interests of Chinese citizens to ruin their reputation for the next generation?

It's likely that China will use illegal or underhanded techniques to get ahead today then clean up their act and claim rehabilitation later. You can see the mental groundwork being laid in the whataboutism rebuttals comparing the US today vs past history.

> in the best interest of Chinese citizens.

Of course you can do that but that is not how you do trade. Trade requires trust and a move like this undermines trust. And I find it difficult to argue that it's in the best interest of citizen to undermine foreign investors' trust in the marketplace. In the end it means that less money will flow in.

> Lots of people calling this out as 'a bad thing', but at the end of the day the Chinese government/courts handled in what it thought was in the best interest of Chinese citizens.

If somebody came into my house, ate my food, set themselves up in a bedroom and enjoyed the comforts of my household, then when I told them to leave declared everywhere they had lodged and dined in my house an independent territory, that would be an immoral act. Blatant theft in the eyes of anyone.

Allen Wu was removed from his post. Not only did he decline, he took off a chunk of the company with him. That is a move of douchery in business I've never seen anywhere in the Western world in my time alive.

If the company I work for fires me, I will leave the premises. I may not like the decision but I respect it. And in Denmark we have courts of law that ensure one vacates the premises by the date of termination.

The CCP is playing fast and loose with whatever it likes. That's bad behavior, whether you're a business or a human being.

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