Why Everyone Wants Arm
economist.com
economist.com
Ultimately if a lot of experienced ARM designers defect to RISC-V firms, then the balance could tilt to RISC-V. I suspect that the talk about takeovers would be causing some unease in the technical ranks.
With ARM, only ARM can license designs to others. They'll license the ISA to you, but you'll still be unable to license your ARM implementations to others.
With RISC-V, everybody gets a free license to the ISA and anybody can license their own designs to others. As a result, there's a lively market of cores, which has been growing geometrically for the last ~3 years.
>Ultimately if a lot of experienced ARM designers defect to RISC-V firms, then the balance could tilt to RISC-V.
SiFive is, on high performance, about 2 years behind ARM's fastest designs right now. On power efficiency and area, they're already very competitive.
Tenstorrent has a team led by Jim Keller working on a high performance implementation.
Rivos, full of ex-Apple, ex-P.A.Semi engineers, is working on another.
And these are just some examples. Several other parties have huge RISC-V efforts ongoing.
RISC-V having competitive high performance implementations is something I fully expect to happen within 2 years, rather than just a possibility.
We have been hearing the story of how valuable Arm is for some time. On paper and in theory this story is great but it seems like something has gone quite wrong along the way.
If Arm is so desirable, why has it failed to locate an acquirer? Why so many botched deals such as the China IP deal? Why has it had to spin off its software division? Why has it decided to try to IPO in the middle of a terrible global recession?
The most recent round of layoffs have been of an different nature than what has come previously. And this layoff was preceded by others before it.
Something about this round of cuts feels desperate, last minute, unplanned and quite deep in nature.
This is a company which seems to be having an identity and leadership crisis.
The timing is also incredibly bad. They have decided to try to IPO in a bear market : recession. And to make this “bear market IPO” work, they have sawn off a leg and thrown it overboard.
If everyone wants Arm, I don’t think it would be choosing THIS MOMENT to IPO.
In the Mergers and Acquisitions world, a failed aquisition is “the kiss of death.” Having failed in a desperate gamble to sell the company to NVIDIA - we are now seeing the outcome: A highly undesirable and poorly timed tail spin into a poorly planned and badly formed recession IPO.
Won’t be buying the shares of this one.
The company is a single speed bump away from catastrophe in my opinion. These graphs which have been going up and to the right only need a single disruption to change trajectory.
Personal opinion is Arm is on the cusp of disruption, having failed to exit, it is hard to imagine the luck lasting forever.
Think about it: ARM is basically a money printer. One company owns the patents and can license it to manufacturers for whatever the hell they want. The cherry on top? Now they don't even have to develop their own ISA extensions or standards, they just let Mediatek, Apple and Qualcomm fight over what they want in the next big version. Every dollar they spend on lawyers is worth 10 software engineers, frankly. They've transitioned to the kind of company where they behave like a dragon, guarding one big patent hoard until they die or someone purchases the mountain they live in. The writing is on the wall for proprietary RISC architectures, anyways: RISC-V beats the pants off ARMv8 in so many important benchmarks like SIMD calculations and performance-per-watt, once Chinese manufacturers catch word that they can make chips without paying tribute to Western think-tanks, we'll be mass-producing these on a scale that simply doesn't exist today. ARM's real business of putting a Cortex M53 in everything with a power cable will be donezo.