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Comment by gchadwick | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder if ARM is hampered by having to release a design that has to work on more than just the most cutting edge TSMC process.

They're constrained by what their customers want. Yes it's nice to have the highest performing chip but plenty of space in the mobile market for less than best CPUs. Anyone buying arm CPUs doesn't have the A15 as an option so in a sense it's not a competitor. Someone selling premium phones is trying to out-compete apple but how much does the raw performance stats matter to the consumer markets?

I think there's also a tendency for everyone to want to do their own CPU now. Qualcomm and Samsung might want their arm micro-architecture to be the A15 killer and only buy the lower performance cores off arm for instance.

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> I think there's also a tendency for everyone to want to do their own CPU now.

I mean... I think it's the opposite. There was a time when Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia had their own microarchs which they used in most things. Increasingly they're back to ARM-supplied designs now.

I suspect this is partly because the ARM designs are adequate these days, but also because phone CPUs just aren't that competitive anymore; the iPhone is enormously faster than any other phone, and consumers do not care about this at all, because the other phones are, generally, Good Enough.

> I mean... I think it's the opposite. There was a time when Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia had their own microarchs which they used in most things. Increasingly they're back to ARM-supplied designs now.

Indeed but I'm wondering if we'll see a swing back, if they're all selling SoCs with the same set of arm IP in varying configurations what's the differentiating factor? I suspect there's an aspect of 'arm never builds what we want' as arm needs to satisfy multiple people that would drive them to build their own design at the high end. That said I've only got a hunch and can't recall concrete evidence for this.

I think there is a lot of room for competition in the accelerator space e.g. GPUs, ML inference engines, video encode/decode.

It seems to me like modern core design is expensive and high risk/low reward for most of these companies. Remember, Apple has a ton of R&D and the margins to put massive cores into just about everything they sell, upto and including putting a CPU faster than most desktops into their "budget" monitor. Fabbing costs keep going up and the extra revenue from larger+faster CPUs would get gobbled up by TSMC and Samsung Fab. Setting out to build something faster at the same size and R&D is what eats your profit.

For Qualcomm, Samsung, Google (for Pixel at least), and NVidia, ARMs balance of performance/die size/efficiency is aligned well with their market positions and the opportunity cost of rolling their own is just too high even in the face of thinning margins from competition.

This has been a popular topic for some time in the computer architecture space.

“ The End of the Road for General Purpose Processors & the Future of Computing - Prof. John L. Hennessy”

https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/end-road-general-purpose-proc...

Qualcomm acquired Nuvia whose only product is a custom ARM CPU microarchitecture. I wonder what they'll do with it.

> I think there's also a tendency for everyone to want to do their own CPU now.

I wonder how many of these are actually vanity projects? Apple spent billions for more than a decade on ARM development before using their own design as a central processor.

OTOH MediaTek et all don’t worry about any of that.

> Apple spent billions for more than a decade on ARM development before using their own design as a central processor.

For their computer platforms. Apple has been using ARM since the Newton.

Anyone who wants to differentiate from competition building x86 boxes will have to use a non-x86 design. Viable ones these days are mostly POWER for workstations and servers, and ARM for everything between mobile and midrange servers.

If you build a commodity computer based on the same components everyone else has access to, your margin will be squeezed. If your product has different characteristics than your direct competition and that difference is advantageous on a given segment, your competitors will have trouble moving in. That's why Apple M-series and IBM mainframe CPUs are not available to anyone without a full computer attached.

> For their computer platforms. Apple has been using ARM since the Newton.

The Newton used a regular ARM design (that was back when Apple owned a huge chunk of ARM). They used 3P ARMs for the main processor of other devices for years (e.g. time capsule or some video dongles).

That one sentence of mine you referred two made two points: 1 - it took a long time for apple to get to the point where they could replace external designs as the core processor for a device (starting with the phone) and 2 - that they had by that time quite a bit of experience for using their own designs for subsidiary processors inside their devices. All of that is a pretty complex undertaking.

> If you build a commodity computer based on the same components everyone else has access to, your margin will be squeezed. If your product has different characteristics than your direct competition and that difference is advantageous on a given segment, your competitors will have trouble moving in.

Well, it’s all about where your locus of differentiation is; all else you want to commoditize. It’s not like Apple makes their own DRAM, and those suppliers are the ones that get their margins squeezed (especially by Apple — look at who their CEO is).

And the lack of a CPU design team is a competitive advantage for the MediaTeks of this world, even if it’s not exclusive to them. Instead the very lack of exclusivity in cpu has a network effect value for them. This is what killed arm competitors like MIPS.

It took a long time for ARM to dominate the low-power space (MIPS and POWER were contenders for a long time). ARM started as a desktop processor and died on the desktop before there was a space for low-power 32-bit RISC devices.

In 2008 Apple acquired PA Semi and two years later they released an iPad powered by the A4, their first in-house design. Many acquisitions and designs later, their performance started to approach the performance of Intel chips used in their desktops and laptops. It was a very complex undertaking and they nailed it on every step.

All Apple computer ISA transitions were driven by external factors. Motorola gave up on the 68K family (a dead end for them) in favor of the 88K RISC processors (where they thought they had a chance), Motorola and IBM gave up on PPC and never delivered a low power G5 (they offered Apple Cell instead). Finally, Intel didn't give Apple the special treatment it needed to differentiate from other laptops and, since by then Apple had phone and tablet SoCs that were competitive with Intel parts and there was lots of commonality between macOS and iOS, that last choice was easy. Depending on a third party for the component more easily usable to set you apart from your competition is never great. If Apple moves their Macs and mobile devices away from ARM, it'll be the first time Apple decides that without a "catastrophic" event from outside.

For Intel, they also missed a lot of targets in terms of both delivery and thermals throughout the x86 Apple era.

As a company, they don't like being at the mercy of someone else if they can help it.

> For Intel, they also missed a lot of targets in terms of both delivery and thermals throughout the x86 Apple era.

True. Up until now, it was always betting the company on someone else's silicon roadmap. Now they control it completely.

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