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Comment by BlueTankEngine | Hacker News Reader

In my experience talking to semiconductors folks, ARM is just not a concern anymore. The future is RISC-V, and ARM is already being seen as legacy tech. ARM's progress in the server space has stalled, the ARM Windows ecosystem is dead, Android has laid the groundwork for a move to RISC-V, and ARM has never and will never touch the desktop market.

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> ARM has never and will never touch the desktop market

That’s a bold statement as I type all day on an M1 Mac. My FT100 company just made the leap to them as dev machines.

My company has entire teams and regions that do NOT buy PCs and only Mac laptop for employees. Started with the M-series.

I think you mean "Do not buy Windows computers". Macs are also PCs.

To be fair that whole boat sailed with the "I'm a mac he is PC" series of adverts.

Ah, I'm not in the US so I avoided those ads.

Graviton, M1/M2, Ampere etc but I’m sure you’ll be able to explain why Arm is seen as ‘legacy’ tech when billions of smartphones are being shipped every year with Arm CPUs.

Oh look, you named 4 areas where ARM development has already peaked. Hyperscalers are already looking to evolve from ARM in the near future, just look at how much attention Ventana got at RISC-V Summit. M1/M2 are Apple ecosystem specific phenomenon that haven't inspired any copycat products. Ampere has been a massive disappointment to everyone in the industry, see the fact that Nuvia had their entire business dead-to-rights pre-acquisition. ARM simply isnt at the cutting edge of the semiconductor industry anymore. Just because Apple and Qualcomm use it to great effect doesn't mean ARM is making any major innovative strides relative to the competition.

> ARM simply isnt at the cutting edge of the semiconductor industry anymore.

What you really mean is Arm isn’t the hot new thing anymore. Well it hasn’t been that for 20 years. Meanwhile billions of arm devices in leading edge nodes are being shipped. Oh well.

> Hyperscalers are already looking to evolve from ARM

citation needed

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/08/5_percent_cloud_arm/

"5% of the cloud now runs on Arm as chip designer plans 2023 IPO"

5% does not seems to me as a position that you want to change to something else.

ARM in every day computing outside of mobile phones and SBCs is just getting started as I see it.

If RISC-V support by Microsoft is as bad as it has been for ARM, then I'm afraid RISC-V will never touch the desktop market, at all. Contrary to ARM, which is being pushed there with great success by Apple. Server-wise of course it's a different story...

If great success to you is that they put the M1 and M2 in a tower, I don't know what to tell you. Intel, AMD, and the x86 industrial complex don't care in the slightest what instruction set your Mac runs

Might I suggest taking a step back, re-reading your first comment and all the replies under it, and asking yourself "is it possible I might not be 100% correct, and maybe other opinions have enough merit to be worth considering why people aren't agreeing with me, rather than just changing my argument to make sure I'm still the winner of this thread"?

I’m not sure I expressed my point clearly. It wasn’t quite about Apple. So I will reformulate it here: the fate of any instruction set on the desktop is primarily decided by Microsoft.

Do you have any information that Microsoft is planning to support RISC-V at least as well as x86/x64? (That is to say, not with something like Windows RT, or Windows CE)

That would be tremendously good news, I shall add.

>In my experience talking to semiconductors folks,

Most, if not all SemiCoductor “folks” I know are very pragmatic. As in how a Real Engineer should be, unlike software engineers. And in my experience, only HN and the Internet are suggesting ARM is dead. Everything will be RISC-V.

Yup, difference to the engineer is minuscule.

It's getting traction coz chip companies don't want to pay ARM for licensing, not because it is particularly better at something.

>The future is RISC-V

I hope this never comes to pass, because a RISC-V future is a Chinese future.

A Chinese future will not be kind to western ideals that most of us hold dear.

Huh? China has licenses for both the x86_64 and ARM ISAs. WhT about RISC-V makes it an advantage for Chinese companies?

RISC-V is free and open as in libre, by contrast to x86 and ARM which must be licensed from Intel/AMD and ARM and are thus subject to potential western economic sanctions.

Now, yes, China will just espionage and kangaroo court their way through and around such legalities anyway, but nonetheless RISC-V is less effort for more reward for China if it becomes at least on par with x86 and ARM.

Put more basically, it's a matter of national security. China can have an entire RISC-V ecosystem indigenously, unlike x86 and ARM.

Can Zhaoxin's x86 license, or the various Chinese companies's ARM licenses, just be revoked?

If the US and/or UK place sanctions on exporting microprocessor technologies to China then that's that. Intel/AMD and ARM are subject to US and UK laws and regulations respectively.

RISC-V by contrast is much, much harder for any given country to regulate because of its free and open nature. At most the US and UK can embargo individual developments made within their jurisdictions, but they can't regulate the entire architecture. RISC-V doesn't have a kill switch named Intel/AMD or ARM.

China has licenses for x86-64 “designs” and ARM’s design. Not the ISA. Although “ARM China” is probably enough for them.

They have access to VIA's x86 license. They have entered a deal to use it for their domestic designs and have been doing so for 10 years now.

Really? No Chinese company has the ARM architecture license? That's honestly a bit surprising if true

ARM China is a wildly different animal than ARM. They went rogue a few years back and though SoftBank/ARM did a lot to get things back in line, it still shows up like this:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/arm-china-says-its-ousted...

I'm loving it. I used cheap risc-v boards for several of my projects, most notably a GD32V in my keyboard. The equivalent stm boards weren't too expensive, mostly in the 10-20$ range, but weren't as easily available (and 10$ is still 3x the price of the chinese risc board)

Though the rp2040 has largely ended my cheap risc-v addiction

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