By the way StarFive were SiFive China until SiFive divested them (the split was a bit acrimonious).
RISC-V is only interesting as a platform for a different business model.
Nevertheless it seems plausible there are companies that would like to license a RISC-V design (rather than implement their own or use one of the slower free cores) and might therefore be a SiFive customer. I'm not saying it's going to be a huge market, probably a much smaller one even than Arm, but it's a possible one.
I think part of what I'm getting at is it's TOUGH to get people to adopt new IP. And it's TOUGH to be all things to all people so you can compete in the low end against M0s and MSP430s, in the mid range against A77s and in the high end against i9's.
That being said, if SiFive fabbed a catalog part with one or two E20s at a reasonable cost, I have an immediate need of 200 of them. I only wish there were another 500 of me with a similar need so there was a chance we could get it fabbed at a decent price.
Why would they do that? That's not the business SiFive is in. Arm doesn't do that -- they leave that to people such as the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the RP2040.
Perhaps (if you insist on a SiFive core) you could look at something like the BL602? $0.99 here.
https://pine64.com/product/pineseed-bl602-wifi-ble5-soc/
If you're willing to use non-SiFive cores (and why not), the CH32V003 is pretty awesome for $0.10 (8 pin) to $0.14 (20 pin), assuming 2K RAM and 16K flash is enough for your purposes.
But I don't know what is "a decent price" for you.
If ARM decides to change their license terms, you are screwed. If SiFive decides to change their license terms, you could just switch to a competing IP vendor without any changes to your software ecosystem.
But yeah. Even though we have compilers, it's not like you can spin up support for a new ISA in the drop of a hat. If you launched a project with a StarFive part and then decided you wanted to use SiFive IP, you should be able to use the same tooling. The impact of that shouldn't be under-estimated.
Go x86, and you'll end up dealing with Intel, or AMD (okay, there's Via & maybe a few makers of legacy x86 parts).
Go RISC-V, and roll your own or pick from a growing list of vendors, are both valid options. And switch supplier while keeping your toolchain ecosystem.
I'd expect at least that this will spur innovation in the field. Likely increase consumer choice.
More suppliers of [insert product type here] is almost always a good thing.
And the specs extend further to non-ISA, such as standardizing boot process and platform.
If that is what you're saying, I think you're wrong.
As to the low level hand coded assembly. There's a fair amount of stuff in the Intel architecture that's not officially published. There are tools (from Intel) like VTune and the Intel C compilers that use non-published interfaces to optimize C or assembly, sometimes significantly. It is true you can write software without them, but many people purchase these Intel tools to make sure their systems run quickly and efficiently.
I can't remember if the SiFive U-X4 core equivalents were defined in the open RISC-V specs or as part of SiFive specific interfaces. If the former, then your point is even stronger. If the latter, your point is still valid, though modulo the impact of having relied on a SiFive specific interface.
ARM is making peanuts compared pretty much all the companies that actually make high-end chips. Their IP seems to be worth much more than the business.
I'm not even sure what the valuation this valuation might even be based on (which admittedly applies to a bunch of other companies which actually end up doing quite well). They might conceivably be worth 100 P/E as an acquisition but an IPO would only make it less likely?
$50-55 billion would mean that ARM is more overvalued than Nvidia and Nvidia actually has a realistic chance to grow into that valuation.
I can't see how Arm is even worth the $32 billion SoftBank paid for them now. RISC-V didn't exist outside of Berkeley in 2016 when SoftBank bought Arm, but now it's becoming a serious rival and especially a serious limitation on how much Arm can raise prices.
Arm have around 2.7 billion in annual sales with $500m or $600m of profit.
That makes $32b a P/E ratio of 50 to 60, and $50b a P/E ratio of 80 to 100.
In simple terms, if you pay $50 billion to buy Arm, and they make the same profit every year as they are making now, it will take 80 to 100 years for you to make your investment back.
It's like putting your money into a bank paying 1% interest, but a lot riskier.
Such P/E ratios can only be justified by the company and its profits growing rapidly.
Arm's revenue actually fell 1% from 2022 to 2023. The last four years have been roughly 2.0, 2.7, 2.75, 2.7.
Is that a peak, and it's only downhill from now on, because of RISC-V (or otherwise). Or will they start to grow again?
Either way, it sure doesn't look like the very high annual growth rate needed to justify a price of $30b let alone $50b.
But that's not how you make money by purchasing companies. You make money by buying the company low and then selling the company high. So if you bought ARM for $50B and sold it for $70B in 5 years, you would make $20B on an investment of $50B
But I'm certainly not in the position to guess how much ARM would appreciate over the next 5 years. I pulled that example out of a hat (or some other, less polite to mention part of my anatomy.)
Fundamentals count for something, no?
On the one hand you have ARM investors wanting them to extract more revenue, and the ARM customers do not want to pay more or have more restrictive licenses. They are in a bit of a nasty equilibrium but one that will hit all IP companies eventually.
An old colleague of mine has got into the idea businesses are now going to put the big squeeze on all suppliers that count as part of gross margins, which would include ARM, while essentially ignoring operational costs. The implication would be companies looking to use RISC-V would be more inclined to pay chip design houses on a contract basis more upfront than have anything including royalties. I dislike the idea but think he is right, and that the future of electronics is about to go through the same sea change that software did with open source and the emergence of SaaS.
ARM is a fabless pure play IP house. The big bucks are not in IP design but in manufacture.
That's another thing they have in common with Arm.