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They have made too many bad choices, and everyone else has been eating their lunch for the last few years. They are a non-factor in the mobile space where ARM architectures dominate. They are a non-factor in the GPU market where NVDA dominates ahead of AMD. They were focused heavily on data centres and desktop/laptop CPUs where ARM is also increasingly making inroads with more efficient designs that deliver comparable performance. They are still struggling with their fab processes, and even they don't have enough money to make the investment needed to catch back up to TSMC. There is a good reason that even Global Foundries has given up on the bleeding edge some time ago.

They are in a deep hole, and it is difficult to see a future where they can restore their former glory in the foreseeable future.

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> where ARM is also increasingly making inroads with more efficient designs that deliver comparable performance.

ARM isn't doing any such thing. Apple & Qualcomm are, though. ARM itself if anything looks weak. Their mobile cores have stagnated, their laptop attempts complete failures, and while there's hints of life in data center it also seems mediocre overall.

Don't forget their "brilliant" strategy of suing their own customers.

Being a customer shouldn’t protect a company from lawsuits. ARM feels they have merit here , just like Qualcomm did when they sued Apple. It’s not that rare in the corporate setting to have suits between companies with otherwise amicable relationships.

The optics can still be terrible. Qualcomm (or more accurately, Nuvia, the company they acquired) produced some stunning chips with almost unheard of battery life for a laptop, and Arm are suing them to use their own inferior designs. They even tried to have end user laptops recalled and destroyed! There's no world where this looks good for Arm.

There’s a very clear bias and idolization in this comment of yours which is based on a misunderstanding of the case at hand.

ARM aren’t trying to force Qualcomm to use ARMs cores. They’re trying to force them to update the licensing royalties to make up for the (as ARM sees it) licensing term violations of Nuvia who had a design license for specific use cases.

The part you reference (using ARM designs) is the fallback if Qualcomm lose their design license.

The destruction of the chips is standard practice to request in cases of license and IP infringement .

Qualcomm already had a design license prior to the acquisition of Nuvia. They were doing custom cores back in the original Kryo days which were an in-house custom ARMv8.0-A design.

The terms of that license was specific to what they can do. ARM is claiming it doesn't cover some of the things they are doing.

I'm not enough of a lawyer to figure out who is right.

Their design license doesn’t extend to Nuvia’s IP however according to ARM.

That is the entire crux of the issue. ARM gave Nuvia a specific license, and then Nuvia was acquired which transferred the IP to a license that ARM did not extend it to.

Hypothetically, if Qualcomm have broken their Arm licenses in a way that damages Arm’s business do you think Arm are supposed to just let them carry on? Should Arm say ‘legal action won’t look good so we’ll just let it pass’?

And the fact that Qualcomm got just about everyone to endorse the acquisition ahead of announcing it but didn’t even tell Arm is a bit of a tell.

Arm's major competition is RISC-V. Qualcomm engineers have been joining the important RISC-V committees recently. If Arm beats Qualcomm in the courts, Qualcomm will switch to RISC-V, and then Arm will have won the battle but lost the war.

If Qualcomm loses to Arm in the courts then they have a big problem in 2025 which switching to RISC-V at some point in the future will not solve for them.

They are not suing them to use "inferior designs," you're completely misrepresenting the issue. They are suing them over IP and contract violations. The ISA in question is irrelevant here, you could also get sued by SiFive if you licensed their cores and then did something that SiFive believed violated that license. It's not that deep.

This feels a bit pedantic. ARM-the-CPU-architecture is increasingly making inroads with more efficient designs that deliver comparable performance to Intel's x86 chips, thanks to Apple and Qualcomm. ARM-the-holding-company is not doing that, they just make mediocre designs and own IP.

The post I was replying to had 3 other companies mentioned or referred to (INTC, AMD, and NVDA), it seems odd that they'd suddenly have meant ARM-the-ISA instead of ARM-the-company when ISA wasn't otherwise being discussed at all.

But even if they meant ARM-the-ISA, that'd still put it in a fragile position when the 2 clear market leaders in the ARM-the-ISA space have no particular allegiance to ARM-the-ISA (Apple having changed ISAs several times already, and QCOM both being active in RISC-V and also being sued by ARM-the-company)

AWS is basically running 100% of their own software on their own Graviton ARM CPU

The US government wants then making SOTA semiconductors. Biden wanted it and I highly suspect Trump will want it too.

I have to wonder if part of this is Intel wanting a Trumpier CEO so it can retain the favour of the US government, while Trump associates Gelsinger with the CHIPS act which he reflexively hates as a Biden thing.

Traditionally if you wanted SOTA semiconductors you'd go to IBM for the technology and then build your own fab. I'm not sure how true that is today but I wouldn't be surprised if it is.

That's what Rapidus is doing

last few years.

It's pretty much two decades at this point.

Apple saw the writing on the wall and bailed years ago, built their own chips and denied them a large customer.

It’s a really bad sign when a customer decides it can out innovate you by internally copying your entire business and production line.

> It’s a really bad sign when a customer decides it can out innovate you by internally copying your entire business and production line.

Not necessarily, at scale, especially Apple's scale, vertical integration can make a ton of sense - for control, innovation, price, risk hedging.

It is not apple's decision that is the bad sign. There can be plenty of reasons for that as you mention and wouldn't be of note if their chips were poorer or even similar to intel in performance

It is the fact they can build a much better chip in almost any metric so far ahead of Intel is the red flag.

They haven't made their own fabs. Not yet, anyway.

And historically, wasn't this juts an extension of their fight with Samsung in the mobile space more than a rejection of Intel?

Re: fabs, Apple did by way of TSMC. Apple provided TSMC with massive amounts of cash in the 2010’s to fund new fabs. These were loans, but with very generous low interest terms that TSMC couldn’t have gotten elsewhere.

I think you’re correct that this was initially because Apple didn’t want to be at the behest of Samsung. But as Apple iterated on their mobile and tablet chips, they had the choice to bring them to their desktop and laptop lines or not to. They took that gamble and here we are today with non Intel Macs.

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