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Comment by jinzo | Hacker News Reader

This thread is the perfect example of useful idiots with astroturfing. This is a CPU core designed by UK company (and owned by Japanese) made in Taiwan on equipment made in EU (with non trivial USA components). Xiaomi here is the easiest to replace in this chain (and the Chinese have very much tried to replace any of the others, failing for now). Yet they are angling for a huge PR win.

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ARM is merely an IP portfolio licensing company. They don't really design or build anything. And everyone uses TSMC (who uses ASML). The primary design is still being done by Xiaomi, that's the most unique part of this build.

Stop downplaying how big of an achievement this is.

And how did that IP portfolio come into existence? Did it suddenly materialize out of thin air or… did ARM engineers design it?

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt: in your mothertongue, the meaning of “design” is not as broad as in English?

How about Apple M series ARM chip designs? From what I have seen only resemblance with ARM is the ISA.

What about it? Apple has an architectural license which allows them to design their own CPUs with ARM ISA. Most companies that use ARM CPUs don’t.

Your initial response made it sound as if Xiaomi did nothing wrt chip design and all the hail goes to "ARM engineers" which is simply not true. Had that been true we would have dozens of chip designers which we don't.

Below is some additional detail about the processor. Like the parent comment notes, ARM licenses IP of an ISA or core designs (see ARM C1-Ultra cores [0]), licensees like Qualcomm then make specific SoC for different use-cases.

  Xiaomi has made the XRING 03 boast a larger die size than the XRING 01, 
  measuring 133mm² compared to its predecessor’s 109mm² dimensions This change 
  was deemed necessary as the flagship SoC features 16MB of SLC cache, not to 
  mention a new “6 + 4” CPU cluster that comprises two ARM C1-Ultra cores 
  running at 4.35GHz, four C1-Premium cores operating at 3.68GHz and lastly, 
  four C1-Pro cores running at 3.15GHz. [1]

0. https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/c1-ultra

1. https://wccftech.com/xiaomi-xring-03-official-tsmc-3nm-n3p-l...

They license the IP that they design. They design complete chips you can buy and go right to tape out with no changes if you want.

Did they license an actual chip design from ARM or just the ISA?

They licensed several ARM IP blocks.

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