I'm not sure if this is already being discussed:
RISC-Y Business: Arm wants to charge dramatically more for chip licenses
RISC-Y Business: Arm wants to charge dramatically more for chip licenses
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Arm wants to charge dramatically more for chip licenses
- Thread starter maflynn
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Triple binaries and 2-1 isa rosetta, not likely at all! I'd prefer they went back to x86, but that isn't going to happen either!
Why wouldn't it? ARM/Softbank is reworking the licensing and Apple licenses ARMs IP for all of their products.
Apple ($3 million & an Apple VP as CEO) worked together with Acorn Computers (12 employees) and VLSI (tools) to start Advanced RISC Machines, which we now know as Arm; I would think Apple has a solid deal that may not be affected by the price hike, but we might never know about any such deal...?
It is called "RISC V", pronounced "risk five". This is an open source architecture that anyone can use for free. I just happen to have two microcontrollers on my desk right now, one is and ARM. It is an RP2040. The other is an ESP32 which uses RISK V architecture. RISK V really has some advantages besides cost. It handles vectorized math better, I think. I am working on some projects to write firmware to control motors and I test my work on both microcontrollers and don't have to change much.
My point is that there is competition out there. RIC V is real, I have one. If ARM Holdings gets greedy, customers will look and find for other options. RISC V is free to use. Hard to beat that price.
That said, it would be nearly impossible for Apple to move to yet another architecture. But there are MANY people starting new projects who are not invested in ARM. This could push many new projects away from ARM.
Or maybe not. If license fee is based on retail price of the finished product. Maybe I don't care because my product is targeted to be free. It is a not for profit open source robotics project. But this is a rare exception.
Guess without the $40 billion that NVIDIA was willing to pay for the acquisitation which got blocked by governments, they have to raise money in a different way.
So it’s kinda funny that this is happening after companies were protesting against NVIDIA trying to buy ARM for $40 billion. That’s alot of money that is now gone for ARM.
So it’s kinda funny that this is happening after companies were protesting against NVIDIA trying to buy ARM for $40 billion. That’s alot of money that is now gone for ARM.
Then all these ARM Mac’s will be obsolete so people will have to buy new computers again. More $$$$$ for Apple.
Sigh.... For a long time Softbank ran Arm in mostly a "hands off" mode. They left them do some sensible things without too much unnecessary interference. [ One of the moves was to get into the server SoC/Package business (Neoverse ) which has a higher average selling price so that 1%-2% of that brings in more money. That seems to be actually working pretty well. Not a 'print money' operation , but more revenue than before that is growing. ]
This policy is likely not what is good for Arm in the long term. It is a short term hustle to try to unwind Software from having paid way too much for Arm in the first place.
From the FT article.
" ... Son is relying on a blockbuster Arm IPO to help mount a turnround at SoftBank, which has suffered heavy losses over the past year as the value of its tech investments was hammered in a broader industry downturn. ..."
They are looking for some overpriced software buyout to will leave tons of 'extra cash' in Softbanks coffers ( and likely not enough in Arms ).
It is mainly handwaving to justify an overly inflated initial IPO price point. Nvidia was going to pay a 'drunken sailor' price for Arm and now looking for herd of 'drunken sailors' to pay too high for Arm at IPO. ( bigger fool pricing. )
The 'fire' under RISC-V growth that the potential sale to Nvidia seemed to be dying down a bit and then Arm runs around and those this 'gasoline' on that. The article makes it appear Arm is going to try to 'cherry pick' the client base and only shift this on "expensive" devices like smartphones. But this will likely further erode Arms embedded client business even further where RISC-V has much more traction. Going to be hard to not 'scare' those customers that they'll be 'next' after Arm tries to bleed the over vendors with higher margins 'dry'.
And for folks putting Arm chips in $100+K machines ... LOL. That is going to be another one of those putting the relationship into a "Ice Age" status. Another set of customers likely to scare off trying to pimp them like a street walker. It will push more of them into Architecture License (short term revenue booster but longer term , if piss them all off, more of a one shot gimmick (again maybe don't care is just trying to hustle high IPO price and take the money and run ) , but others are just going to leave.
IF Arm pushes too many customers into Architecture Licenses to avoid this craziness , then start to get into a pricing death spiral on the mostly complete IP sales. ( fewer folks buy , crank price , even fewer people buy , rinse and repeat).
They don't have to. Apple has an Architectural license. They have rights to the general instruction set design and some critical associated patents, but Apple is mainly not buying almost fully flushed out IP designs.
Apple wouldn't need a 'from scratch' , in-house ISA. If they had a Arm v9 Arch License they can very likely just keep using it. and maybe drop in a few , very narrow , extremely specialized instructions at the edges if the Arm ISA and just continue on. (e.g., Apple has AMX which isn't a standard Arm standard facility. There are a few others. )
Small embedded stuff that end users' applications never see ( e.g., the SSD controller CPU cores) Apple can just flip with some internal only transitions.
Arm v10 , v11 , v12 , v13 would come and Apple could/would gradually 'fork' from them. If each of those is 2-3 years long evolutionary path, then that is 7-12 years until might have to do something.
There is a ton of stuff in the Arch Licenses that Apple already has. ( especially if picked up this initial v9 ). The future increments are likely to get smaller and narrower. Which means Arm is going to loose a decent amount of leverage. v9 has nested virtualization , a very good solid SIMD mechanism in SVE2 , and decent security updates. There is not tons missing for a smartphone or Mac there. Arm's GPU , internal chip networking , and some other uncore stuff Apple really doesn't need much of at all.
if a large enough group of Arch License holders got together and cooperated then they could just 'by-pass' Arm for post v9 collective 'updates'. ( Google, Samsung , Qualcomm , Apple , Amazon , and Mediatek would be enough. It isn't like Arm would have to loose dozens off their client list to loose control of the smartphone market. Even smaller group in the nascent server market foothold they have. )
If Son/Softbank do some stupid stuff for an extended period of time , then they'll probably be forced to give up Arm for a more sensible price ( if drive the company into large losses ). At that point Apple and some other large players could perhaps take Arm private at some sane price . Get rid of the irrational owner and Arm can go back to being a sensible Contract R&D firm that it really is at heart. ( this whole meme stock price chasing stuff is a big mismatch to what Arms core business really is. )
No. ARM specifically stated that Apple and Samsung are not affected as ARM APPARENTLY had separate private deals with Apple and Samsung respectively.
Apple and ARM has their own separate deal that are not public and not affected by this. The same with Samsung.
Qualcomm?
After actually reading the article, apparently not:
"Let's say Motorola makes a phone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon Arm chip. Previously, Qualcomm would have signed a deal with Arm for an Arm license, and that license would extend to anyone that buys a Qualcomm Arm chip, like Motorola. Qualcomm contributes a lot to its own chip designs, but when it comes to the Arm license it is basically an Arm reseller. Arm would now want a licensing fee from Motorola (and not Qualcomm?), and it would ask Qualcomm to not sell chips to anyone that doesn't have a licensing agreement with Arm."
Qualcomm can not be happy about this...
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'Win' yes, 'Huge' ? Probably not if almost exclusively just aimed at the smartphone market in the price range of $300 and up.
Apple is highly unlikely to move so zero impact there. And that is a substantively large subset of the smartphone market that RISC-V would have zero new traction in.
It is likely a tax rate set to have minimal impact on the sub $300 phones. Or maybe threshold of about $200-250.
What Softbank is chasing here for more so the $499-1,599 phones. Most of that is not the main SoC. Screens , Radios , RAM , Sensors , etc are most of what is driving up those costs. Softbank is trying to line Arm to skim off a piece of the action that other non-Arm component vendors create. This only 'works' for Softbank where the Arm SoC is a lower percentage of the overall system price.
The phones with cheap-as-possible screens , RAM , modem , cameras there won't be much to 'take' there and probably some kind of 'cutoff' designed into the pricing to minimize digging into the 'almost zero margin' phones prices. (can't get blood from a turnip. ). Here the SoC price was likely an higher percentage of the overall system price in the first place (especially where the celluar modem is on-die bundled with the Arm cores ... Arm already taxes that whole SoC price).
where RISC-V might break into the smartphone market is more likely at the bottom; not the top.
RISC-V does get some new momentum wins in areas where they were/are already clawing share away from Arm. This isn't going to help customers who already were inclined to leave. The embedded space was already in trouble.
Where Arm was already being used as a political 'Cold War' tool does capricious pricing really matter if even getting a IP license is a gamble. Banning Hauwei from access to Arm product means they don't really care much if Arm comes up with kooky pricing; couldn't buy it in the first place. RISC-V already had healthy momemtum in those kinds of areas. This isn't going to change that much.
If Son/Softbank were goofy enough to try to apply this new policy to the areas of their business where they were already loosing ground. Yes, Arm would be just giving away market share even faster. However, it doesn't sound from the article that they are that looney tunes.
Qualcomm has a arch license that they don't use for smartphones. At least not for last several years. ( back in 32-bit Arm era they did there own cores and would be out of this loop). Modern Qualcomm SoCs are just semi-custom Arm cores with very small tweaks.
Qualcomm not like though. That would be like the pot calling the kettle black. That's mostly what they do for the Qualcomm modem. It is taxed on the whole phone prices. That's why Apple got into a large 'dust up' with Qualcomm.
Qualcomm and Arm are already in a wrestling match over the Nuvi cores where Qualcomm is trying to wave their mostly unused smartphone Arch license as a 'get out of jail free card' for blowing up terms on the Nuvi license. Honestly Qualcomm trying to wiggle to the cheapest fee probably is partially motivating this Arm change as Qualcomm was looking to make a large portion of Arm IP licensing revenue disappear. Arm changing the game is partially a backstop if Qualcomm gets their way. Main purpose is propping up the IPO price. (which again Qualcomm did lots to block the Nvidia buy so .... what did they expect Softbank to do ... still looking for a 'bigger fool' buyer for Arm to offset how much Softbank overpaid for Arm. )
Arm doesn't own Arm. Softbank owns Arm. It is Softbank that is looking for that money. They way overpaid for Arm and now need money ( because a bunch of their other deals didn't go so well either.). Arm will never see the vast bulk of that $40B price.
Softbank is trying to set up an IPO for Arm and this 'pricing change' is trying to paint a much more rosey picture of Arm possible future revenue flow ... which would drive a higher IPO stock price. ( i.e., Softbank is looking a 'bigger fool' to take Arm off their hands and they need some cover story as to why, if you don't look too closely, that high IPO stock price might be worth it. )
If Softbank could make $40B by holding Arm wouldn't want to sell it. Nvidia was just to just 'drunken sailor' throw lots of money at it. ( And likely shift to doing more monopolistic stuff when it didn't pay off if the books got tight and folks started to look hard. )
which Samsung? Samsung Semiconductor has used a Arch license to do their own cores (Exynos ). [ The fab company is also a silicon design/products company . ] And in a model where the 'fab company pays"... Samsung was already there as the product/fab company were the same.
That seems to be about to shift to the Samsung Phones/Mobile company doing their own SoC. That new one may or may not use 'from scratch' cores. If it is going to shift to mainly licensed design IP for the SoC then would likely fall into the same trap the article outlines.
Apple has an architecture license. So mainly not licensing design IP. ( only the instruction set and patents specially about the instruction set design.). Not so much that it is 'private' but much different.
This goes back to the deal Arm made with Nuvia on architecture for server chips. Now that Qualcomm has bought them in order to make Arm ISA-based laptop and desktop chips, Arm decided to sue them because they want a bigger slice of the revenue pie.
The thing is, there is probably at least as much money in the smartphone market as in the general PC market. Arm are actually very late to the table to want to change these deals now.
The thing is, there is probably at least as much money in the smartphone market as in the general PC market. Arm are actually very late to the table to want to change these deals now.
It’s well know for a while Apple has different licensing arrangement with ARM. Apple and ACORN founded ARM, apple used arm in newton in the 90s. Steve Jobs sold some of the ARM shares to save APple from bankruptcy in addition to Microsoft deal.
Nothing is stopping ARM from wanting more money once that agreement expires
It means little to SoftBank that Apple was involved in the forming of Arm
Sure if you are going full gloom and doom it may eventually happen. Apple just has architecture license, this hike is mostly about resellers like Qualcomm extending the license to their customers. If Qualcomm sells the chip to a phone manufacturer, the chip is covered by Qualcomm license agreement with ARM. ARM wants none of that anymore, they want Qualcomm customer to license from ARM. Apple doesn’t use ARM design license, they just use architecture.
SoftBank wants to get out of ARM, the nvidia deal was blocked. Their play is to test the hike, show revenue gains before IPO. I would bet SoftBank will divest before Apple has to renegotiate the agreement.
If Apple agrees with @leman and believes that Aarch64 is superior to RV64G, I'm sure Apple wants other companies to adopt RISC-V ISA as soon as possible, so they can be the only company using ARM ISA. While ARM's decision could hurt Apple in the short term, it may be good in the long term.
