I'm afraid they have seen RISC-V as a threat for a while now. It has already been years since their first FUD campaign.
>if ARM started allowing everyone to use their IP for free you would expect them to survive?
That's not how I see ARM surviving.
One way ARM could survive is by doing what the MIPS owners did: Abandon the ISA, move to RISC-V, use your extensive expertise to make competitive cores, and your clout in the market to sell them to your pre-existing clients.
They could totally pull it off, but it would honestly surprise me if they did so, considering how poorly they've dealt with RISC-V so far.
Even if that’s their best bet, long term, I don’t see why they would have to start doing that right now. Why would they leave their castle with its golden egg-laying goose, only because they know it won’t live for X more years?
Timing such transitions is always difficult (you can’t wait until your goose is dead), but I think they’re better of waiting at least a few more years.
The MIPS owners were in a different situation, weren’t they? Their goose already was dying or even dead.
Alas, that would probably have worked better 2+ years ago, there is a lot of movement now.
It seems like Intel has realized this. They tried to buy Sifive, but have now themselves joined as a major RiscV International sponsor and are investing heavily in the ecosystem.
Of course there is a downside there too, because it accelerates a software and hardware ecosystem transition to a different architecture that can enable other players. We'll see how it plays out
One of the reasons Intel is spending money on RISC-V could be that they want to undercut Arm, as the latter are now beginning to be competitive in Intel's X86 world. RISC-V is going to succeed at all as an ISA, it is going to hurt Arm before Intel.
Me neither, but spreading FUD about RISC-V as they've been doing doesn't help their credibility should they take the MIPS path.
ARM's vast experience brings the quality you've come to expect to the RISC-V world. Want to lower TCO and level up your designs, while leveraging existing experience, but worried about low quality IP polluting your tech? Fear not. etc...
You can probably let an AI spew this stuff by now. Training data is easy to find.
Got a good chuckle from that, I did! :D
MIPS was pretty dead when they abandoned it, ARM is still alive and well.
ARM could survive by making the ISA free and competing by having the best ARM core designers and designs, and/or by having proprietary addons for media handling/decoding.
The trend with RISC-V suggests that ISAs are going to be commoditized and the real value will be in the implementations themselves.
It is not that difficult to re-target a micro-architecture (what you call implementation) to a new ISA, especially if the ISAs relatively close, as most modern ISAs are. RISC-V and Arm ISAs are an example where that should be especially easy.
Why pay for ARM if you can retarget to RISC-V and still retain most of the benefits of your designs.
Right now, the Arm ISA has much better micro-architectures than RISC-V, why bother with RISC-V? I think this will change over the next 5 years. One of the ways to change this could be Arm selling RISC-V implementations.
Of course there are also dangers in RISC-V: one is that we will get too many RISC-V versions, so no stable software ecosystem emerges for any single one of them. Adapting Linux, GCC and so on to your specific version of RISC-V (or any processor really) is rather expensive.
It is the fundamental basic business ideas that they have it all wrong. Which is why every time these discussions came up they are non-productive. It is no different to saying Linux would take over desktop in the 90s because it is free. We are in 20s and coming up 30s. It is still not happening.
But at least ( or hopefully ) we have passed stage where RISC-V is fundamentally better ISA than ARM. And talk about the business aspect of it.
Edit: Ok I was wrong, the ISA debate is near the bottom of the page. I didn't invent the term "Riscy Silver Bullet" for no reason :).
The desktop? Maybe not. But Linux has done well with laptops in recent years (Chromebooks). Definitely not "taken over", but 30 million units a year is nothing to sneeze at either.
Completely agree.
Irrelevant question that no one anywhere has any obligation to care about.
Longterm I’m afraid that a completely open ISA might result in a less competitive market as long the cost of developing competitive cores is high enough. All top players could just start behaving like Apple and just keep their cpus for their own products/cloud services instead of selling them at commodity prices and losing a competitive advantage. So having a ‘neutral’ player like ARM might still be preferable.
But ARM probably cares about ARM's survival so it is relevant to the discussion about what future decisions ARM might make.
I literally quoted a question that asks "you expect", and what I am pointing out, not declaring but observing, it's already a fact regardless if I say it, that neither you or I nor anyone else has any obligation to expect anything.
It doesn't even matter if we do expect something. Even if you were some kind of Arm fan like being a fan of a sneaker brand or a celebrity, your good wishes still don't change anything.
"you expect" is just irrelevant in this question. Arm can adapt to the new environment or not. The environment is changing and it doesn't matter if anyone likes it or not.
And the nature of the change, people giving away something that someone else used to be able to charge rent for, is not unfair or unethical or immoral in anyway, nor is it any kind of net loss for society as a whole, so there is no argument for doing something to artificially protect Arm's business model.
Steve used to sell cakes. Sally gave everyone her recipe for cake and now fewer people buy Steve's cakes. So what?
Do you mean to say that Sally should not be able to give away her own cake recipe? Steve doesn't like it because he had a good gig going for a while there, but so what? The environment Steve was operating in changed, and his business model no longer works. And while you could sorta-kinda say it's Sally's fault, you can't say she did anything wrong either legally or morally or in a holistic sense for everyone as a whole, and so there is nothing anyone else should do about it. Steve had no special right to his cakes being purchased. He has the right to offer them, but no one is obligated to buy them, and no one is obligated to care if he fails to sell enough to live well on.
I don't expect anything related to Arm, and neither can anyone else. It's just a totally irrelevant question.
Of course RISC might push them to make their licensing mechanism to be more flexible if they start considering RISC an a real threat to them (I don’t think this is very likely to happen in the near future, though)