> The 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.

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.

ARM has extensive IP and know how. They could build up and sell high performance RISC-V IP/cores now and prevent RISC-V focused companies like SiFive from gaining a foothold by denying them revenue and investment.

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

> Intel has realized this

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.

intel bought into arm as well, then sold it off like many other things in the past. it will be interesting to see if intel is forward-thinking this time, or just chasing profit ... again.

>I don’t see why they would have to start doing that right now.

Me neither, but spreading FUD about RISC-V as they've been doing doesn't help their credibility should they take the MIPS path.

That's just a job for the marketing department. I can hear them already:

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.

> Training data is easy to find.

Got a good chuckle from that, I did! :D

Take a look at the Halloween Documents and then look at Windows Subsystem for Linux. This industry can absolutely forgive FUD in the long term if a company changes its path.

Long term, yes.

But is RISC-V somehow superior to ARM soo much that ditching their ISA and switching to RISC-V is their only way to survive. Is there anything specific about RISC-V that would ARM to make significantly more efficient cores (and I don’t think that there is any evidence that this would be the case). Because if not it would an exceptionally bad move for ARM to do (basically like Intel deciding to ditch AMT64 to make ARM or Risc cpus.

Abandoning the ISA is probably too extreme.

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.