Followerer

In ARMv8 you have a much cleaner mechanism through system registers(MSR/MRS).

" It's an open secret that ARM was (and still is) selling the CPU design at a discount if you integrated their Mali (GPU)."

Why is that bad? Not only it's common business practice (the more you buy from us, the cheaper we sell), it also makes sense from the support perspective. Support the integration between their cores and a different GPU would be more work for them than integration of their cores with their own GPUs.

That's why companies expand to adjacent markets: efficiency.

A completely different thing would be to say: "if you want our latest AXX core, you have to buy our latest Mali GPU". That's bundling, and that's illegal.

Graviton is Neoverse, ARM's Neoverse.

The AMX is an accelerator block... If you concluded otherwise, your reverse-engineering skills are not great...

Let me repeat this: part of the ARM architectural license says that you can't modify the ISA. You have to implement a whole subset (the manual says what's mandatory and what's optional), and only that. This is, as I've been saying, public knowledge. This is how it works. And there are very good reasons for this, like avoiding fragmentation and losing control of their own ISA.

And once again, stop spreading misinformation.

No. Precisely the Tegra SoC within the Nintendo Switch (X1) uses ARM Cores. Specifically A57 and A53. NVIDIA's project to develop their own v8.2 ARM-based chip is called Denver.

That's like saying that my Intel CPU comes with an NVIDA Turing AI acceleration extension. The instructions the CPU can run on an Apple ARM-based CPU is all ARM ISA. That's in the license arrangement, if you fail to pass ARM's compliance tests (which include not adding your own instructions, or modifying the ones included) you can't use ARM's license.

Please, stop spreading nonsense. All of this is public knowledge.

"and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there"

No, they may not. People keep suggesting these kinds of things, but part of the license agreement is that you can't modify the ISA. Only ARM can do that.

The main source of revenue for ARM is, by far, royalties. Licenses are paid once, royalties are paid by unit shipped. And they shipped billions last year.

Revenue is not $300, we don't know what ARM's revenue is because it hasn't been published since 2016. And back then it was like $1.5 billion. $300 million was net income. Again, in 2016.

I think you've already been adequately corrected on your misconceptions about ARM's CPU design teams.

As I said, I'm on my second FAANG. The "very rare individuals" you mention are hired L9 or above. That is, distinguished engineers+. You don't get to L9 with "a valuable technical contribution", you get there because people know who you are, you have strong network of connections within the industry, and you are in a position to make strategic decisions. It's very much not a technical position, it's borderline executive. Let's put it this way, the people with that kind of compensation, you know who they are. It's never an anonymous whizz kid who's very good at solving technical problems, it's the guy who hired them and/or knows how to direct their work.

As you said, you don't know me and I don't know you, so I don't have a reason to doubt your word. If you say you've met engineers who get that kind of compensation, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Everyone I've met or I've known to be in that level of compensation were the people I already knew were making that kind of money.

And that's not the worst. The worst is that all of this was well known by pretty much everyone in the country. I've been hearing about these dealings, the King's affairs, and generalized corruption in the Royal House for 30 years (pretty much ever since I started paying attention to these things).

Not only the country knew of the King's dealings with Saudis and other fascist dictators, they used those dealings to make a case in favor of the Monarchy. "Of course, he'll take a cut! It's the least he should get after sealing that multi-million deal!" went the general conversation (among the population, of course, the media remained silent at all times). This should give people a taste for how Spain works, and the attitude of their citizens.

Another interesting thing that nobody has mentioned in the press yet is that maintenance and servicing (staff) of most if not all of the Monarchy assets (houses, palaces, boats!) is paid by Patrimonio Nacional (National Heritage; supposedly in charge of public assets of cultural and historical relevance), not by Casa Real (Royal Household; in charge of the Monarchy expenses). I.e.: a significant part of the budget allocated to public affairs is redirected to the private affairs of the Monarchy. Then they will claim "but relatively speaking, it's not that expensive", when a significant portion of the cost is hidden behind a different institution.

Competitors are also multi-billion corporations. I do work for one of those big multi-billion corporations, it's my second, and I've also worked for others not so big. Only newbie engineers fresh out of college believe the myth of the genius engineer who gets grossly overcompensated because they're so smart. You can find 10s of thousands of brilliant engineers in any of these companies, that's the bottom line. Not a single one of them is, on their own, irreplaceable. Specially valuable individuals get awarded distinctions like "fellow" or "distinguished". They're valuable, more than anything else, because of their contacts and rapport within the industry. It's never technical competency; not that they're technically incompetent, but most of their underlings will likely be more technically competent than them (if they're smart, after all, they will do the technical work). If you haven't figure this out yet, don't worry, you'll get there.

Do you think a multi-billion corporation would pay a low level employee an extra million just because they can? You may overestimate the value of individual engineers, big corporations don't. That's how they become big. The money they make is the difference between the value of your work and the money you make. The smartest and best connected people in the company are working to make that gap as wide as possible.

Apple is a small, although significant, part of ARM's total market share. And that 25x is, as I said, without taking into account the premium. If you do, and there are good arguments to do so, the valuation growth is 35x, in almost 20 years.

Regarding innovation, ARM's been at it since 1990. I'm sure it's not the same now as it was 30 years ago, but we're well past the point where one can reasonably fear it to be an unsustainable business. Last time I heard numbers, they were talking about more than 50 billion devices shipped with ARM IP in them. That is a massive market.

You don't answer my question. Why wouldn't licensing businesses work as publicly traded companies? What's the fundamental difference, specially in an increasingly fabless market, between a company licensing IP to other companies and a company selling productized IP to consumers?

ARM was publicly traded between 1998 and 2016. In that period its value multiplied about 25x, not counting the premium of the acquisition. Could you elaborate, please? Where do you see the disaster? (Honest question).

The company is currently valued by analysts as high as $40 billion. Most seem to believe it's worth more than the $32bn Softbank paid in 2016.

Definitely in the short run, because of the understandable fear from NVIDIA's competitors to use their (now) technology. Maybe in the mid run if those fears begin to crystallize. Unlikely in the long run, I'd assume NVIDIA would spin ARM off before killing it entirely, buying ARM would be a multi-billion investment.

They can also design their own ISA. An ISA is a document, they can write their own. Now, can you think of reasons why they wouldn't want to do it that don't also apply to MIPS?

This can happen anywhere in the world. In order to remove a CEO, you have to follow the proper process. Allen Wu claims that the process wasn't followed and, therefore, his dismissal was illegal and void in effect.

It's not like he was dismissed and he just didn't leave his office. He's challenging the legality of his dismissal.

Socialist + "extreme centre" at best. And that's the executive. The legislature and the judicial are still packed and dominated by francoists, respectively. And don't get me started on the military...

Spain was an openly fascist country that made the transition into a covertly fascist one in the late 70s. It wasn't the democratic forces who forced the transition, it was the fascists who half-conceded it because they wanted a halo of legitimacy in the international stage.

This is corporate mindset 101. Questions like "why don't you do X" make no sense to a corporation. The question is always "why should I do X". Every decision has a cost and a benefit, and things happen when benefits outweight the costs proportionally to the implicit risk.

Companies have been successfully working with ARM for a loooong time. It's a massive, well supported, ecosystem that works quite well (no customer complains about delayed/cancelled products related to ARM's performance). What does RISC-V offer that's worth jumping into the void?

That's startup territory, you won't see big companies betting big on RISC-V for a while, if ever.

"Apple Silicon" is a literal truth. The silicon design, the microarchitecture, is theirs, not ARM's. The architecture, this includes the ISA but also many other things that have to be taken into consideration in CPU design (exception model, consistency, virtual memory, virtualization,...), is ARM's. They simply don't want to tie their brand to ARM's, which is fair enough, Apple's brand is much more valuable than ARM's.

Regarding the push for a 64-bit chip, I've heard the exact opposite. Aarch64 (64-bit ARM) was an ARM design without a customer, Apple were the first to buy into it. I've heard that many said it was a premature jump, and there was a lot of scepticism within ARM that they'd be able to sell it (this happened when ARM was selling mobile designs exclusively, with no intentions of getting into servers). Still, they went ahead with it, and was an unexpected success.

I can give you a quick one: 5nm CPUs in Apple laptops.

1) ARM sells "ecosystem". They can license their IP because licensees know that, once they buy into it, they benefit from a unified ecosystem. Developing and, more than anything else maintaining an ecosystem, is extremely expensive, messy, and error prone. ARM adds value by keeping that ecosystem in order.

2) ARM instructions have a fixed length of 4 bytes. This means that there's a limited number of instructions you can add. Intel, for instance, is different: they have a very complex encoding scheme that gives them, potentially, limitless encoding space.

3) If any licensee, specially a popular one like Apple, decides to take part of that encoding space for their own instructions... do you see the implications? Now, that space is unavailable to ARM. ARM, the owner and custodian of the ISA, are put in an impossible position: accept those instructions into the ISA (if Apple allows it, because now it's their IP) or lose unity in their ecosystem (fragmentation). In any case, they've lost extremely valuable encoding space and, more importantly, control over their own ISA.

And that's why not only ARM don't allow licensees to implement their own instructions, they will never allow it (generally speaking; they have reserved some encoding space in the M profile for custom instructions, but that's controlled customization in a profile that has fewer instructions to begin with).

ARM doesn't sell chips, they sell IP. E.g.: their ISA (instruction set) or soft cores (designs that you can integrate in your own chip and then fabricate).

There's nothing special in the chips themselves, it's the business model what's quite different from Intel's.

Historically, ARM (and their licensees) have designed their cores targeting power efficiency over everything else, but there's nothing that prevents Apple or any other licensee from designing a power hungry ARM CPU.

"ARM very recently started allowing licensees to add custom instructions, but only for Cortex-M (embedded)."

They've reserved a block for that in the encoding space. Quite exciting! And it makes a lot of sense in embedded world.

You don't need special instructions to talk to peripheral devices. The ISA supports that from the get go. As a licensee, you can't add instructions to the ISA, only ARM can do that. That's what they do, they're the custodians of the ARM architecture.

Just because you don't see the problem, it doesn't mean it's not there. However you want to put it, you can't add (or remove) instructions at your leisure if you want to keep your license. It does not happen. I can get into details if you want, but I think it's besides the point.

The point is, originally, Apple were co-owners of Arm (together with Acorn and VLSI).