[stadium]

> For now, ARM is rock solid on a foundation made from shifting sands of eternal tech change.

ARM as an architecture may be on solid ground, but their future as a company may be uncertain given that their IP seems to have been appropriated by the CCP.

https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2021/09/08/arm-loses-china/

[dustintrex]

ARM and ARM China are separate companies. In software terms, while ARM China may have forked the ARM IP, they're not going to get any commits from upstream and it'll wither on the vine.

[stadium]

Optimistically, yes.

On the other hand, there's a global supply chain appetite for cheap products including CPU's. Upstream commits aren't required to dump cheap CPU's on the market or to develop compute intensive businesses around them that undercut the competition on price.

[nine_k]

Controllers, maybe.

High-end CPUs, hardly. That would require significant design efforts to keep up with ARM's development.

Not that it'd be impossible for China to develop their own strong processor-designing forces, driven commercially or by the state. But so far it seems far from a trivial task.

[stadium]

High end isn't needed. Simply a marginal improvement and CCP comes out ahead. In the performance per watt per cost calculation, the cost factor has no lower bound. Cost can be subsidized to near zero like many other industries under their control.

We're talking about instruction sets with ARM, correct? It's not anywhere near the level of investment as next generation litho tech for a chip foundry?

I don't underestimate the ability to innovate. Stolen tech can be improved just as well as in-house R&D'd tech.

[dnautics]

The good news is that intellectual "property" isn't truly rivalrous. If ARM china "steals" ARM ip, ARM is still capable of licensing to it's western clients; as it's unlikely any of them will be licensing from ARM china.

[rewma]

> If ARM china "steals" ARM ip, ARM is still capable of licensing to it's western clients;

If the smartphone market is an indicator, too bad that this will just mean that the majority of OEMs will just buy their chips from ARM china and thus demand for ARM IP will expectedly drop, and meanwhile this IP appropriation will just be used to develop independent design capabilities.

[dnautics]

"just buy their chips from ARM china"

I'm really not sure what that means. Does ARM china have fabs?

[saagarjha]

ARM China is independent from ARM, which just happens to have whatever IP it was able to run away with. To compete they're going to have to match ARM, given that nobody is going to write software for their custom fork.

[azinman2]

They can win the domestic Chinese market, who has their own home grown software for everything.

Soon, those companies will move beyond China as well.

[posguy]

The domestic Chinese market was not able to support homegrown TD-SCDMA without the silicon manufacturing restrictions that now exist for Chinese companies, what makes you think that a company with rapidly outdating chip designs and access only to domestic silicon fabs which are trapped on older 14nm+ processes is going to be able to compete outside of the low end of the budget segment?

Even Intel had trouble surviving on 14nm, hence all the contra-revenue spent to directly subsidize Intel tablets (whether they were $100 HP Stream Windows tablets, or $50 Walmart special Android tablets) to try and not get locked out of that space.

[rewma]

> (...) what makes you think that a company with rapidly outdating chip designs and access only to domestic silicon fabs (...)

Well, maybe the fact that not so long ago it had none of that and it clearly looks like both the company and the political regime aren't having many problems getting their hands on all the missing pieces.

[ksec]

They still have access to TSMC ( for now ).

[ineedasername]

That's pretty much what I mean by a solid foundation... Built on sand.