[drob518]

This is going to be a strategic challenge for ARM unless they are going to focus on chips that nobody else wants to make. And given the AI focus, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I would think that the RISC-V folks would be salivating at the prospect of flipping some existing ARM licensees to RISC-V.

[tsukikage]

Meta bought a RISC-V startup six months ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=meta+rivos

Guess at the end of the day, no-one ever got fired for building ARM.

[LeFantome]

Rivos is about making GPUs. It will be interesting to see how this all nets out.

It is going to be a huge 24 months for RISC-V. My biggest concern is that everybody will have already placed their bets before then.

[camel-cdr]

Idk, it seems to me like the Rivos people are still doing their RISC-V CPU work.

[wmf]

focus on chips that nobody else wants to make

That's what happened here. Meta wants a Neoverse V3 CPU but no one will make it for them. So Arm has to make it.

[drob518]

I don’t believe that nobody else would build it for them. This chip is not purely custom to Meta, as I understand it. Rather, ARM is going to be selling it to others and entering the market for “AI chips,” which is surely a market that some other ARM licensees want to be in. So therefore, ARM is competing with its other licensees, and in a potentially very lucrative, leading edge market, which is never a great place for an IP-focused company to be. Qualcomm, for instance, is undoubtedly annoyed at this.

[leptons]

ARM does not have their own fab, someone else is doing the actual making. ARM helped Meta design the thing.

[audunw]

That’s overly pedantic.

Then you’d say that Apple doesn’t make their laptops. Foxconn does.

The kind of work ARM would do to “make” a chip themselves goes beyond just design. It’s synthesis, P&R, test, packaging (generally a different company than the fab), yield management, inventory/logistics, etc.