Tech supplier Arm plans to hike prices, has considered developing its own chips

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tech-supplier-arm-plans-hike-prices-has-considered-developing-its-own-chips-2025-01-13/

My first reaction to this is, “Uh, ok, sure” (referring to the idea that Arm will start building their own chips)

My second reaction is, “oh cool, more RISC V chips from big vendors!”

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Yeah. I cannot see how it’s a winning strategy to compete with your own customers. Rarely goes well.

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Mixed feelings on this but here are my thoughts:

  1. Arm probably sees the writing on the wall when it comes to microcontrollers. Iterations after M7 have (IMO) jumped the shark for mainstream uses. M33 is fine but can’t really differentiate as a huge leap over M4. Don’t even know the advantages of M35P / M52 / M55 / M85. Most uC applications are just happy with M4 so first RISC-V core to match that instruction set is compelling for a huge section of the market and costs are by definition lower. In this case, every ARM licensee is probably already thinking of designing ARM out in favor of RISC-V anyway.

  2. Much of China has already abandoned ARM. The number of RISC-V chips from there is pretty astounding and growing daily.

  3. Most high end SoC licensees are already heavily tweaking their cores with architecture licenses. Apple can make a faster core than ARM proper and the same goes for shops like Nuvia and Ampere. Another way of saying this is that ARM is already at odds with their customers and in this case, customers are out showing ARM.

  4. AI accelerators are important but the people making the money are the ones selling chips. That is mainly Nvidia today but things like Groq and other in house silicon from big tech will fracture that further. ARM has done an ok job of deploying Ethos but you do wonder if they had Groq level class of IP if they would be better off just supplying the chip without a OEM. They are completely capable of doing this and funding it.

It feels like this space is undergoing a lot of rapid changes. Pair that with ARMs desire to boost revenue and it makes for interesting choices. Sometimes I do wonder why a privately held “cash cow” needs to grow but that always seems to be the case.

I think EE’s think of ARM mainly in the context of Cortex-M or RPi level Cortex-A IPs. I’m pretty sure that analysts and ARM themselves think about their business as dominantly the highest performance variants and AI accelerators in the current time.

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Where’s the RISC-V stock I can buy? :wink:

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Agreed. It certainly doesn’t make me want to run out and buy ARM stock but it feels like it can only mean good things for end consumers, at least in the longer term.

It seems telling that they’ve been trying to extract more rent from customers since 2019 but I’m not really sure I’ve noticed at all. I guess that means it’s not going well?