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0 pointsErikCorry3y ago0 comments

You don't think it helped ARM?

For years Intel and AMD wanted Android on x86 to happen, and wanted embedded x86 to compete with ARM. It never happened because in small devices SoC is a requirement.

As transistor sizes shrink it becomes more and more insane to divide your system up into two or more dies just because some IP licensing requires it. ARM are swimming against the tide that lifted them for 20 years here.

They seem to be abandoning the embedded market that made them a huge success in favour of trying to enter a super competitive server market where they are only one of many players.

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Conan_Kudo3y ago

> They seem to be abandoning the embedded market that made them a huge success in favour of trying to enter a super competitive server market where they are only one of many players.

There are two problems here: the assumption that they are "a huge success" and that the server market is "super competitive".

It is extremely clear that Arm is not "a huge success" as a company. They get squeezed by Qualcomm on a regular basis. The margins have been super-thin for many years, and development of initiatives to make ARM more broadly successful have been hamstrung by their own partners and customers who do not care to make the ARM platform bigger. They've hit their limits in the space they're in now.

There are only two players in the server market: AMD and Intel. There are specialized cases of "third leg" options, like the AWS-only Graviton built on ARM ISA and Ampere Altra based on ARM CPU designs on Azure and GCP. There's a ton more opportunity in the server space than the embedded space if they can just get things worked out there. Server customers are more high-value because they are more willing to upgrade equipment. Server designs usually have socketable CPUs, which means there is multiple opportunities to sell to the same customer within a 10 year timespan. It's also cheaper to sell to server customers, because there's less up-front engineering work required to build something to sell. It's just a way better market to target.

hakfoo3y ago

ARM-the-architecture is wildly successful. ARM-the-company is not.

To me, that says the problem is that ARM-the-company didn't have the right business plan.

However, to say I'm skeptical of this alternative business plan is an understatement. As was said everywhere else, the ability to build a pick-and-mix SoC is what got ARM-the-platform into the niches where it's strongest today.

Maybe the argument they're going for is to deliberately stab at the Innovator's Dilemma: if they burn their ships on mobile and embedded, they won't be reliant on it in the next 10 years as RISC-V eats their lunch.

That requires a huge commitment to this grand new vision of ARM For The Datacentre(tm), and I sort of wonder if this move might spook even that market.

I could imagine that there was some interest in ARM from hyperscalers because it was amenable to more customized SoC-style designs-- bolting on your own preferred bag of accelerators, management features, and specialized communication fabrics on top of a bag of standardized cores.

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