“A key issue is, what market would Arm be trying to hit?” Buss said of the comparison. However, Buss noted that Surface was always really intended to shift perceptions, and push vendors into building the kind of systems that Microsoft wants to see brought to market.
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If Arm did make its own line of completed chips, the strategy might be compared to Microsoft’s decision to start building and selling its own Surface devices, effectively competing with the OEM system builders that licence Windows for their hardware. The licensing fees that Arm gets are really just a tiny fraction of itĪrm reported total revenue of $746 million for the quarter up to the end of 2022, for example, compared to the many billions its licensees are together making each quarter from Arm's licensed technology. “If you look at the amount of value that is generated throughout the entire supply chain, the licensing fees that Arm gets are really just a tiny fraction of it." “It might be some Arm strategy to derive more value from its IP,” said IDC’s senior research director in Europe Andrew Buss. Its representatives said the business is in a quiet period.Įxperts The Register spoke to believe this work is likely linked with the IPO and efforts to generate more revenue, and they too do not believe Arm intends to start selling its own processor silicon into the market.
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Indeed, there are, we're assured, no plans to sell or license the samples. It's quite obvious to us that Arm is working on silicon that's more akin to a reference design than a product it expects to sell by itself to device makers, otherwise the company is putting at risk its long-standing position as a neutral provider of technology, or the “Switzerland of the processor industry” as it has been dubbed. We've learned that Arm has put together a “solutions engineering” team to produce limited-run chip samples, which are said to be targeting mobile devices and laptops initially. The Brit biz is said to be exploring new ways of bringing in revenue as part of that move, in order to attract shareholders and keep investors happy.
This is a time of major change for the Brit chip operation as it prepares to be floated on the stock market by SoftBank in an initial public offering. The high-end Arm-designed processor sample reported on this month is hoped to make a point to current and future licensees that Arm's blueprints can perform well, if done right.
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We've heard of one prominent Arm licensee that selects a specific cache hierarchy to save money, as it reduces the processor die size, which shaves off performance, leaving some at Arm frustrated that their technology isn't getting a full and proper opportunity to perform at its best. Arm may well have also been spurred into such action by the resurgence of AMD, which is in the way of Arm's desire to bag more of the datacenter and personal computing market, and perhaps by RISC-V, an upstart architecture snapping at Arm's heels. What's happening now is that Arm has spent the past six months or so designing a complete high-end processor to, as the FT put it, “demonstrate the power and capabilities of its designs to the wider market.” That's a polite way of saying that some at Arm feel that some particular customers aren't taking full advantage of its designs, and so it's making some top-end silicon to show off what the architecture is capable of.
Arm collects royalties as well as licensing fees it doesn't make the chips itself. Those customers take the blueprints and typically combine them with custom circuitry to produce complete, finished chip designs, which can be sent off to be fabricated by places like TSMC, Intel's foundry unit, and Samsung. Having spoken to our own industry sources, what's in fact happening here is that Arm is stepping up efforts to showcase its work and make a point to some customers.įor those who don't know, Arm, which is headquartered in the UK and today owned by Japan's Softbank, creates blueprints of chips and licenses those designs to clients. There was a report in The Financial Times the other day with the headline, "Arm makes its own advanced prototype semiconductor." Although the newspaper did its best to cover the nuances of this tale, some might jump to the conclusion that Arm is getting into the chipmaking business. Analysis Arm has designed its own example of a high-end processor, and is getting samples of the chip made for select customers.
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