ARM: The Non-Evil Monopolist

yootje writes "ZDNet is running an article about ARM, a chip-maker who controls more than 80% of the cell phone market and 40% of the digital camera market. ARM shipped 780,000,000 processors last year. ZDNet finds it strange that no one seems to have anything against this company. And maybe it is strange: according to the article many would say ARM is a monopolist, but you never hear anyone say 'ARM sucks!'. But then again, why would they?"

Shipped?

[mst76]

I didn't know ARM "shipped" any processors at all.

Not just a monopoly.

[rebeka thomas]

Being a monopoly isn't illegal

Using your monopoly position in illegal anticompetitive ways however, is.

I thought ARM

[mocm]

only designs CPUs. Do they really manufacturethem?
The article only talks about CPUs shipped, but not that ARM ships them.
AFAIK ARM cores are use by many chipmaker from Intel to TI, but arm don't sell CPUs.

Yes, but

[Raul654]

The government also have to show harm to the consumer (at least in the US you do - I don't think they have to in Europe). This is always the hardest part.

Becuase they are unkown, mostly.

[Sycraft-fu]

There are plenty of other monopolies or near monopolies out there. Go read up on Sysco if you want one (they control basically all grain silos in the US). The ones people care about are the one that get press time. The ones that stay low on the radar, almost nobody cares about. Most people don't actually do a lot of general research, they just get in to whatever is news. You have to do a bit of digging to come upon lesser known monopolies.

Re:Shipped?

[deminisma]

Right. As the article says ARM designs chips and then license the designs to parties that then manufacture them.

Re:Yes, but

[CAIMLAS]

I think that, in this scenario, there really hasnt been any harm to the consumer.

ARM has produced solid products for years and years. They're widely accepted in the "industry" as powerful processors for application-specific tasks that consume low amounts of power, on a relatively small budget.

What's more, they're a kind of standard. If you're hiring a microcontroller programmer, or an embedded programmer, I'd say there's a pretty good chance that they at least have some exposure to working with ARM hardware, as opposed to something more obscure.

All this combined decreases the cost of development for the companies, and results in more products coming to market.

Re:I thought ARM

[tsho]

You're right.

It's well known that ARM is a Connected Community is a global network of companies aligned to provide a complete solution, from design to manufacture, for products based on the ARM architecture.

Look here: http://www.arm.com/community/

Intel, Hitachi would gave their right arms ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... for such market dominance. And Motorola, Samsung, Sony and everyone else too. I've vaguely known about ARM for a long time and associated them with RISC chips and some PDAs but didn't know they have gotten so big. This is really big, isn't it? Biggest chip supplier to the hottest and still growing appliance market. The Brits have lost it in many areas where they used to do well but this is pleasant surprise. Congrats to the Brits for a job well done.

because...

[dj245]

And maybe it is strange: according to the article many would say ARM is a monopolist, but you never hear anyone say 'ARM sucks!'. But then again, why would they?"

Intel is Arm's strongest compeditor in low-power embedded chips with its Xscale chips. Unfortunately, Intel has applied the Pentium 4's famous Netburst architecture to the poor Xscale, resulting in marvelous clock speeds of over 700mhz, but with much added heat and power consumption. You can probably imagine what this does to battery life. The last thing the world needs is Prescott in a PDA.

ARM on the other hand has been following a high computation per clock cycle approach, like AMD (or Pentium M) which makes sense for their applications because it results in lower heat and power consumption. A 1ghz PDA might sound impressive, but if battery life is half an hour, I won't be buying one.

Re:because...

[mooman22]

Unless I am very much mistaken the XScale is based on the ARM instruction set.

So Intel isn't competing against ARM with the XScale as they pay ARM to use the design.

Rather than making it suck, Intel have produced a higher clock rate version of the architecture for use in applications that need more oomph.

See: Intel PXA255 Processor with Intel XScale Technology [intel.com]

Customer is always right

[Fizzl]

ARM does good business. They support they cutomers. they make good products. That's all. I don't care if they are a monopoly as long as they continue to be the benevolent dictator.

They ship exactly what the customer wants. In cell-phone markets it's common to "roll your own" processor. You basically order the ARM core and then tell them exactly what instructions you want to be in the chip. They will deliver that.

Re:Why nobody complains

[h0tblack]

Arm have a very interesting history. They were originally setup by Acorn back in the early/mid eighties to produce a CPU for the future lines of desktop machines Acorn were producing (A3000, RiscPC's etc). This enabled Acorn to be the first with RISC-on-the-Desktop machines a long time before Apple came along with their claim to this title with their PPC based desktop machines about ten years later.
ARM were floated off as a seperate entity by Acorn (a very wise move which enabled ARM to grow where Acorn failed) with investment by Acorn, VLSI and Apple (they used the ARM in their Newton). Being a member of Acorn's enthusiast group I was offered dirt cheap shares and only wish I'd had the money to buy some as they rapidly increased in value. Part of this increase came about as ARM partnered with Digital to work on the StrongARM, before becoming rather closer to Digital, and then in turn Intel (as part of some agreement following the two large companies throwing law-suits at each other over unrealted matters). Intel's involvment with ARM enabled them to produce the XScale and no-doubt helped increase penetration in the wider mobile market.
It's amazing to see a company that I knew from a young age grow into such a pervasive entity. I still have a couple of old Acorn machines, the most powerful of which has one of the first StrongARM chips availible in it, it wasn't until a decade later that I got my next StrongARM, in the form of a much smaller Zaurus. There's also ARM's lurking in games-consoles (GBA, Dreamcast), routers, PDA's, portable music players, mobile phones, infact just about every type of small device. A Lot of people use products with ARM tech in them without even realising it.

Re:Their Customers

[SillyNickName4me]

> but does anybody know the names of ARM's competitors?

Nowadays mostly Hitachi, and in elder days, MIPS.
Theres some overlap to Transmeta also in the market for handheld devices if I go by Transmeta's story, but I never encountered them as such in the marketplace.

Re:Because it was part invented by a lady

[Nighttime]

Actually, Sophie Wilson is a transsexual.

And before I get modded a troll for this, it's a well-known fact in the Acorn community. Acorn being the company that helped start ARM and produced a range of desktop machines using said chips. He/she also was involved with the design of the BBC microcomputer.

Bit if background

[aitsu]

I used to use an ARM computer when home computing was taking off in the UK. They weren't ARM then, they were called Acorn, building oddball "home" computers like the Acorn Atom. In the 1980s Acorn fought off rival bids from the likes of Sinclair to land a deal with the Department of Education and the BBC to develop the BBC Microcomputer and later the Acorn Electron. Its version of BASIC - BBC BASIC - became the programming language standard taught in all schools in the UK for a whole generation. In fact you could stick me infront of a Beeb now and I could probably knock off a simple text adventure without even thinking. ARM, incidentally, used to stand for Acorn RISC Machines. (Later, the 'A' came to stand for 'Advanced'.) Yes, they were in fact one of the earier companies to commercialise RISC computing with their R-series designs, which were also supplied to UK schools in the form of the Acorn Archimedes computer. The Archimedes was one awesome machine.

This is all from memory, however. Here's a more accurate history [atterer.net].

Re:because...

[mikrorechner]

Intel is Arm's strongest compeditor in low-power embedded chips with its Xscale chips.

Sorry, but that's BS.

As you can see here [intel.com] and here [arm.com], Xscale is based on ARM designs, thus making Intel an ARM customer, not a competitor.

Re:Their Customers

[Guy Harris]

does anybody know the names of ARM's competitors?

MIPS [mips.com], for one, although their list of products using MIPS-architecture processors [mips.com] doesn't say anything about mobile phones other than a satellite phone.

Not a monopoly

[haxor.dk]

ARM may have a dominant position, but they do not have a monopoly.

Economically, ARM is engaged what is called "monopolistic competition". They have a product which is interchangeable with that of competitiors, but is differentiated from the alternative offerings. Same as Nike shoes, BMW cars, Apple computers.

Re:sometimes, monopolies are good

[AvantLegion]

but if you look at the debacle of california and their power problems when electricity was deregulated there,

Except applying the word to "deregulation" to CA's power is about as incorrect of a use of a word as is humanly possible.

Only in California does "deregulation" mean "forced sell-offs, forced price setting, prohibition of long-term supplier contracts, and more external price controls". Only in California can you "deregulate" something and actually come out the other end with more regulation.

Never, ever should the word "deregulation" be used to refer to what happened in California. There are precious few more gross misuses of a term than that.

These people may have something against ARM

[sjmurdoch]

In 2001 a student produced an open source microprocessor [opencores.org] implementing a cut down version of the ARM instruction set, However not long after, ARM pressured OpenCores to remove the it from their website, and nnARM disappeared [design-reuse.com].

Maybe the reason people like ARM is that at the moment, most of their competition is from big companies and not open source. If projects like OpenCores catch on and FPGAs become cheaper then maybe open source can perform as well in that region as it does in software. Then I think people would not be happy with ARM taking down compatible products, just as people would not be happy if Microsoft went after WINE.

Instruction set

[Maljin Jolt]

To me, ARM instruction set looks simple and elegant and completely in the spirit of John von Neumann's original idea how an universal computing device should be designed.

Comparing to it, x86 architecture evolves for 30 years like a deseased mutant infected with cancer. Backward compatibility on instruction set is a total nonsense from engineering point of you. You do not feed hay or put a saddle on your today's car either.

Re:Shipped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel licensed the architecture, meaning they pay ARM for the rights to design and manufacture an ARM-compatible processor.

So Intel are both a customer (they pay a royalty to ARM) and a competitor (I'm sure they would indeed love to take market share from ARM's own designs). In fact there are several companies in this peculiar position, which is why ARM have to be so good at politics...

Re:Shipped?

[jyavenard]

StrongArm was inherited from DEC based on an ARM 6 after a lawsuit, however the XScale is a complete rewrite and Intel doesn't pay any licensing fee to ARM. The architecture is different, the cache mechanism is different etc... ARM only license core, they don't produce anything therefore the original post was incorrect. I would the biggest producer of ARM core are either Phillips, TI or Samsung

One possible reason...

[adzoox]

One possible reason may be because ARM is actually a recent entity to marketshare.

If you remember ARM got its start by producing a mobile chip that was similar to the PowerPC and fast enough for Apple's Newton line.

It was very ironic that Palm decided to use Apple's desktop chip (the 68030) - which devloped into the Dragonball processor. And to me, this is one reason that only recent Palm offerings even come close to the Newton.

ARM holdings MAY not have been in any hot seat because of Apple.

While I don't think Apple owns any more shares in the company, at one point, they owned a majority stake. Sales of ARM stock ended up being a saviour to Apple's bottom line. This is one of the MAIN reasons Apple discontinued the Newton (or Jobs chose to axe the Newton) Myths place it on revenge against Sculley and on product consolidation. When, in fact, Jobs saw it as opportunity to fudge a bottom line and to gain research and development dollar for the iMac line.

THIS - is one reason I think ARM isn't considered a monpolist - after all - Apple owns 100% of the Apple market and they aren't considered a monoplist - ARM is still benefiting from this relationship.

Re:Why nobody complains

[Christopher Thomas]

There's also ARM's lurking in games-consoles (GBA, Dreamcast), routers, PDA's, portable music players, mobile phones, infact just about every type of small device.

The Dreamcast uses a Super H 4 as its primary processor, as it needs the SH4's ability to manipulate floating-point vectors natively at reasonable speed.

There may be an ARM core tucked in there for other purposes (sound?), but SH4 is the heart of the machine.

Re:Shipped?

[TonyJohn]

Incorrect. ARM licences its instruction set architecture (ISA) as well as its own implementations of that ISA. Intel (and DEC before them) do pay a license fee and royalties for the StrongARM and all the XScales. Have a look at the ARM Milestones [arm.com]. 2001, Intel and TI license the ARM architecture.

Re:I kind of like ARM

[shlaf_2]

So yeah, I think it's because when people see a computer crash they also see Microsoft (even if it's a dodgy realtek driver that actually crashed), result: Microsoft cops shit

well... I would say, that a really robust operating system wouldn't crash even if it got a dodgy driver loaded. It should just have the corresponding device/cerviec disabled while the rest of the system should go on working as if nothing happened.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Because it was part invented by a lady

[seanvaandering]

Actually, Sophie Wilson is a transsexual.

Sophie Wilson, formerly Roger Wilson, is a British computer scientist. In 1978 she designed the Acorn Microcomputer, which was the first of a long line of computers sold by Acorn, Ltd. In 1981 she developed BBC BASIC for the BBC Microcomputer, a microcomputer that enabled Acorn to win a contract with the British Broadcasting Corporation. In 1983 she developed one of the first RISC processors, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM).

More on Sophie at her homepage [sophie.org.uk]

ARM sucks!

[Anonymous Coward]

First, ARM doesn't make all those chips, they design CPU cores. Chips are designed around those cores. As an example, pretty much all CDMA phones (Sprint and Verizon in the US, most of Japan and Korea, some of China) contain Qualcomm chips.

Second, ARM sucks because their compilers suck. Their compilers suck because the old ones generate buggy code and the new ones aren't backward-compatible with the old ones, so that their customers are stuck with old versions that aren't maintained any more. Worse, their compilers suck enough that some chip vendors decided to write their own compilers, which suck at least as much. Getting code that compiles and runs correctly on all ARM compilers is a challenge. And we're talking about C90 code here, not even C++ of C99. Even the newest compilers are very poor at optimizing code.

Third, ARM isn't the only company designing ARM CPUs. Digital did one, and now Intel does. Those chip families (StrongARM and XScale) were/are faster than anything that ARM designed themselves.

If you want a non-ARM cell-phone (as someone asked), look for a Siemens phone. Except for the latest S65, they pretty much all use a non-ARM CPU. The S55 is actually a good phone.

Re:Why nobody complains

[OverCode@work]

The Dreamcast contains a Hitachi SuperH 4 CPU and a graphics processor developed by PowerVR. The SH4 has many similarities to the ARM, but has very a strong floating point unit (for instance, it's possible to combine blocks of floating point registers for very efficient matrix operations).

-John

Re:I kind of like ARM

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, they're pretty aggressive about protecting their IP (because let's face it, that's all they have). MIPS have also threatened RISC clones, but apparently the only thing they can threaten with are the lwl and lwr opcodes (at least MIPS I implementations).

Two Types of Monopolies

[sirbone]

Alan Greenspan wrote about monopolies in a great essay simply called "Anti-trust". He makes the case that there are two types of monopolies. One type is like Microsoft. The other type maybe is like ARM, though I am not too familiar with ARM's situation. The example Mr. Greenspan used was ALCOA, an aluminum manufacturer at the time the essay was written. The company, he said, was a monopoly because it was so efficient at making its product that no one was at all capable of producing aluminum so cheaply. How this differs from a Microsoft monopoly is that if ALCOA used its monopoly status to inflate prices then it would cease to be a monopoly, since low prices are exactly what made it a monopoly. Thus it was not a coersive monopoly. He went on to point out how this has a net benefit for everyone (as anyone who understands the economics of efficiency knows) and denounced how the government was trying to punish ALCOA for being a monopoly. (IE-It was being punsihed for coming up with superior manufacturing techniques.) Perhaps a modern day ALCOA is Wal-Mart, which, putting aside you opinions on labour, largely sells thing cheaply because of their new innovations in supply chain logistics. I believe they came up with many new tricks in transporting inventory that make their inventory costs very low. So if Wal-Mart becomes (or is) a monopoly, it is because they have low prices. But if they try to strong-arm prices then they get screwed. This is why Wal-Mart is not harmful for consumers in the way Microsoft is.

Intel/ARM relationship [was "Re:Shipped?"]

[AllTheGoodNamesWereT]

The Intel XScale processor is indeed based on intellectual property licensed from ARM, but the situation is a little more complex than that. Intel's license agreement with ARM (which Intel acquired when it bought DEC's semiconductor business in the 1990s) allows Intel greater flexibility in implementing ARM-based processors than is granted to most other ARM licensees.

Here's how we described the relationship in the PricewaterhouseCoopers publication Technology Forecast: 2002-2004 [pwcglobal.com]:

ARM maintains very tight control over its architecture, giving most of its licensees virtually no freedom in how they choose to implement the processor. The exceptions to this rule are Intel and Motorola, which are unique among the many dozens of ARM licensees in that they can design their own ARM-compatible processor cores. Whereas other ARM licensees simply use the processors that ARM provides to them, Intel and Motorola can extend, create, or modify ARM's designs to create their own unique implementations of the ARM architecture. So long as the resulting chip remains compatible with ARM software, Motorola and Intel are free to experiment with high-performance or low-power designs. This gives both Intel and Motorola a substantial advantage over the many other ARM licensees, all of which are competing with products based on identical processor cores.

Re:Instruction set

[TonyJohn]

I'm sure it's in MUL, and could be in the others. Basically, there are three register operands (two inputs, and one output), and for some reason that I would expect has to do with how the instruction is implemented, one of the source operands (I forget whether it's the first or second) can't be the destination. Sure, you can swap the operands, unless you want to square a number (and don't need to keep the original around), but it's a pain.

IIRC, this restriction was removed in ARM architecture version 6.