ARMs Race: Licensing vs. Manufacturing Models In the Mobile Era 54
MojoKid writes "The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in the past six years and ARM has had to evolve along side it. ARM's IP focus allows it to dedicate all its resources to building a great design rather than committing to any single manufacturing process node, customer, or foundry. Architectural design and implementation is done very much in partnership with both foundries (TSMC, GlobalFoundries) and licensees like Samsung or Qualcomm. The difference between the way Intel goes to market and ARM's model is more nuanced than the simple ownership of manufacturing facilities. Owning its own fab means that Intel can tweak process technology to match the particulars of a given architecture (and vice-versa). It also gives the company far more flexibility when planning future nodes. If Intel feels that integrating Peanut Butter Silicon on Insulator (PB-SOI) is the best way to hit its performance and power consumption targets at 14nm, for example, it can make that happen internally. ARM, in contrast, is limited by the decisions of the foundry manufacturers it partners with."
Re:Intel's ARM license (Score:5, Informative)
ARM were pissed, Intel were embarrassed at having a non-x86 SoC that outperformed both their own cores *and* ARM's, so sold it to Marvell... *minus* the royalty-free license.
Intel was embarrassed that their ARM core had the highest power consumption on the market, and that they had no idea how to reduce it except a process shrink that wouldn't come soon enough.
Re:Intel's ARM license (Score:5, Informative)
There are 3 from scratch Arm designs where you are talking as if there were 1.
StrongARM: DEC's original ARMv4 compatible designs (SA-110, SA-1100). DEC sold the design/business/name to Intel who sold if for a while and made an upgrade (SA-1110), but later came up with...
XScale: Intel's ARMv5 redesign which had 3 generations (PXA1xx..3xx) and some of their own instruction set instructions (like wireless MMX). Intel sold the business/name to Marvell who sold chips manufactured by Intel, but Marvell already had...
Feroceon: Marvell's own superscalar ARMv5/v6/v7 compatible design that they used as an embedded processor for their Ethernet and Storage business(88Fxxxx, and later PXA9xx). Marvel is in the process of transitioning all of the old Intel business to their own Arm Core (w/ the PXA9xx)
Also, as an architectural licensee (like Intel and Marvell), there is no requirement to "give-back" improvements to Arm. In fact, as an architectural licensee, you can't actually start-with/use/modify Arm's designs. You must design your own from scratch and it must pass their compatibility test suite (earlier architecture tests for v4/v5 allowed for instruction set extensions, but later tests for v6+ do not), but that is all.
On the flip side, if you are a regular licensee, you must use the design Arm gives up pretty much As-Is (although you can make timing fixes and ram wrappers and similar adaptations that don't change the functionality). Although you can request Arm to make modifications for you, they are free to share these modifications with other licensees...
The main reason Intel sold Xscale (for which they had to pay Arm a royalty and to which they couldn't add new functionality) to concentrate on pushing x86 (free from royalties and free to innovate) into the mobile space. Time will tell if this was a good move (although Intel retained their Arm license in case they want to reverse course)...