ARMs Race: Licensing vs. Manufacturing Models In the Mobile Era

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."

Intel's ARM license

[Anonymous Coward]

intel still retains the royalty-free license it obtained from ARM when ARM were running out of cash. the deal was that intel would feed back any improvements made. unfortunately, just as my associate told ARM when he was working for LSI Logic - advice which ARM completely ignored - the designs ARM had at the time were so poor that intel was forced to use their *own* super-scalar Harvard architecture and to put an ARM-compatible front-end on it. intel never gave back any modifications to the design.... because they never made any. 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. Marvell had absolutely no qualms about out-performing ARM and immediately ramped it up to 1ghz.

building a great design? NOT!

[dltaylor]

Spend some time looking through the Linux kernel archives, or actually USING one, and you'll see that quite the opposite is true.

What was a tolerable architecture for low-complexity embedded designs has serious flaws in cache coherency and clock-for-clock is painfully slow compared to a 464 (or, even, 440) PowerPC.

Because the ARM lacks the useful complexity for cache coherency and memory, and memory-mapped IO, barriers, and a quite small page table entry cache, it does have a power consumption advantage over the PPC, though.

Maybe (hopefully, really) the 64-bit versions won't be quite so crippled.

Intel is a paper tiger

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at it objectively, the ARM ecosystem benefits from a diversity of process technologies funded by its customers, whereas Intel needs to get its process bet right every generation. And even to the extent that its graphics cores allow it to claim that it is used to producing SoCs, not just CPUs, it's still just one supplier -- it can't compete on customisation -- at best it could offer a few standardised SoCs.

Intel will suffer from margin compression by entering the mobile space (and the more chips it sells there the worse that problem will get) while simultaneously seeing increasing ARM competition in servers shave its margins there too. Intel may not have the money much longer to stay a generation and a half ahead in process tech.

Re:Intel is a paper tiger

[TheRaven64]

Intel does currently have two big advantages over ARM. The first is that they are typically a generation (or, at least, half a generation) ahead of other fab owners. This is the same advantage that allowed them to compete with superior designs from AMD for the late '90s: they could get higher clocks at the same power, and more chips per wafer (meaning lower cost). The other advantage is that they are a much larger company and so can afford to make half a dozen guesses about the state of the market at the end of the five-year chip design cycle. They can then have different teams working on chips for those market predictions and only actually ship one or two of the final microarchitectures. In contrast, every ARM chip has to be a success, often for several generations (for example, the new A7 is an A8 with a number of refinements and a lot of tweaking for optimisation and some slight ISA tweaks to make it instruction-set compatible with the A15).