Yes. People upthread are talking about how corporations want to recreate the open software revolution with open hardware and this will (and already does) play out exactly like it has with open software: big vendors extract all the value from the product, contribute nothing back, and keep any cool features they come up with internal and proprietary.

This is the problem with arm, it’s this foundational technology that underpins everything from Grace to Dojo and TPU and yet arm doesn’t make any fucking money. They lost money during the first year of the pandemic (and the two years prior iirc!) despite the boom in electronics sales!

Nvidia buying arm for the synergy of forcing CUDA as the default arm graphics IP (and BYO for higher price) was the good ending. Nobody else is going to pay $40b for a company that makes 0.5b +/- 1b without some other synergy, and the other possibilities are companies like Samsung, tsmc, or Oracle with their own synergies. CUDA as an ai platform was absolutely a play that would be cashing out big right now if they had succeeded.

Well, if it’s not nvidia (and it seems any other buyout would be equally unlikely to get approval) then SoftBank is just gonna have to make the existing licensees pay up, and cash out the business that way (revenue and then IPO). So there’s a lot of licensees who are going to find an extra zero on their TCO of ARM usage.

That’s the reason you saw Qualcomm pitch a fit and start lying about the terms of their licensing deal last year. And google and meta and Amazon are equally upset. And they’re gonna start funding a competitor.

Those companies (and the bulk android market) mostly don’t care about performance, this is the “cheapest thing that works” market. The accelerator (TPU etc) is the thing that really matters now.

There may be a minimal amount of collaboration (ala Minix or CDDL) to build that common platform but that’s all they really care about, is some basic P-core and E-core designs. There is no incentive for Amazon to build processors that are way faster than googles, actually everyone is still selling vCPUs based on sandy bridge processing power. They’d rather make cheaper smaller CPUs (this is why zen4c and zen5c exist, in large part) than compete on performance or features. That’s just not where the secret sauce is, and it’s not where the revenue is.

So we are going to see the same thing as the software space, where vendors take the fruit of risc-v, build their own stuff around it, and pay nothing and contribute nothing back. Everything important will live in proprietary, non-portable IP that doesn’t need to be shared under open terms. The same problems as always when you BSD/MIT license.

The future is a google TPU that you are not allowed to purchase yourself, stamping on a human face endlessly. But the boot will be based on a core of open-source/open-license designs, how wonderful! (with the interesting parts living inside proprietary parts of the core ofc)

Nvidia/CUDA dominance is way better than google platform-as-service that you can’t even run on-prem if you wanted to. And for all you can say about them, nvidia has never stopped pushing to the next thing, even when they had an insurmountable lead, and even when nobody else believed in the goal or saw where they were trying to go. Google and Amazon don’t benefit from pushing the limit like this, they just want cheap arm.micro instances and a host for their proprietary accelerators.

The difference between BSD/MIT and GPL is fundamentally about who gets the freedom - BSD/MIT let developers do what they want with it, and that sometimes comes at the expense of user freedoms. And when google/Amazon/meta say they want free and open cores, they certainly don’t mean they’ll be giving away their IP.

That’s arm’s predicament in a nutshell. Their business model lets other companies extract all the value and revenue. They’re this foundational technology that google/Amazon/meta make billions off of, and arm gets to lick the beaters. And any change to this model is is going to piss off enormous amounts of people, not least google/Amazon/meta. And arm’s play is “ok but if we don’t contribute anything worth paying for, then you won’t mind switching”. There is no BATNA for arm licensees right now.

Long term this could mean arm being knocked off its pillar. But that could happen anyway too, eg with the nvidia merger perhaps.