Over the past few weeks, there have been numerous reports about Nvidia’s overtures to acquire Arm. The news has mostly been obsessed about the $31 billion that Arm’s current owner, Softbank, paid for Arm and whether Nvidia could pay such an eye-watering price to buy this asset. There is also pushback from Herman Hauser who was one… Read More
The Interface Design IP market explodes, growing by 18% in 2019, with $870 million, when CPU IP category grew by 5% at $1,460 million. In fact, Interface IP market is forecasted to sustain high growth rate for the next five years, as calculated by IPnest in the “Interface IP Survey 2015-2019 & Forecast 2020-2024”, to reach $1,800… Read More
Late last year I wrote about Arm’s efforts to play a role in servers, in AWS, and particularly Arm-based supercomputing, in the Sandia Astra roadmap and in partnering with NVIDIA who are in the Oak Ridge Summit supercomputer. These steps came, at least for me, with an implicit “Good for them, playing a role on the edges of these challenging… Read More
We always warn clients that even in the best of times, Joint Ventures (JVs) in China always end in tears. And we are far from the best of times right now. There is a major example of this playing out right now with Arm China.
Arm’s China JV is, to put it simply, a bit of a mess. The Board has fired the CEO, but he has refused to leave. And owing… Read More
Arm did it again. They continue to press their advantage, most recently with an announcement on their 2020 release of cores for mobile applications, in Cortex-A, in what they now call Cortex-X custom cores, in Mali GPUs and in the next generation of their Ethos neural net core.
Paul Williamson, VP GM of the client line of business,… Read More
When it comes to Arm, we think mostly of phones and the “things” in the IoT. We know they’re in a lot of other places too, such as communications infrastructure but that’s a kind of diffuse image – “yeah, they’re everywhere”. We like easy-to-understand targets: phones, IoT devices, we get those. More recently Arm started to talk about… Read More
At TechCon I had a 1×1 with Steve Roddy, VP of product marketing in the Machine Learning (ML) Group at Arm. I wanted to learn more about their ML direction since I previously felt that, amid a sea of special ML architectures from everyone else, they were somewhat fudging their position in this space. What I heard earlier was that… Read More
At TechCon Arm announced two more advances against competitive threats, one arguably tactical and the other strategic, at least in this writer’s view. The tactical move was to add support for custom instructions, the ability to collapse multiple instructions into a single instruction through customer-added logic which hooks… Read More
I was at Arm TechCon as usual this year and one of the first panels I covered was close to the kickoff, hosted by Andrew Hopkins (Dir System Technology at Arm), Kurt Shuler (VP marketing at Arteris IP) and Jens Benndorf (Managing Dir and COO at Dream Chip Technologies). The topic was implementing ISO 26262-compliant AI SoCs with Arm… Read More
Without a doubt, RISC-V is generating a lot of buzz and I’m sure a lot of new designs, especially in spaces that are super-cost competitive or demand added differentiation in the processor. I doubt this is having meaningful impact on Arm business, in $$ rather than press. It takes a long time to replace an ecosystem of that size and … Read More
