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Comment by sohkamyung | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it a bit of a stretch for Hermann Houser to say ARM 'sold' 15 billion chips last year and compares ARM to Intel? Technically it was ARM licensees that sold those chips, not ARM.

Quote from the article: "The man [Hermann Hauser] who helped spin ARM Holdings out from Acorn Computers in 1990 also said the technology firm had sold 15 billion microchips in 2015, which was more than US rival Intel had sold in its history."

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ARM has not sold a single chip in 2015 but 200+ partner companies that integrate ARM into theirs SoC together with quite sophisticated tech like modems, GPU's, accelerators of any kind etc. In many cases real estate taken by ARM is below 1/4 of total die area.

> real estate taken by ARM is below 1/4 of total die area

Yes, but perhaps it is the most valuable area of the die? The rest may be, for instance, taken by highly repetitive memory cells?

without those memory cells the arm chip is useless. Try using a cell phone with 1kb memory. These days things are so integrated that there's no "most valuable", except perhaps power gating / power control parts of the circuitry.

Value is determined by supply and demand, not function.

I don't understand what you mean in this context. Elaborate please?

Just because memory is indispensable, doesn't mean its more valuable for its designer/manufacturer, since competition may force them to accept a much lower margin. There are multiple companies designing memory chips, but only one can license ARM chips.

thank you! this discussion also helped me realize the importance of both memory--in which to store broad knowledge and associations--AND raw horsepower in the CPU.

Most valuable? I doubt it. Each of these partners shipping major chip volumes have likely ran a cost/benefit analysis of an in-house CPU vs paying the licensing fee.

Here's a more sobering set of numbers to compare ARM and Intel on:

Intel Corporation net income (2015): $11.4 billion [1]

ARM Holdings plc 2015 total assets (2016): $3.21 billion [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Holdings

Intel is in a problematic situation though and is laying off 12,000 staff st the moment. I don't think the dollars tell the full story.

Not in many cases. Things like Bluetooth and WiFi chips have a simple CPU and then lot of custom digital logical and fancy RF components on the die. The CPU is only a small part of the design, both physically in the amount of area it takes up and also of the amount of engineering effort that goes into it. Correspondingly, it represents a small part of the value to the customer. Obviously the customer wanted a good CPU, but there are lots of relatively cheap ways to obtain a good enough small CPU.

When I worked at Cambridge Silicon Radio, we'd license in various bits of IP like the USB. We might pay more for that than a small ARM core would cost.

Selling licensees is even smarter than selling chips, no risk and probably same margin.

In 2015, Intel paid out more in stock dividends (~$4,500M) than ARM Holdings made in revenue ($1,489M).

Which, as I understand it, means that in 2015, Intel was probably at least two orders of magnitude more profitable than ARM Holdings. GP could still be right about margins, but as a shareholder, Intel would bave been much more preferable.

How long can Intel retain those profit margins though? ARM processors are the de facto architecture for mobile and IoT - as mobile processors get more powerful and more desktop class software becomes available on mobile devices, Intel's profitability is seriously threatened.

You could make the same argument about arm too, for that matter. Why pay for an arm license if you can get an equivalent risc-v chip (rtl, "soft core" or whatever it is that you get when you buy an arm license) for free? Well, not at the moment but in a few years when risc-v has matured a bit more..

Its likely Hacker News runs on Intel. There is no cloud - it's someone else's computer, as they say...

People have been predicting the demise of Intel for a long time now. "Now that AMD is shipping Opteron CPUs, there's no way Intel can retain the server market..."

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