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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Theres survivor bias - the success of ARM ignores the relative failure of other alternative instruction sets. SPARC, Itanic, MIPS, the road to today is littered with instruction sets that didn't make it in the same way ARM has.

Oracle and Fujitsu will still sell your business SPARC servers, but I don't know that I'd buy that business unit (never mind that I don't have that kind of money). It's easy to buy the lottery ticket after you've got the winning numbers. ARMs successful now but there was a lot of luck and hard work up get there.

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The comment above is talking about ARM's business model, which Intel on Itanic definitely didn't have, Sun didn't have for SPARC (they later freed it, after it was no longer commercially relevant), and MIPS as a company didn't follow, either.

Anyone remember the Motorola families of chips? 68xxx and 88xxx.

Plenty of people do (they're some of the most beloved chips of all time), but their peak was pre-1990, so most people don't bring them up in discussions like this.

They should.

The 68K line was the Itanium of it's time. It overpromised and underdelivered and was crushed by the 286 and 386. Many vendors made machines based on it (Atari ST, Amiga, Mac, Sun Microsystems, Sinclair QL, ...) and all of those vendors either went out of business or transitioned to RISC architectures in a hurry. It was one of the many near death experiences the Mac platform had.

It was more successful than the beautiful losers such as the TMS9900, iAPX 432, i860, NS32000, but it hit the end of track and left everyone in the lurch.

I never understood why Motorola couldn't keep up with Intel in the speed race. If they had, 68K would be the dominant architecture today.

Performance per clock cycle was much better on 68k. I understood that they lost out because the world adopted DOS and DOS run only on x86. Then... consequences. The only surviving platform that used to run on 68k is the Mac, which was a minor player even at the time.

68k were extremely expensive at the time, that's why they lost desktop market to their 80x86 killer. An additional factor was what XT and then AT became an open architecture.

From what I remember, 68k processors were used by PalmPilot starting from the US Robotics days. I wonder if they had any particular power efficiency to make it better for Palm. Either that or I am remembering it wrong.

what is the main product line of PalmPilot?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot

Thank you for the link.

They are also used in automotive as part of the Coldfire CPU series.

But I think a lot of this usage goes back to the days where embedded CPU families had been a lot more fragmented, and companies usually picked one family of their favorite supplier (based on pricing, fulfilling the use-case, etc) and then just sticked to it due to code not being particularly portable.

Since that time the amount of CPU families that are actually used shrank drastically, and it's a lot more likely that all of those use-cases just pick ARM.

IIRC Motorola couldn't keep up in terms of producing competitive performant designs and lost out to competitors. ARM hasn't fallen into that trap. Then again, empires rise & fall, and the end of something is usually just a matter of time. But in the tech world the "end" is also some after-life embedded in another organization or pivoted to a different direction. For now, ARM is rock solid on a foundation made from shifting sands of eternal tech change.

> For now, ARM is rock solid on a foundation made from shifting sands of eternal tech change.

ARM as an architecture may be on solid ground, but their future as a company may be uncertain given that their IP seems to have been appropriated by the CCP.

https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2021/09/08/arm-loses-china/

ARM and ARM China are separate companies. In software terms, while ARM China may have forked the ARM IP, they're not going to get any commits from upstream and it'll wither on the vine.

Optimistically, yes.

On the other hand, there's a global supply chain appetite for cheap products including CPU's. Upstream commits aren't required to dump cheap CPU's on the market or to develop compute intensive businesses around them that undercut the competition on price.

Controllers, maybe.

High-end CPUs, hardly. That would require significant design efforts to keep up with ARM's development.

Not that it'd be impossible for China to develop their own strong processor-designing forces, driven commercially or by the state. But so far it seems far from a trivial task.

High end isn't needed. Simply a marginal improvement and CCP comes out ahead. In the performance per watt per cost calculation, the cost factor has no lower bound. Cost can be subsidized to near zero like many other industries under their control.

We're talking about instruction sets with ARM, correct? It's not anywhere near the level of investment as next generation litho tech for a chip foundry?

I don't underestimate the ability to innovate. Stolen tech can be improved just as well as in-house R&D'd tech.

ARM China is independent from ARM, which just happens to have whatever IP it was able to run away with. To compete they're going to have to match ARM, given that nobody is going to write software for their custom fork.

They can win the domestic Chinese market, who has their own home grown software for everything.

Soon, those companies will move beyond China as well.

The domestic Chinese market was not able to support homegrown TD-SCDMA without the silicon manufacturing restrictions that now exist for Chinese companies, what makes you think that a company with rapidly outdating chip designs and access only to domestic silicon fabs which are trapped on older 14nm+ processes is going to be able to compete outside of the low end of the budget segment?

Even Intel had trouble surviving on 14nm, hence all the contra-revenue spent to directly subsidize Intel tablets (whether they were $100 HP Stream Windows tablets, or $50 Walmart special Android tablets) to try and not get locked out of that space.

They still have access to TSMC ( for now ).

> (...) what makes you think that a company with rapidly outdating chip designs and access only to domestic silicon fabs (...)

Well, maybe the fact that not so long ago it had none of that and it clearly looks like both the company and the political regime aren't having many problems getting their hands on all the missing pieces.

The good news is that intellectual "property" isn't truly rivalrous. If ARM china "steals" ARM ip, ARM is still capable of licensing to it's western clients; as it's unlikely any of them will be licensing from ARM china.

> If ARM china "steals" ARM ip, ARM is still capable of licensing to it's western clients;

If the smartphone market is an indicator, too bad that this will just mean that the majority of OEMs will just buy their chips from ARM china and thus demand for ARM IP will expectedly drop, and meanwhile this IP appropriation will just be used to develop independent design capabilities.

"just buy their chips from ARM china"

I'm really not sure what that means. Does ARM china have fabs?

That's pretty much what I mean by a solid foundation... Built on sand.

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