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Comment by steve1977 | Hacker News Reader

steve1977

I think the interesting bit is actually this:

For the first time in our more than 35-year history, Arm is delivering its own silicon products

I can imagine a lot of ARM engineers being frustrated at seeing their cores being used in stupid ways for decades to finally flex what they can do (outside of Apple).

I can imagine many of those ARM engineers looking at Ampere's product line and surmising that an "AGI" ARM server is like building the Hindenburg 2.

Meta is a guaranteed customer though.

Oracle was a guaranteed Ampere customer and ended up giving away the vCPUs for free.

Agreed, it will be _very_ interesting to see what waves this causes. It would be like TSMC deciding to make and sell their own CPUs, now ARM is directly competing with some of their clients.

Eh, I'm not so sure it'll be that big a deal. The whole supply chain is so twisted and tangled all the way up and down. Shuffling out one piece doesn't seem like it will, on its own, be so major. Samsung made the chips for the iPhone, then made their own phone, then Apple designed their own chips made by TSMC, now Apple is exploring the possibility of having Samsung make those chips again.

Also, it takes a willful ignorance of history for ARM to claim this is the first time they've manufactured hardware. I mean, maaaaybe, teeeeechnically that's true, but ARM was the Acorn RISC Machine, and Acorn was in the hardware business...at least as much as Apple was for the first iPhone.

Technically right is the best kind of right … right?

I don’t think ARM Ltd have ever done a deal to deliver finished chips to a customer for production use.

They’ve made test silicon and dev. boards.

They designed arguably the first ever SoC (for Acorn) in the form of the ARM250 but Acorn bought the chips from VLSI not ARM.

Not aware of an exception to this rule until now.

As I mentioned in another comment, I guess when ARM references to themselves, they mean Arm Holdings plc and not Acorn Computers. The two are of course very much related, but not the same company.

But really how different is TSMC than VLSI making the ARM1? By your logic I would say that ARM has already delivered it's own silicon product.

Well technically the ARM1 was a Acorn product (made by VLSI). ARM as a company was only incorporated in 1990 (as a joint venture between Acorn, VLSI and drumroll Apple), I guess that's where the mentioned 35 years and "first time in our history" come from.

The best kind of correct?

Can this be read as finally the financial incentives to join the AI silicone race has become too tempting. Finally the incentives to sell chips are definitely stronger than the cost of competing with your own licensees?

Do they need to higher Design Verification engineers for this?

Thats a huge cost compared to the average RTL jockey

ARM already had tons of DV engineers. No company would license the RTL or any IP unless it has already been run through millions of simulations in DV.

What would be the real advantage of doing that?

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