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ARMs Race: Licensing vs. Manufacturing Models In the Mobile Era
MojoKid writes "The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in the past six years and ARM has had to evolve along side it. ARM's IP focus allows it to dedicate all its resources to building a great design rather than committing to any single manufacturing process node, customer, or foundry. Architectural design and implementation is done very much in partnership with both foundries (TSMC, GlobalFoundries) and licensees like Samsung or Qualcomm. The difference between the way Intel goes to market and ARM's model is more nuanced than the simple ownership of manufacturing facilities. Owning its own fab means that Intel can tweak process technology to match the particulars of a given architecture (and vice-versa). It also gives the company far more flexibility when planning future nodes. If Intel feels that integrating Peanut Butter Silicon on Insulator (PB-SOI) is the best way to hit its performance and power consumption targets at 14nm, for example, it can make that happen internally. ARM, in contrast, is limited by the decisions of the foundry manufacturers it partners with."
So to sum it up, ARM is winning in the markets it is in, and instead of this puff piece talking about *INTEL*UNITS*SOLD*, it's talking about some vague claimed benefit Intel has by virtue of vertical integration.
And to back up this puff piece we have to go back in history:
So in the 1980's it quotes PCs (now being eaten from the bottom up by tablets, so they only quote up to 1989 when PCs were the only game in town).
And for the 1990's we quote Data Centers (now being eaten from low power ARM servers, but never mind we only quote up to 1999).
And for the 2000 onward they quote HPCs, which are what exactly? High powered PCs?? High Performance computers? Some sort of limited category designed to exclude the bulk of the Arm sales to make Intel numbers look better????
Owning its own fab means that Intel can tweak process technology to match the particulars of a given architecture (and vice-versa)
That may be understood as an Intel exclusive, but it's not entirely true. Even in the fabless world the big shots (Qualcomm, NVidia, AMD & co) have very early access to new process nodes and can certainly tune their design to it, and have their own specifics tweaks made. So they can do both kind of adaptation too, although it's not as integrated as for Intel. If you draw a line, Intel is at one extreme being able to have close integration, the small fabless companies are at the other extreme taking the stock TSMC or GF or UMC or else offering as-is. But the big fabless guys are somewhat in the middle.
ARM, in contrast, is limited by the decisions of the foundry manufacturers it partners with.
It's also a bit misleading. ARM has early access to all big fabs (Globalfoundries and TSMC), and because ARM is so pervasive there is a very very high pressure for a fab to provide the best ARM implementations on their process. So sure, it's the fab making the decisions on their process in the end. But you can bet they will pay a lot of attention to any ARM feedback gained during the early access co-work.
ARM doesn't only provide processor IP, they do the whole range now from memory cells to GPUs to interconnect to memory controllers. And they work with the fabs to optimize their design for them and provide their customers "Process Optimization Packages" (POPs) that summarize how to get the best of a process for their IP. So ARM has the know-how, the access and the pull to have a big say in what happens in the fabs roadmaps.
Owning the Fab is a big capital cost and means the beast has to be fed but allows for more late-stage tweaking. Not owning that Fab means potentially more flexibility in choosing a process for the design. Of course ARM ahs to work with it's partners, that doesn't mean it's partners are in-flexible and far from cutting edge.
Seems like no great news, just the same old in-house vs. out-sourced debate...
Art is the mathematics of emotion
And ARM has one huge advantage over Intel - everybody else except Intel has their own ARM SOC these days, so designers can shop around to get the chip they want, from the supplier they want. And they can easily switch to a different supplier without having to throw out their entire investment into the architecture.
That being said, I cannot see the GPs world where ARM seriously threatens Intel in the server/high performance computing market, where Intel holds most of the cards, not just the aces.