Not for a long while at least, anyway
Analysis Arm has designed its own example of a high-end processor, and is getting samples of the chip made for select customers.
There was a report in The Financial Times the other day with the headline, “Arm makes its own advanced prototype semiconductor.” Although the newspaper did its best to cover the nuances of this tale, some might jump to the conclusion that Arm is getting into the chipmaking business. Having spoken to our own industry sources, what’s in fact happening here is that Arm is stepping up efforts to showcase its work and make a point to some customers.
For those who don’t know, Arm, which is headquartered in the UK and today owned by Japan’s Softbank, creates blueprints of chips and licenses those designs to clients. Those customers take the blueprints and typically combine them with custom circuitry to produce complete, finished chip designs, which can be sent off to be fabricated by places like TSMC, Intel’s foundry unit, and Samsung. Arm collects royalties as well as licensing fees; it doesn’t make the chips itself.
That said, Arm does at times design complete chips and have these made for it; these are just prototypes for customers to try out rather than final products for mass production.
These samples include things like a multicore 64-bit 10nm mobile-friendly test chip made with TSMC; a 28nm Samsung-fabbed part for embedded systems; and a datacenter-grade processor mainly for the likes of Google and Microsoft.
The key point being that these are limited samples of completed chips just for engineers so that they can test their software works as expected on Arm’s latest architectures and technologies. Senior staff at Arm we’ve spoken to previously have openly detailed the availability of this test silicon, and said Arm simply isn’t interested getting into making and selling chips by itself. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to them, business wise and strategically.
What’s happening now is that Arm has spent the past six months or so designing a complete high-end processor to, as the FT put it, “demonstrate the power and capabilities of its designs to the wider market.” That’s a polite way of saying that some at Arm feel that some particular customers aren’t taking full advantage of its designs, and so it’s making some top-end silicon to show off what the architecture is capable of. Arm may well have also been spurred into such action by the resurgence of AMD, which is in the way of Arm’s desire to bag more of the datacenter and personal computing market, and perhaps by RISC-V, an upstart architecture snapping at Arm’s heels.
