ARM gets into actually making chips

ARM just announced (it’s been in the works for a while), that in addition to licensing the architecture, they’re now making their own chips.

That is cued to a section on all the companies (and there are many) publicly announcing support for this effort. Meta buying the first batch.

Most interesting, however, is that Qualcomm and AMD are two obvious omissions from all the supporters. Leads me to suspect they view this as competition. As the video points out, Qualcomm has been suing ARM for a while now, even as it still uses ARM licenses.

If you want more info, scroll to the start of the clip and play the whole thing - it’s not very long.

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Not sure about this. I entered ARM around 2000 and it was my first 20 bagger. It was the last great British tech company before being sold off as a Brexit casualty.

I really don’t think this is a great move.

On the one hand ARM have tragically failed to raise the per unit royalty value from their chips which remains pitiful and under constant legal challenge from the likes of Qualcomm and even ARM China which managed to “privatise” ARM’s China presence. So I get why they want to capture the end chip value for themselves.

On the other hand they are entering into competition with their own customer base. That really hasn’t worked out well for tech companies generally, Illumina and Grail anyone!

Of course the fab production houses, the memory players and the non competing market players give this a vote of confidence (see video) but the actual clients kept quiet on this.

This was the reason ARM stated they always needed to be independent - so they can serve the whole market. They may have just shrunk their royalty customer base massively.

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