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Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

58 points by goplayoutside 4 days ago | 18 comments

drob518 2 hours ago

This is going to be a strategic challenge for ARM unless they are going to focus on chips that nobody else wants to make. And given the AI focus, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I would think that the RISC-V folks would be salivating at the prospect of flipping some existing ARM licensees to RISC-V.

forinti 6 hours ago

Arm came from Acorn and Acorn did make the first ARM CPUs for their computers, so it's not really the first time they do this.

fweimer 5 hours ago

They made the Morello research CPUs, but did not sell them.

The Acorn/Arm history is somewhat complicated due to the Arm IPO, I think.

nutjob2 5 hours ago

One can split hairs about the corporate responsibility, but I personally bought a VLSI ARM chip in the 90s. VLSI were one of the original 3 partners (along with Apple and Acorn) who owned the newly formed ARM corp and were the first to produce them (for Apple).

daneel_w 2 hours ago

The Acorn Archimedes came with Acorn branded CPUs (the "ARM250" IIRC) already in the late 80s. I can't recall what company made the chips for ARM at that time, but in the later Archimedes models it was VLSI.

rwmj 44 minutes ago

VLSI from the very start according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#ARM1

kaladin-jasnah 50 minutes ago

How does this fit with Meta's decision to acquire Rivos?

brcmthrowaway 20 minutes ago

acquihire?

mrbluecoat 2 hours ago

"in-house" is misleading

> Like nearly all fabless AI chipmakers, Arm currently manufactures its CPU at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ’s fabrication plants.

ChrisArchitect 4 days ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506251

checker659 7 hours ago

That is not a dupe

Eufrat 6 hours ago

I think it is. The launch announcement explicitly says the same thing, “Meta is our lead partner and customer”.

checker659 6 hours ago

On HN, dupe means duplicate discussion for the same link

password4321 4 hours ago

> duplicate discussion for the same link

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but this is incorrect per moderator dang at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43765252:

> On HN, dupeness is more a question of whether the underlying story is substantively the same or not

I believe dang's most recent in-depth explanation can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43738815 and you can search for more at https://hn.algolia.com?query=author%3Adang+dupe&sort=byDate&...

Submissions of the same exact URL are automatically merged into the previous discussion server side, and are discouraged for about a year.

checker659 4 hours ago

But one is a press release from ARM and the other is a report from CNBC. How are the two the same?

By your logic, there shouldn't be a gazillion posts about Apple Events the day it happens.

geerlingguy 3 hours ago

Apple usually announces like 3-5 new products, each in a distinct market / audience fit. Arm announced one product for one customer.

But sometimes two long discussions ensue on separate days for one event/product/announcement, if it's big enough. Often the discussions are merged later on. No big deal.

mbreese 55 minutes ago

And even for big news events (which, this might qualify as), people can miss the first discussion. Even if the discussions end up merged later on, the different discussions can still be fruitful.

Which is why, even if it is a duplicate conversation, the mods generally allow things to play out organically. There's either going to be more discussion above, or people have already said their peace and we move on.

password4321 2 hours ago

It's not my logic, it's the logic of the moderator(s) of HN. Here's more, cut+paste from the link previously provided (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43738815):

> I agree—they're not all the same story. On the other hand: stories in an ongoing sequence usually lead to repetitive discussion, which is bad for HN