Arm vs Intel – The ninth innings.

Arm lays out its position with Armv9.

• Arm has announced its first new processor architecture for quite some time but the real test of this will come when it goes head to head with Intel on a level playing field.
• Arm held its Arm Vision Day event where the headline news was the launch of the new Armv9 architecture updating the Armv8 which was launched in October 2011, almost 10 years ago.
• The Armv9 looks to me more like a big evolution of the Armv8 rather than a complete rethink as the underlying 64bit instruction set remains essentially the same.
• Instead, a series of extensions have been added that maintain full compatibility to Armv8 and add a host of functionality and performance upgrades that will keep Arm competitive for the next 10 years.
• Not surprisingly, AI and security feature very heavily in the new architecture as there are two of the most important areas demanded by end-users at the moment.
• This is being headlined by Arm’s Confidential Compute Architecture which aims to shorten the chain of trust that is required when computing secure data which should make it more secure.
• The first mobile IP cores based on v9 are also expected to show a 30% improvement in performance before any further frequency-based or design-based improvements that Arm’s customers can make when they implement the IP.
• The bottom line of these announcements is that Arm is building on its recent momentum created by Apple with the pitch that its processor can do anything that any one’s else’s can at least as well or in some cases, better.
• A couple of years ago, this claim would have been met with plenty of scepticism but the surprisingly good performance of the M1 and its power efficiency have proven what Arm has been claiming for years.
• Consequently, while there are plenty of reasons that are unrelated to Arm as to why the M1 may be so good, the M1 has increased Arm’s credibility where it will at least have a seat at the table to make it case.
• However, the real question remains unanswered which is: has Apple rendered the x86 processor design obsolete?
• Intel of course says absolutely not but only a side-by-side comparison of the two designs manufactured on equivalent semiconductor processes will begin to answer this question.
• When Apple launched the M1, it demonstrated superior performance and there is a strong possibility that it was able to do this largely because Intel’s missteps meant that its best silicon was 2 generations behind the TSMC 5nm process that Apple had used.
• Qualcomm’s recent acquisition of NUVIA (see here) and the fact that Apple is trying to stymie the progress of this company is an indicator that the wonders it has pulled off with the M1 are more about the 5nm process and skill in chip design and much less about any proprietary IP that Apple has developed based on Arm.
• However, the ball is firmly in Intel’s court to prove that its 7nm (TSMC 5m equivalent) chips will retain the performance edge that has made Intel the market leader for the last 30 years.
• I think that the jury remains firmly out on this question and it will be a little while yet before it is categorically answered.
• However, in the meantime, Arm remains a credible processor architecture for almost any use case which is what the enhancements to the new v9 architecture are addressing.
• While the fundamental technology is progressing nicely, the issues around Arm’s ownership are much more problematic.
• The acquisition of Arm by NVIDIA is looking increasingly problematic (see here) and the situation with Arm China appears to be going nowhere (see here).
• The fact that a number of Arm’s most important customers are not very keen on the idea of Arm being acquired by NVIDIA is a very bad sign and has already sparked increased interest in the open-source version of Arm: RISC-V.
• Hence, I continue to believe that the best solution to this is for Softbank to put Arm right back where it found it which is on the London Stock Exchange.
• Given how non-sensical and narrative-driven the market is at the moment, it could even earn a profit by re-listing the company.
• It is increasingly becoming clear that the technology industry would be best served with Arm being a publicly owned, fully independent company.