Discussion

ARM Silicon#

heuristo: This seems bad, doesn’t it? I already know that there has been friction between arm and their customers over higher licensing fees since the IPO just trying to put this in context.

nateb2022: [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506251 (18 minutes older, 6 comments)

HeyMeco: This is my condensed version for the SBCwiki documentation focused on the key facts without all the unnecessary marketing around it

swiftcoder: This is substantially more useful than the marketing fluff in the press release. Probably would have made sense to post this in that thread though

HeyMeco: I wonder what the people at Ampere are thinking right now

soumyaskartha: ARM naming a chip AGI is either the most confident product launch in history or the best marketing we have seen in years. Probably both.

stared: Waiting for ARM-AGI-2

bitwize: Their marketing department is smoking a lot of hopium. I will now think of it as the ARM MatMul Unit.

HeyMeco: It really is a choice for Arm to use their 2023 based mobile X4 cores instead of their current C1 Ultras for this. Hopefully they step up quickly

trebligdivad: I wonder if it's a joke like Arm-Generative-Intelligence or something like that.

josemanuel: Wasn’t Ampere just bought by Softbank?

rbanffy: I don’t think they are thrilled, but I would expect them to have some non-compete clauses in their license that would give them some say WRT ARM’s pricing overlap with their products. No contract can legally forbid ARM from going after Ampere’s customers, but there can be penalties in terms of reduced license fees.OTOH, I’m not sure how far Ampere’s work with Oracle Cloud and their hard booked orders give them a cushion. I haven’t heard of new products from them, and haven’t played with OCI for some time to see if there are any newer CPUs there.

wmf: No, the Arm TPU is coming later.

zackmorris: I added a cost/performance analysis for that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509236 in case anyone's interested.

arrty88: This is great for consumers. More options leads to more choices means more competition means lower prices. Which group is it bad for?

lucasay: Not sure how to feel about this. Does this mean ARM is slowly moving from just licensing IP to actually competing with companies building on top of it?

boxedemp: I figured they would do this when SoftBank acquired them.SB likes 10x buys.

mghackerlady: The ones who recognize standards as a good thing. ARM making their own CPUs shifts their focus from making a good ISA for people to use to making a good ISA to use in their own CPUs.

grahammccain: Yeah seems like competing with your customers is a bad idea.

rbanffy: I think the only ARM licensee going for the hyperscaler CPU market is Ampere. Amazon and Microsoft make CPUs for themselves and Nvidia’s are aimed exclusively at AI workloads driving their GPUs.

JR1427: AWS Graviton and Microsoft Cobalt are arm-based.

adrian_b: These processors will have very decent performance for many applications, very similar to that of AWS Graviton5, but with more cores per socket.However, the claim made by Arm: "the Arm AGI CPU, for agentic AI infrastructure, delivering more than 2x performance per rack compared with x86 platforms" is obviously false.The new Intel Clearwater Forest Xeon processors use Darkmont cores, which have approximately the same performance per core, the same die area per core and the same power consumption per core as the Neoverse V3, but Intel offers 288 cores per socket and 576 cores per board, in comparison with only 136 cores per socket for Arm.Therefore there is no chance that these new Arm processors can provide more performance per rack than Intel Clearwater Forest.For applications that benefit from array operations, the AMD Zen 5 compact cores have much more performance per core than Neoverse V3 and AMD has provided 192 cores per socket for a long time. There is no chance for the new processors to exceed the performance per rack of Zen 5, but for those applications that do not benefit from array operations, these new Arm CPUs should have better performance per watt than Zen 5. But by the end of the year AMD should have Zen 6 Epyc CPUs, with more cores per socket, enhanced performance per core and improved performance per watt, so then there would be even less opportunities for these Arm CPUs to be better at something.The only way how the claim of Arm can be true is if they have compared their new CPUs with antiquated CPUs like the Intel Granite Rapids Xeon CPUs, instead of comparing with state-of-the-art Intel Clearwater Forest and AMD Zen 5.

lizknope: Softbank still owns 90% of ARM and they finished their acquisition of Ampere only a few months ago in November 2025.I'm a chip designer and a chip this complicated takes about 3 years from start to actual silicon so it would have started well before Softbank started their acquisition process of Ampere.The press release says it was co-developed with Meta who has a growing custom chip team. Normally these chips like Amazon's Graviton or Google's Axion are designed for their own data center use only and rented to customers. This ARM chip sounds like Meta and other companies will all be able to buy chips for their own data centers.I'm guessing Softbank will get ARM and Ampere to align on future chips or just merge Ampere completely into ARM.

nullpoint420: Damn, no wonder Ampere stopped releasing chips. They were churning them out and then just crickets.