Arm still strong despite SoftBank loss as shipments pass a quarter of a trillion Arm is claiming strong royalty and licensing growth for the last quarter of 2022, plus revenue growth in all its target markets, while parent SoftBank reports another quarterly loss due to the volatile tech sector. The chip designer reported total revenue of $746 million for the third quarter of its financial 2022 to the end …
no, you WILL pay each and every month or else we will own all your data.
Subscriptions for this, subscriptions for that... nothing you own will be yours. That is the vision of the future that these companies want.
A never ending stream of tithes from the great unwashed who need your product to survive in this grim world.
Welcome.... Welcome to the machine
{kudos to Roger Waters for those words around 50 years ago}
You don't have to. But releasing a marginal improvement annually still means that people replacing their 2018 smartphone with a 2024 smartphone get a nicer experience than the people who replaced their 2015 smartphone with a 2021 smartphone, and so on; as long as any chip company proceeds to the next ARM core, their competitors will be obliged either to do the same or to lower their prices. You can still get a brand new Samsung phone with eight A55 cores.
I still think they're missing out on a potentially lucrative market by all but ignoring the desktop CPU segment. It's been repeatedly demonstrated with all the Raspberry Pi and workalikes (like Hardkernel's ODROID line) that just popping an ARM CPU meant for cell phones onto a bitty-board and bolting some connectivity and an HDMI port to it doesn't make a good desktop (too slow, not enough functionality) and trying to cram a beefy server CPU (like Ampere Altra) into a desktop case results in a Frankenstein's monster that still breaks the bank.
C'mon, ARM, throw out a design for a 16-core workstation CPU with decent bandwidth and good clock speeds, and I bet if it's cheap enough you'll find plenty of business (and even prosumer and home lab and hobbyist) buyers eager to throw $500-$600 at a workstation that can handle everything besides gaming and high-performance video work that stays below 100W under load and doesn't need a fan to stay cool.
(and no, I'm not buying a Mac Mini)
FWIW, Qualcomm's 8cx Gen 3 SoC is a pretty good desktop/laptop class SoC, and powers Surface Pro 9 and the Windows Dev Kit, along with devices from other OEMs including Lenovo's ThinkPad X13S
Ampere's Altra is a great choice for a more powerful SoC option.
As Arm based SoCs mature in desktop/laptop scenarios, and as Arm native OS, dev tools runtimes and libs, and Arm native apps, etc. arrive, expect more Arm silicon options to emerge,
>I still think they're missing out on a potentially lucrative market by all but ignoring the desktop CPU segment.
It has been a good business strategy, ARM effectively own the smartphone market in the same way Intel owned the desktop market.
What will be interesting, is given what Apple have done with ARM64, is to ask what are Raspberry Pi doing in this space, as they have established a marketplace with the singleboard computer. I would think a Raspberry 'desktop' might be attractive to this customer base and so enable them to gain a foot hold before having to directly take on the established desktop market players.
(and no, I'm not buying a Mac Mini)
Why not? You've just described a highly customised ARM processor that is optimised for the software running on it. Games will come as the games companies realise, if they don't already, the advantages of optimised coding for iOS, iPadOS and MacOS. Technical and supply issues have held up the 3nm versions of the Apple Silicon SoC but it's still streets ahead of Intel in temperature and power efficiency,
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