back to article Akeana debuts RISC-V CPU designs on $100M budget, longs for an Arm wrestle

Akeana, which has secured over $100 million in funding over the past few years, has now launched its long-awaited lineup of RISC-V CPU designs, which are aimed at applications from embedded to datacenter systems. With this launch, Akeana feels it's ready to challenge both RISC-V peers and Arm. Ever since it was founded in …

  1. Justthefacts Silver badge

    So….if they are only selling cores (ie licenses\royalties) what’s their license fee going to be? If it’s 2%, to even match ARM, they’ll need $5bn in chip sales to even break even on the $100M already spent. That’s 10x what SiFive managed before going broke (sorry, “pivoting”). Not going to happen.

    The truth is, ARM charge a suicidally *low* license fee, which only works because they make it up in staggering volume. Nobody can compete with that, and remain in business.

    But it’s much much worse than that for a newcomer. If Akeana think they can charge even 2% for an unproven core, they’re about to get a rude shock. It’s not about whether the data sheet shows it has the performance, or even whether it “works”. The main question, and economically almost the only one that matters is - what is the yield of this core on TSMC 3nm. If it’s even 85% yield, while ARM are getting 95%, then the silicon manufacturer is paying a 10% tax just from using the core there at all! Akeana are about to discover that their “customers” expect *Akeana* to pay *them* money to use customer silicon as trial yield proving vehicles. Or at very best, an equal “partnership” where Akeana get no money, just “paid in exposure” by Marvell or Qualcomm or somebody. Whatever happened to those Qualcomm and Samsung RISCV cores from three years ago…dropped without trace after a few PR puff pieces…..yeah, that exactly.

    Ah yes, that “paid in exposure”, so un-beloved of unpaid interns everywhere.As others have found out, there’s just no business model here.

  2. GraXXoR Bronze badge
    Coat

    Unfortunate product name if they want to do business over here in Japan.

    Akeana reads as “open hole” in Japanese. 開穴

    Definitely the wrong kind of open unless you’re a drilling company.

    I’ll let myself out.

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