Parting Ways with ARM
Semiconductor companies that have been using ARM’s services, such as Samsung Electronics, have begun to part ways with ARM. This is because they believe that ARM has been abusing its power by raising license fees and forcing the use of its designs. An alternative is RISC-V, an open-source semiconductor design asset. Samsung, Google, Intel, Qualcomm, and others are promoting the use of RISC-V.
Samsung Electronics announced on June 1 that it will serve as a steering board member of the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE), an open source software development project launched by the nonprofit Linux Foundation. RISE is an organization launched to develop software using RISC-V. Participants include global IT and semiconductor giants such as Samsung Electronics, Google, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm.
RISC-V has been evaluated as the best alternative for companies looking to leave ARM. Founded in 2010 by researchers at UC Berkeley, RISC-V is able to produce semiconductors with similar performances to those of ARM chips. But it can decrease chip areas by about 50 percent and chip power consumption by 60 percent. Best of all, because RISC-V is open source, no one company can own semiconductor design assets like ARM does. Therefore, it requires no licensing fees. For these reasons, IT and semiconductor companies have been promoting RISC-V as an alternative.
RISC-V is yielding positive tangible results. Qualcomm began loading its Snapdragon 865 with a RISC-V microcontroller in 2019. So far, it has shipped about 650 million RISC-V cores for mobile devices, automobiles, and IoT applications. Google expressed its hope that RISC-V will become an Android tier 1 platform like ARM.
But open source has obvious limitations. Open source can be freely used by anyone so they can become fragmented. This feature hampers the creation of a stable and consistent ecosystem based on open source. For this reason, the development of software by multiple companies has great significance for the creation of a RISC-V-based ecosystem. In particular, it will make it easier to implement applications and services that run on RISC-V-based chipsets and reduce resources required for development and maintenance. RISC-V is expected to be used in various fields such as mobile devices, home appliances, data centers, and automotive applications.
Meanwhile, ARM, which is about to go public, is trying to boost its profitability. The company is reportedly considering charging a license fee per device instead of per chip. Devices are more expensive than chips, so applying the same percentage to devices for license fees will be able to generate much more revenue for ARM than applying it to chips.
ARM also plans to force companies to use only ARM designs starting from 2024. For example, Samsung uses an ARM design and AMD’s graphics core to make Exynos chips for smartphones but will not be able to do so in the future. This was known during ARM’s lawsuit against Qualcomm.