The biggest news of the two-day technology circle was that a Japanese company, Softbank spent 32 billion U.S. dollars to acquire British ARM company. Some believed that this was due to the robbery of Sun Yat-sen, the owner of SoftBank, plundering the pound, and others said that the money from Softbank came from Selling Alibaba's stock, ARM founder Hermann Hauser told the media that the acquisition of the company made him very sad.
Although I have seen a lot of people in the industry are confused about whether the word ARM should be read as "ARM" or should be directly read, but it is undeniable that ARM's products have penetrated into the daily lives of people around the world. The ARM architecture is a CPU architecture that uses RISC. Almost 100% of the smart phones and smart TVs that we can access every day are based on the ARM architecture, and there are many embeddings that we don’t even see everyday. Devices also use the ARM architecture.
From the perspective of market share, ARM and Intel's X86 is the two major CPU architectures in the world today. Both companies are in the semiconductor industry's role of the Taishan. However, the market strategy of the two is actually quite different. The X86 architecture is only licensed to semiconductor companies that can count five fingers. Intel’s own CPU has always dominated, and it is basically a single company. However, ARM itself does not produce chips at all. All ARM chips are third-party companies that purchase designs and licenses from ARM and customize them according to their own needs, and then find semiconductor factories to produce them. Therefore, compared to Intel's own R&D and production, it also opened factories all over the country. With more than 100,000 employees, ARM's mere staff of one or two thousand is really a light asset company.
Under this circumstance, ARM's British company was acquired by the Japanese and could not help but cause people to have a wide range of associations. (Some people even think of resisting Japanese goods. It really is a skeleton surprise.) However, in fact, this acquisition has little influence on the daily life of the Chinese people, but many people pointed out that the leader of the smart phone Apple should think about the future: If the ARM architecture is controlled by the Japanese, the future of the iPhone Should the CPU used be a Plan B?
I have seen that someone has given Apple an incentive to cooperate with Intel, which is an American company. After that, Apple's computers and mobile phones are all based on the X86 architecture, which is quite good. In fact, just a few months ago Intel had already announced its abandonment of the mobile processor market. In the past few years, more than 10 billion US dollars had been spent on it. In fact, those who are a little familiar with the semiconductor industry will realize that, compared to Intel, the more suitable backup solution for Apple's mobile phones should be MIPS.
Although people only know ARM and I do not know MIPS, but in fact the momentum of MIPS architecture was not weaker than ARM, it once occupied a large share in the field of embedded devices; and there are many consumer areas, we are familiar with the Sony PS , PS2, PSP game machine is based on the MIPS architecture; In addition, the so-called "Chinese core", the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed more than 10 years of Godson, in fact, is also to pay MIPS company licensing fees. However, unlike ARM, MIPS is considered an academic school (its founder John Hennessy is still the principal of Stanford University) and is not good at business development. It has been declining in recent years. After selling 489 patents to a consortium of companies such as ARM, IBM, and Intel in 2013, MIPS has been acquired by another British company, Imagination Technologies, for a purchase price of only $60 million. Contacting ARM sold 32 billion US dollars, MIPS is really poor.
From some perspectives, MIPS and ARM are very similar. They are all lean instruction sets, they are designed for low-power applications, and they are all produced using third-party authorization methods; but in reality, there are also a few major differences. Academic MIPS allows third parties to radically modify the CPU architecture, while ARM allows only a few global semiconductor companies to modify the CPU architecture (including Qualcomm, Apple, NVIDIA and Samsung, all semiconductor semiconductors), and other ARM chips The companies are directly using the ARM public version of the design, and can not make any changes (such as Huawei Hass). ARM's strategy is obviously very suitable for commercial promotion, technical requirements for third-party companies have also been reduced, the development cycle will be greatly shortened, only need to follow the ARM public version of the CPU and GPU architecture to find chip OEM orders, flow Film, production can be.
However, the disadvantages are also highlighted. After all, the ARM public version may not be able to take care of the specific needs of all third-party vendors, and sometimes it will drop the chain. In this regard, we are familiar with the event is Qualcomm Xiaolong 810, due to Qualcomm's own research and development of the chip architecture can not be listed on the map to save trouble directly with the ARM public version of the design, resulting in a variety of market use Qualcomm Xiaolong 810 mobile phone Overheating crashes.
Of course, there is another important reason for recommending MIPS to Apple. Apple actually has a long-standing relationship with Imagination Technologies. Apple’s mobile phones have been using the GPU design provided by Imagination Technologies since the first generation iPhone, which is Power VR. Speaking of Power VR, it is not a simple role. In the 90s of last century, he participated in the desktop graphics battle (Sega's Dreamcast used Power VR graphics chips) and switched to the low-power market after losing power. Of course, for Apple's favor, Power VR is not disappointing. Basically, each generation of iPhone and iPad is the most powerful mobile device at the time of graphics performance. This must be the result of Power VR.
Unfortunately, although Imagination Technologies bought the MIPS architecture long ago and launched some new products afterwards, there is no sound in the area of ​​smartphones that have been monopolized by ARM. Over. Under such circumstances, if Apple can further cooperate with the company, both CPU and GPU design adopt Imagination Technologies' scheme, which is full of imagination. This is not the question of how much money or how much money you can make, but our world needs diversity. If you look at Intel now, you know that almost no improvement has been made in desktop CPU performance over the past five years. This fully demonstrates that a single player is definitely not a good thing.
Before, it was once suggested that Apple acquires ARM. I think that Apple is more suitable for Imagination Technologies.