Discussion ARM Cortex/Neoverse IP + SoCs (no custom cores) Discussion

[MS_AT]

And do you know if this mysterious NVX is enterprise only or will it end up in nVidia client offerings?

 

[adroc_thurston]

nVidia client offerings?

They're not Nvidia, they're Mediatek.

 

[branch_suggestion]

SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing

(TOKYO, Japan) and (Santa Clara, CA) – March 19th, 2025 – SoftBank Group Corp. (TSE: 9984, “SoftBank Group”) today announced that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a leading independent silicon design company

amperecomputing.com

ARM has crossed the Rubicon, becoming a merchant Si vendor makes them almost the same as x86.
And remember, AMD and Intel could open the x86 licence up to select companies with full cross licensing deals if they felt like it.

 

[soresu]

They're not Nvidia, they're Mediatek.

As long as they have nVidia GPU IP in them it's at the very least nVidia/Mediatek given their own Tegra and Grace SoC's of the last few years are all based on OTS ARM Ltd CPU IP cores.

 

[gdansk]

SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing

(TOKYO, Japan) and (Santa Clara, CA) – March 19th, 2025 – SoftBank Group Corp. (TSE: 9984, “SoftBank Group”) today announced that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a leading independent silicon design company

amperecomputing.com

ARM has crossed the Rubicon, becoming a merchant Si vendor makes them almost the same as x86.
And remember, AMD and Intel could open the x86 licence up to select companies with full cross licensing deals if they felt like it.

Even with all their recent moves (most of which I dislike) I don't think it is similar. ARM still allows more competition. They move in a way that suggests they do not want that environment to last. But some of their customers have so much money I wonder if they can't get away with it.

 

[soresu]

SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing

(TOKYO, Japan) and (Santa Clara, CA) – March 19th, 2025 – SoftBank Group Corp. (TSE: 9984, “SoftBank Group”) today announced that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a leading independent silicon design company

amperecomputing.com

ARM has crossed the Rubicon, becoming a merchant Si vendor makes them almost the same as x86.
And remember, AMD and Intel could open the x86 licence up to select companies with full cross licensing deals if they felt like it.

Read it again - SoftBank, not ARM Ltd.

This is more SoftBank playing the Apple game of vertical integration.

Assuming that is that they didn't just buy it for the purpose of getting their workstation engineering teams knowhow for ARM partners to have an off the shelf system implementation to match the processor IP cores.

 

[soresu]

Even with all their recent moves (most of which I dislike) I don't think it is similar. ARM still allows more competition. They move in a way that suggests they do not want that environment to last. But some of their customers have so much money I wonder if they can't get away with it.

Several of those partners make chips for themselves and their cloud services rather than to sell them on.

Trying to sell those partners on an off the shelf IP design rather than their own custom built solutions that cater to their own specific needs seems like the sort of thing that would just end up pushing them to RISC-V.

Hell, it's not like Google don't probably have the necessary capability to design a custom CPU and GPU with all their hw engineers, and DeepMind too to supplement with some extra magic.

Making AlphaFold was complicated enough that performant CPU µArch design doesn't seem that out of reach for their next trick.

 

[branch_suggestion]

Read it again - SoftBank, not ARM Ltd.

SoftBank would own both, they can guarantee no COI as much as they like, it is not much different to NV acquiring them.
They have also fought Qualcomm hard, and lost.
ARM is fast becoming nearly as hostile to competition against the firm as x86.
Hyperscalers and NV they have to play nice with, and they will all probably make custom cores eventually.
The ARM IP model is going to be reduced to mobile basically, their server open idealism is dead, leaving the door open in the future to RISC-V and a more open consortium x86.
They won mobile, but merchant DC they never had a chance with their business model.
PC, we shall see.

 

[soresu]

SoftBank would own both

I know that, just making the point that the ARM CEO and the SoftBank CEO are not the same person.

 

[branch_suggestion]

I know that, just making the point that the ARM CEO and the SoftBank CEO are not the same person.

One is beholden to the other when investments are required.
Son pushed ARM to invest in a lot of areas that flopped hard, so maybe Haas has more autonomy to make big decisions now?

 

[poke01]

more open consortium x86.

Look AMD and Intel can kill off ARM and RISC-V if they made x86 fully open.

But they won’t. If they did however, that would shake things up a lot. RISC-V would be irrelevant tomorrow.

 

[soresu]

ARM is fast becoming nearly as hostile to competition against the firm as x86.

*Intel, not x86 in general.

AMD seemed plenty willing to play ball until the US govmt started throwing toys out of the pram over China.

Without govmt constraints and Intel I think that the x86 ecosystem would be considerably more open to competition, or at the very least collaboration.

 

[soresu]

Look AMD and Intel can kill off ARM and RISC-V if they made x86 fully open.

RISC-V is fully open - that means anyone can do whatever they want with it within the bounds of the original CC or BSD license of the ISA, even to the point of adding custom instruction set extensions.

Even if x86 became open it would only be to allow other players to enter into an ISA license agreement, or perhaps ARM style to license CPU core IP for their own custom SoCs as Samsung is currently doing with RDNA and Xclipse (good gods that name is terrible 😂).

 

[poke01]

RISC-V is fully open - that means anyone can do whatever they want with it within the bounds of the original CC or BSD license of the ISA, even to the point of adding custom instruction set extensions.

Funny Apple does this as well, the adding custom instructions bit. I think Hector found some custom instructions that ARM didn’t allow.

 

[soresu]

Funny Apple does this as well, the adding custom instructions bit. I think Hector found some custom instructions that ARM didn’t allow.

If Apple was making Android phones ARM might have cooked them, but as their platforms are entirely walled garden they got away with it.

Plus SME seems to have rolled it into an official spec, likely with some extras.

 

[branch_suggestion]

Even if x86 became open it would only be to allow other players to enter into an ISA license agreement, or perhaps ARM style to license CPU core IP for their own custom SoCs as Samsung is currently doing with RDNA and Xclipse (good gods that name is terrible 😂).

I assume any new licensees would have the same rights as the existing ones, namely any new extensions developed for x86 are available to all licensees.
All the groundwork for a potential future x86 consortium are being placed.
Will be interesting how Mr. Tan sees the best future course for Intel.

 

[branch_suggestion]

*Intel, not x86 in general.

Should also be noted AMD did make that custom firmware MI300C for Microsoft, that is technically a semi-custom x86 effort.

 

[branch_suggestion]

Even with all their recent moves (most of which I dislike) I don't think it is similar. ARM still allows more competition. They move in a way that suggests they do not want that environment to last. But some of their customers have so much money I wonder if they can't get away with it.

Well it could indeed be a IP+talent acquisition with all future Ampere hardware canceled or more specifically packaged as an off the shelf ARM product that IP licensees can tweak and produce themselves.

 

[soresu]

Not a very interesting one from the raw performance point of view.

It was meant to be more of an upgrade over A55, and in that much it was certainly, perhaps even more so than A510 going by the figures they presented for A65/E1.

(it actually went through the same Cambridge design team before moving on to another I can never remember the name of)

 

[Doug S]

Funny Apple does this as well, the adding custom instructions bit. I think Hector found some custom instructions that ARM didn’t allow.

Those custom instructions have always been added to the ARM ISA down the road. First the ones that helped with x86 emulation and supported the strong x86 memory model, then Apple's AMX that became SME.

So what's more likely to me is that Apple is working with ARM in adding new instructions but sometimes they need them more quickly than ARM is able to add them to their ISA, so Apple adds them as unofficial not really supported instructions like what they did with AVX so that they can pull those and replace them with the "official" stuff once it is ready.

AFAIK Apple hasn't added any instructions that have lasted longer than a couple years or so without basically the same thing under a new name being added by ARM. If that's incorrect I'd be curious to know what stuff Apple has added that ARM seemingly doesn't want.

 

[Nothingness]

Those custom instructions have always been added to the ARM ISA down the road. First the ones that helped with x86 emulation and supported the strong x86 memory model, then Apple's AVX that became SME.

The possibility to add instructions has been there for very long. For instance Qualcomm had an integer division. This was using the encoding space of coprocessor instructions.

AFAIK Apple hasn't added any instructions that have lasted longer than a couple years or so without basically the same thing under a new name being added by ARM. If that's incorrect I'd be curious to know what stuff Apple has added that ARM seemingly doesn't want.

Not sure about instructions, but as far as I know the possibility to change memory ordering operations, which Apple uses in Rosetta2, has made its way into Arm architecture.

Also Apple has added the possibility to alter flag setting on some instructions, which again isn't in Arm architecture.

See: https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-fast/

 

[MS_AT]

So is the Vera CPU core called Olympus? Or are these patches for Nvidia-Mediatek collaboration? https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/132368

 

[Kepler_L2]

So is the Vera CPU core called Olympus? Or are these patches for Nvidia-Mediatek collaboration? https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/132368

The NVIDIA+MediaTek SoCs are using stock ARM cores.

 

[poke01]

The NVIDIA+MediaTek SoCs are using stock ARM cores.

Interesting so Vera is fully NVIDIA

 

[soresu]

While a new custom core is certainly interesting news to discuss, can we try to keep this thread separate for ARM Ltd's licensable CPU IP (Cortex/Neoverse) news/rumours specifically, and shift anything else to its own thread?

If it helps I can start a general ARM CPU news thread for subjects like:

• Custom cores.
• Off the shelf vs custom comparisons.
• Various ODM SoC's from Samsung, Qualcomm, Rockchip, Amlogic, Mediatek, CIX etc.