Or to put it differently, common sense has finally taken over!
It was always the case that these separate ARM companies (and so many of them) made zero economic sense. ARM in servers ala Neoverse, yes, that makes a huge amount of sense; but not other companies doing the exact same thing, it's just wasted resources.
Amazon is basically a more sensible model (or, alternatively, think Apple A4 and A5) -- ARM does one part of the job with the CPU and bus designs, TSMC/SS does fabbing, AMZ (or Apple back then) puts together the exact package of functionality they need.
Honestly I'm not optimistic for Nuvia. Having the ambition to be faster than ARM is great, but you need customers who are willing to pay more for that extra speed, you need to manage relationships, you need to be able to provide any extra weirdness that might be desired from NPUs to accelerators to security features. I can't see how Nuvia is big enough to both design a kickass CPU+SoC AND do the sort of handholding and customer management that's required when a Google or a Facebook come by considering buying the chips but asking for one extra thing that will really help us out.
Well, we'll see. I'm sure whatever happens they will land on their feet, acquired by Apple, Google, or nV.
There's an interesting question here that, as far as I know, remains unanswered: what was the ARM server timeline?
We know ARM has been pushing a particular timeline for its presence in servers since at least 2015. There were earlier timelines that could be mocked, but starting around 2015 they began to be, IMHO, realistic, hoping for a substantial v8 based presence beginning in 2020, which is about what we saw, with Neoverse announced in 2018, and AMZ really taking advantage of this in 2019.
OK, so against that background, consider Centriq. That was announced as an idea in 2014, SoC demoed late 2016, shipped late 2017, then soon cancelled. Cancelling was probably a good idea, given what we know of Neoverse, but the interesting political question is who knew what when...
Was ARM planning Neoverse quietly for years, since 2014 or so?, and just not informing the partners?
Did the partners think (and to be fair, this was not an unreasonable thought at the time, until Apple kicked ARM's butt) that ARM had a history of cores that were great at area+power, not so much at performance, so they had an opening?
Or was ARM willing to leave servers in partner hands until some late point (2016?) by which time they were so disappointed at everything they'd been shown that they concluded "to hell with these people and their companies, they all deserve to fail! If you want something done right do it yourself."
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