Arm relishes competition from open-chip architectures

The rise of a RISC-V, an open-standard processor, is good for the market, according to an executive at Arm.

Dennis Laudick, vice president at Arm, speaks at the Arm Tech Symposia held at the InterContinental Seoul on Thursday. [ARM KOREA]

The rise of a RISC-V, an open-standard processor, is good for the market, according to an executive at Arm.

“Arm actually performs best when we have competition. We value competition,” said Dennis Laudick, vice president at Arm, when asked at an industry conference about the rise of open-chip architectures like RISC-V.

Arm cores are the central processing units found in almost every phone and increasing used in PCs and servers.

Laudick said that Arm’s appeal could remain strong despite any challenges due to Arm’s stability and big ecosystem.

“What we really have is a huge amount of trust. We are also incredibly stable,” he said, adding that “Real value of Arm is its ecosystem.”

Arm is currently in a dispute with Qualcomm over the licensing of technology after Qualcomm purchased Santa Clara, California's Nuvia in 2021 for $1.4 billion. Arm is requesting an injunction that would require Qualcomm to destroy designs developed under Nuvia’s license agreements with Arm.

With the launch of legal battle, multiple media outlets reported that Arm will change its licensing terms so that its clients must use Arm’s graphics processing units (GPU), neural processing units (NPU) and other auxiliary processors if they are to use its CPU cores.

Currently, clients are able to mix processors based on non-Arm intellectual property with Arm CPU cores.

Arm executives attending the conference declined to confirm the potential change of the terms, saying they are not permitted to publicly talk about the matter.

The conference highlighted Arm’s efforts to up the scalability of Arm-based chips via different programs.

Among the projects is Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (Soafee), whose members include chipmakers, car manufacturers and cloud providers.

”Soafee creates an opportunity for the traditional automotive industry and the software development community to come together and share their expertise, technologies, and products as we define the future of the software-defined vehicle,” said Dipti Vachani, SVP and GM, Automotive Line of Business, Arm.

Cambridge, UK's Arm is a subsidiary of Softbank. The Japanese company has been trying to sell the subsidiary.

BY PARK EUN-JEE [park.eunjee@joongang.co.kr]