Arm Wants a Leg Up In Chips - DTNSB 4957
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Guaranteed to fit every time. eBay, things people love. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, February 14th, 2025. Happy Valentine's Day, patrons. We love you. Let's follow up on the context of some tech stories and help each other understand.

Today, Tom explains what ARM actually does and why announcing it will make its own chips is such a big change, plus a summary of yesterday's show from RW. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Wintwit Dow. Let's start with what you need to know in The Big Story. ♪

It is all about ARM. No coincidence that I'm going to explain ARM later in the show because the Financial Times sources say the UK's ARM Holdings will announce its own server chip early this summer. Meta will be the first customer to buy the chip for use in data centers. Now, hold on, you may say, there are lots of ARM chips all over the place. How is this the first? It's not actually the first.

We'll get to that later in the show, but it's the first in a long time. ARM creates designs and instruction sets for chips, but has not actually had chips manufactured under its name in quite a while. It makes its money by licensing. Apple licenses the instruction set for its own designs and TSMC makes the chip. Qualcomm licenses more of the design and well, TSMC makes the chip. So the news here is,

is that ARM won't be licensing its design to someone else. In this case, ARM will be asking someone to make a chip that it designed itself.

You can probably guess who will end up making the chip. We don't know for sure, but hey, TSMC would be a good guess. And then they're going to sell this chip under the Arm brand directly, apparently Meta being their first customer. The other piece of context to know here is that everybody is making their own server chips. So Arm is kind of jumping on the bandwagon here. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Apple are among those using their own designs, often based off Arms designed chips.

in their own data centers. But nobody is yet relying solely on their own designs. They're also buying from other companies, including Qualcomm and NVIDIA. The last piece of this puzzle is

is that ARM is majority owned by Japan's SoftBank, which tried to sell it multiple times, most recently to NVIDIA, but was blocked. So SoftBank is now trying to catch up to the booming AI market. Not that ARM hasn't benefited from it a lot, but hey, SoftBank would like them to benefit more. It is one of the partners with OpenAI on Project Stargate to build data centers in the US. So it seems like

It would like its own ARM chips to be in those data centers. Of course, NVIDIA and Microsoft are also part of that partnership, too, so it's not like it's going to have a monopoly on it. Financial Times also points out that SoftBank is close to acquiring Ampere, an Oracle-backed company, which uses ARM's IP in its chip designs, which are also used in these AI data centers themselves.

This last bit I'm going to mention is probably a coincidence, but it's notable that NVIDIA disclosed in a filing this week that it sold half of its stake in ARM, which was less than 1% at this point, but still interesting timing, right?

I wonder what the benefit, I mean, this is kind of like a little out of my wheelhouse. I did study instruction sets in school. Yeah. But I always wonder what is the, I mean, obviously ARM's done very well just designing its own chips and then just licensing, well, sorry, doing the design of the instruction set and licensing it out. What do you think the benefit here is of finally getting into their own chips? Is it just, I don't know. It's good.

It could be similar to what Microsoft does, right? I've noticed a lot of the headlines are like ARM's going to compete with its own customers, but Microsoft does that, right? They make the Microsoft Surface. Yeah. But they have good relationships with their customers because they sell the Surface as a reference design, right? As a flagship. And so maybe ARM is going to do that and say, hey, we'd like to get a little of this server money because there's so much money going into building data centers, but it will serve as a demonstration of what you can do with ARM instruction sets at the same time.

Okay. Oh, well, they do that with a graphics card even too, right? Because NVIDIA, for example, says they're on reference graphics cards. So, which I have not bought one of in a long, long time, but I do remember that. So that's interesting. Okay. Yeah. So maybe, nobody knows. And also we're going to have to wait till June for the actual announcement and details and all of that. I bet we'll find out more then. All right.

Well, DTS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Paul Thiessen, Ali Sanjabi, A.B. Puppy, and welcome new patrons, Toby and Kenny. Picture this. You're in the garage, hands covered in grease, just finished up tuning your engine with a part you found on eBay. And you realize, you know what?

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Well, ByteDance's apps, including TikTok, reappeared in Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store Thursday. So U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to both companies with a little more detail about the provision on distribution not being enforced. The U.S. president did sign an executive order on January 20th, which delayed enforcement of the restriction for 75 days. For

Yeah, I want to know what was in that letter. Yes, please. Yeah.

Like, because I was not surprised that Oracle was willing to continue to provide service. That's a little more wiggly. They can say, well, we were doing it from outside the U.S. or something like that. But Apple and Google fairly clearly were like, well, unless we're sure that this is legal, we're not going to list these apps. So what did Attorney General Bondi say about

You know, did she say, I will take responsibility like I indemnify you? Whatever it was convinced Apple and Google to be like, all right, fine, we'll go ahead and list these and not worry about the consequences. Which, I mean, it's weird that there's a law in the books that says it's illegal for them to do this. But the president could just say, don't worry, I won't ticket you for speeding.

A little asterisk on that on that letter. Be like, no, really, it's OK, guys. Yeah. I mean, could you show that in court? Like the letters, I don't have to pay that huge fine because there's some pretty big fines there. A note from your parents. Two separate people told 404 Media that the database for the U.S. Department of Government Efficiencies website at DOG.gov was vulnerable to defacement.

Basically, anybody could access the database. The site is really informational, but the database it pulled from was editable by anyone. People also told 404 Media that the site is built on Cloudflare pages, not government servers, which is actually good news because there's no allegation that the site or its database were connected to sensitive government networks. Just embarrassing.

Thursday, some U.S. users of Apple TV were asked if they would like to approve Netflix data to be shared with the Apple TV app. So on the actual Apple TV device, the app can show you what episodes are next in shows that you're watching across different devices or different services rather that agree to share that data with Apple.

Netflix famously has not. And apparently it still has not. Nine to five Mac reported that the rollout has stopped and Bloomberg speculates it was a bug, not a feature. Darn it. I use the Apple TV. I was inordinately excited at the idea that I wouldn't have to go to a separate chiclet on my home screen to see what to watch next in Netflix. It seems kind of silly, but it would be nice to just have it all in one place. Oh, well.

The International Energy Agency projects that global demand for electricity is going to rise 4% annually through 2027 due to increased data center use. China is expected to see the biggest rise at 6% annually. And the IEA noted that 80 for 5% of the rise in demand is expected to come from emerging and developing nations. So a couple of surprises. I thought it would be more than 4%, not to minimize 4%, but I thought it would be even bigger, uh,

And I think a lot of people expect that it probably comes from Western countries like, you know, Europe, U.S., etc. But it's not 85% coming from other parts of the world. Amazon will remove the ability for Kindle to download and transfer e-books between devices over a USB connection starting February 26th.

Users are told to use Wi-Fi instead to move their books and users will still have the ability to upload books over USB. So you can continue to sideload and use Calibre. First, I reacted to this by saying, well, they just want to use Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is pretty prevalent. I guess that's reasonable. But then when I noticed that they're still allowing upload, not download, I'm like, oh, this is totally a DRM thing. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

CNBC notes that the digital ad market seems to be booming. Wednesday, Reddit reported revenue up 71%, despite weaker than expected user growth. Smaller platforms saw rises too. Pinterest up 18%, Snap up 14%. The big companies are booming. Meta sales were up 21% on the year. Microsoft's ad and search revenue rose 21% on the year. Amazon grew 18%. Google, the dominant one, is not going to grow as much because it's so dominant, but it grew 11%.

And in fact, Google's losing some of its dominant market share. Don't get me wrong. They're still incredibly dominant. But, you know, advertisers are starting to diversify to more platforms. You know, it turns out, Wen, that all those restrictions on tracking didn't kill the ad market. That ad market, very resilient. Very, very resilient. I'm making money. I was worried about those advertisers.

Norway plans to build its own undersea data connections from the mainland to its Arctic archipelagos, Jan Mayen and Svalbard. Underwater infrastructure has been a target of malicious activities with several undersea cable cuts. Norway's armed forces no longer consider satellite connectivity sufficient, though, and they want a robust cable connection. Seabed surveys will begin this summer with completion of the connection expected by 2028. Yeah.

Good internet on Svalbard. I watch a vlogger named Cecilia who talks about her life on Svalbard. She's got decent internet there. So this is why. Good news for Cecilia. Yeah. Recorded Futures Insect Group Threat Research Division says the salt typhoon attackers continue to infiltrate telecoms worldwide. Most recent intrusion exploited unpatched Cisco iOS XE network devices. That's

iOS, an acronym from Cisco, not the Apple iOS. The Salt Typhoon attacks have breached networks in Italy, South Africa, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. The new attack targeted 1,000 Cisco devices worldwide. Most of those were in India, South America, and the U.S. Insicht Group notes that 1,000 devices, sounds like a big number, are still only 8% of the potential exploitable Cisco devices out there, meaning that these targets were selected. And

Admins using Cisco iOS XE devices, whether you think you're selected or not, are advised to apply the available security patches and, of course, do normal things like avoid exposing your admin interface to the Internet. Yeah, always good advice. Really important stuff. Please do.

China's Baidu said Friday it will make its Ernie 4.5 series of large language models open source starting June 30th. This follows an announcement Thursday that a version of the Ernie chatbot will be available for free starting April 1st. Hopefully that's not an April Fool's joke.

Ernie lags behind ByteDance's Dobao chatbot with 78.6 million monthly active users and DeepSeek with 33.7 million monthly active users. Ernie has 13 million. Yeah, DeepSeek made a lot of waves and rightly so because it kind of, you know, burst onto the scene, even though it'd been around for a while, burst into public awareness.

But I thought it was interesting that Dobao is still the number one chatbot in the US or in China. And it's made by ByteDance, right? So that company does a lot of things beyond TikTok. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper into an ongoing story. Got to follow up for you.

Well, as I mentioned in the big story, Arm appears to be ready to make its own chip for the first time in a long time. And Tom explains some of the background for what Arm does to help you understand why this is such a big change. Yeah.

Yeah. So unlike NVIDIA or Intel or AMD, ARM has not been a chip maker. NVIDIA, Intel and AMD design chips that they sell under their own names, sometimes in NVIDIA's case, even using ARM designs. But ARM mainly designs chips. And I'm going to go into what that means because it means a couple of different things.

Arm Holdings is the company that creates the reduced instruction set computing or RISC architecture for computer processors. It also designs cores or processors that implement the instruction set. So you've got the instruction set and you've got the core that can implement the instruction set. Arm has a design for both.

And a company can license either just the instruction set and then build its own core design or the design of the core that runs the instruction set. And I guess theoretically not license the instruction set, but that'd be kind of weird because, you know, you got a core that can run that instruction set. These companies can build the products on their own. ARM doesn't build them for them. That's the thing to remember. ARM doesn't build any products itself yet. Right.

I'm not going to get into detail about chip architecture and instruction sets beyond that. You only need to know what those things are in a top level way to really understand this. Chip architecture is the building of the chip architecture.

Instruction sets are the instructions that run on the chips and they tell the chip how to work based on the parts they have. That's really all you need to know to understand what we're talking about here. ARM grew out of the famous UK company Acorn Computers, the folks who made the legendary BBC Micro, which you might be familiar with, not just from several BBC series on computing, but most schools in the UK in the 1980s had at least one.

For that generation, the BBC Micro was their first interaction with anything that ran on a silicon chip. After the success of the Micro, the folks at Acorn were working on Acorn business computers, but the chips they had been using for the Micro just weren't powerful enough. They visited a bunch of other places to see what options they had.

and decided, you know what? We're going to have to design this thing ourselves. So in October, 1983, engineer Sophie Wilson led the design of an instruction set that would end up being the linchpin upon which arm is built. And when they implemented that instruction set in hardware with Sophie Wilson and another engineer named Steve Ferber leading the design of the acorn risk machine, they got something called arm arm doesn't stand for that anymore. I'll get to that in a second. Uh,

Pretty soon, Acorn started working with Apple on newer versions of the ARM core. And in November 1990, Acorn spun out the ARM design team as a joint venture with a company called VLSI and Apple.

Apple was involved with this at the time. And while Apple loved being part of the joint project, it was keen for it to be called something besides Acorn Risk Machines, since Acorn made competing machines. So they changed the name of the company to Advanced Risk Machines Limited. And in 1998, that name just became Arm Limited. And these days it's called Arm Holdings.

The ARM design got famous for its low power usage of its chip designs. It was a favorite for PDAs, starting with Apple's Newton and eventually then mobile phones. And ARM continued to make designs for chips used in mobile devices. And then smartphones began to take off. On September 5th, 2016, SoftBank acquired ARM.

And then after a few years, tried to sell it to Nvidia in 2020. That sale did not pass regulatory approval in the UK, Arm's home base, so it didn't happen. Instead, SoftBank made Arm a public company and you can now buy stock in Arm as of September, 2023. However, SoftBank still owns around 90% of the stock. So even though it's a public company, it is majority, like huge majority owned by SoftBank. So when we say SoftBank owns Arm, that's what we mean.

So what does ARM sell now? It licenses its cores and its instruction set. Those cores are used to create microcontrollers, CPUs, systems on a chip. The ARM core is combined with other parts to produce a complete device that can be made in semiconductor fabrication plants.

Companies can license ARM technology into their own system on a chip, put it alongside their own components like GPUs and radio baseboards, et cetera. ARM also has designs for GPUs as well. But when we're talking about ARM making a server chip this year,

It means they're going to use their own core, their own instruction set and integrate it into their own system on a chip, right? They're not just going to give someone the core design and the instruction set to make their own system on a chip themselves like they do with Qualcomm. There are a few ways a company can license from ARM.

This is something of an oversimplification, but the major ways are use it in their own system on a chip design, like I said, or license a full chip set from ARM. ARM has some reference designs that they'll license you. And a company can also design a chip and modify the ARM design a little bit. So when you hear it's an ARM chip, okay.

Up until maybe later this year, it's never actually an ARM chip. The chip's design may be wholly ARM. It could be ARM in combination with other things on the system. And the design could also be ARM but slightly modified. That would mean it was tweaked a little with some optimizations or extensions.

With the ARM Cortex license, companies make more significant modifications on the design, which ARM then promises not to share with other companies. That's going to be one of the tricky things when it starts to make its own designs is keeping those secrets secret from the part of ARM that's making its own chips.

You can also skip the designs that just license the instruction set. In that case, a company gets an architectural license where they build their own CPU that will just use ARM's instruction set. There are some complications about licensing patents that go along with that. But at base, you're not going to license the chip's design, not even with modifications. You're just getting the instructions.

That is an option that's suitable for companies that keep their cards close to their chest and want to design the hardware themselves from the ground up. In other words, Apple. There's others too, but I think Apple's probably the most famous with Apple Silicon right now. The ARM instructions run the chip that Apple designs for its devices. Broadcom does this too. NVIDIA, Samsung, Qualcomm, they all do a version of this. They all take part in those architectural licenses. So that's why ARM...

Actually selling a chip, like a system on a chip under its own name is such a big change. Any questions about that? I'm flashing back to architecture in school. And that's pretty amazing. Do you think there's anything about, I don't know, is it...

It's kind of interesting because I think, like, as you said, that there's also a heavy proprietary factor of this, right? So a lot of times, depending on what the OEM does, it does make sense they would want something optimized and geared towards whatever their domain is.

And there is a sense of, yeah, proprietary information and wanting to make sure you keep as much of that to the best you can. But obviously being able to work with ARM is more conducive to actually building something performant. I'm still kind of curious, like what's left? Who is left for ARM to sell their chips to? So if all the big players that we already kind of talk about day to day in like tech, like Apple, Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm all do their own architectural license, who would actually, I guess, for example, buy chips?

a fully, a full ARM reference chip? Or is it just there as like a, hey, best practices, please do this for your AI, you know, AI like gear chips or your server chips or things like that? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I don't have a substantive answer for it. But what I can guess, educated guess is,

that we should not forget that arm design, the arm designs are used in lots of chips. They, they're using embedded systems. They're using mobile devices. They're used. Almost every smartphone has a chip that has some kind of arm intellectual property. And I bet a lot of those mid range phones are, are using full on arm designs.

I guess that would make it more attractive, I think, sometimes depending on the pricing and the OEM itself and what the pricing and the range of the device is. It might be more attractive to have an ARM reference chip rather than a chip that is using ARM, but is from a third-party manufacturer or something. That could be... I hadn't thought about it until we were talking just now, but that could be why ARM is wanting to do this.

is that they have no problem selling their licenses and their architecture and their full designs to people making mobile phones, right? They are dominant in that market. Where they are new is servers. You know, x86 was the server dominant chip. Intel and AMD still make a lot of the chips that go into server designs.

ARM designs are new there. And maybe that's why they're like, oh, we want to make a server chip. It could be because they aren't seeing as many people take those full designs like you're talking about because it's a newer market and people want to keep it close to their chest. Like you're saying, it could also be a way of them stimulating other people to use their designs even more since they aren't as dominant in that space as they are in mobile. Yeah.

That makes a lot of sense. They kind of show what their platform can do, and then hopefully some takers will pick it up and they'll have more licensees. Yeah. Well, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at reddit.com slash r slash Daily Tech News Show. ♪

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Well, we end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today, RW shares another excellent summary of our most recent episode. Yeah, so he was listening to you and Jason talking yesterday, and RW wrote, listening to this on an SE3, which I use as a permanent podcast device. Home buttons are great as long as you have dry and clean fingers. Tech and food, what more could you ever want?

So thank you, RW, for always having such good observations on the show. Folks, send us your observations, your insights. If you're like, actually, I know what's going on with those instruction sets. I can explain this. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com.

Thanks to RW for contributing to today's show. Like I said, we always appreciate that. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. The show is made possible by our patrons, patreon.com slash DTNS. There's a live version as well, DTNS Live on YouTube and Twitch. Find details on that and more at dailytechnewsshow.com. Monday is a holiday in the U.S. We'll talk to you on Tuesday.

This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show Briefing were created by the following people. Host, producer, and writer, Tom Merritt. Host, producer, and writer, Jason Howell. Co-host, Rob Dunwood. Co-host, Jen Cutter. Co-host, Wen Tui Dao. Producer, Anthony Lemos. Producer, Roger Chang. Editor, Hammond Chamberlain. Editor, Victor Bognot. Science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermans. Social media producer and moderator, Zoe Detterding.

Our mods, Beatmaster, WScottus1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso, and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. Music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Luters. Art by Len Peralta. Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Patreon support from Tom McNeil. Guests on this week's shows included Mitzula, Bodhi Grimm, Ron Richards, Tim Stevens, and Patrick Beja.

And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Enjoy a brilliant sleep experience with Soundcore from Anchor. Stressed out by your partner's snoring? Having trouble falling asleep? Waking up too easily? Suffering from poor quality sleep? Now, put on Soundcore Sleep A20 Earbuds.

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