alt Hacker NewsArm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
Comments
The Acorn Archimedes came with Acorn branded CPUs (the "ARM250" IIRC) already in the late 80s. I can't recall what company made the chips for ARM at that time, but in the later Archimedes models it was VLSI.
After Amazon, Google, and Apple all have had successes with in house ARM, I had naively assumed Meta would do the same. Given the speeds with which they have been developed, it must not be "that hard" to spin up a chip. You could have easily framed it as a long-term plan - custom chips for the Occlus.
This is going to be a strategic challenge for ARM unless they are going to focus on chips that nobody else wants to make. And given the AI focus, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I would think that the RISC-V folks would be salivating at the prospect of flipping some existing ARM licensees to RISC-V.
How does this fit with Meta's decision to acquire Rivos?
"in-house" is misleading
> Like nearly all fabless AI chipmakers, Arm currently manufactures its CPU at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ’s fabrication plants.
Arm came from Acorn and Acorn did make the first ARM CPUs for their computers, so it's not really the first time they do this.