The moves by Nvidia and AMD are part of Microsoft’s push for chip companies to develop Arm-based processors for Windows PCs. Microsoft aims to challenge Apple, which develops its own Arm-based chips and has nearly doubled its Mac computer market share over the past three years.

That means Nvidia and AMD will join Qualcomm, which has been making Arm-based chips for laptops since 2016. Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm could shake up the PC industry long dominated by Intel, but the industry is facing growing pressure from Apple.

Arm is a British chip designer whose technology has long been used in low-power devices such as smartphones. Arm’s chips offer better battery life and performance, but are not compatible with the x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD, which creates challenges for software development.

Microsoft already partnered with Qualcomm in 2016 to port the Windows operating system to Arm’s architecture. Sources said Microsoft gave Qualcomm an exclusive deal that would not allow other companies to enter the market until 2024. Microsoft also encourages chip manufacturers to incorporate advanced artificial intelligence features into CPU designs to improve the performance of Windows software.

Jay Goldberg, CEO of D2D Advisory, a financial and strategy consulting firm, said: “Microsoft learned in the 1990s that they don’t want to rely on Intel again, they don’t want to rely on a single supplier. If Arm is really in the PC The (chip) space is taking off and they will never let Qualcomm be the sole supplier.”

Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm and Microsoft all declined to comment for this story, while Intel did not respond.

It is noted that Nvidia’s stock price closed up 3.84%, Intel’s stock price closed down 3.06%, and Arm’s stock price closed up 4.89%.

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The vulnerability, currently tracked as CVE-2023-4211, was discovered by researchers from Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Project Zero and subsequently reported to Arm.

At present, the details of the vulnerability have not been made public. On checking the official announcement, which describes the vulnerability as improper access to memory and the possibility of leaking or manipulating sensitive data.

“A local unprivileged user could perform improper GPU memory handling operations to access memory that has been freed,” Arm said in the advisory, and found evidence that the vulnerability “may be subject to limited, targeted exploitation.”

The following driver versions are affected by the vulnerability:

 Midgard (2013 release) GPU kernel driver: all versions from r12p0 to r32p0

 Bifrost (2016 release) GPU kernel driver: all versions from r0p0 to r42p0

 Valhall (2019 release) GPU kernel driver: all versions from r19p0 to r42p0

 Arm fifth generation GPU (released in May 2023) architecture kernel driver: all versions from r41p0 to r42p0.

Phones including Galaxy S20/S20 FE, Xiaomi Redmi K30/K40, Motorola Edge 40 and OnePlus Nord 2 all use Valhall GPU.

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Arm priced its initial public offering (IPO) Wednesday at $51 per share, at the high end of its target price range, which would give it a fully diluted market capitalization of more than $54 billion, including restricted stock outstanding. Based on last fiscal year’s profit of $524 million, its price-to-earnings ratio is about 104 times.

It is reported that Arm’s customers Apple, NVIDIA and AMD have agreed to invest. In addition, TSMC, a leading foundry, has resolved to subscribe to Arm’s ordinary shares with a shareholding of about 0.2% within an amount not exceeding $100 million.

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At the Communacopia & Technology conference organized by Goldman Sachs, Stuart Pann, senior vice president and general manager of Intel foundry services, said, “We announced this morning that we are participating in an investment in Arm.”

Anchor investors are large organizations that have clearly expressed investment intent at the inquiry stage and placed orders on the first day of the roadshow and bookkeeping.

“Anchor order” is not a kind of institutional arrangement, it is characterized by the timing of the purchase is more special (early batch), Anchor investors do not have a lock-up period, while the cornerstone investors need to accept the 6-12 months lock-up period.

80% of TSMC’s wafers are Arm processors,” said Pann. In real time our IFS organization is also embracing Arm at a high level, and investing in Arm and building partnerships shows that we absolutely value the foundry business.”

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Arm on Tuesday announced the pricing of the $52 billion initial public offering, which will be the largest such deal in the United States this year.

Arm said in a filing that SoftBank Group plans to issue 95.5 million American Depositary Shares (ADSs) at a price of $47 to $51 per share.

Arm will license its IP to Apple and many other companies, and Apple currently uses Arm’s technology to customize the design of its iPhone, iPad and Mac chips.

In fact, Apple was one of the first companies to partner with Arm in 1990, and then released the sadly unsuccessful “Newton” handheld computer in 1993, which was based on Arm’s chip technology.

However, the East does not shine, Arm technology, although not to obtain the favor of the computer chip, but due to low power consumption and a series of factors later gradually dominated the field of mobile semiconductors.

It is worth mentioning that Apple is also one of the first large technology companies to invest in Arm’s initial public offering. However, Arm’s public IPO filing on August 21 did not mention this transaction, which means that the deal was signed between then and September 5th.

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For SoftBank-owned chip designer ARM, however, its overwhelming dominance of the smartphone processor market is both its most important asset and its biggest challenge in achieving a $60 billion valuation in its IPO next month.

In its IPO prospectus released this week, ARM warned investors that its large existing presence in the mobile and consumer electronics markets could limit future growth opportunities. Although ARM also has hopes of entering other markets such as automotive chips and cloud computing processors, analysts believe that in these markets, ARM will never achieve the near monopoly position it has in the smartphone market.

ARM also failed to break into the hottest area of the chip market this year: processor chips used to power various AI models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. Nvidia is the dominant player in this space.

Geoff Blaber, chief executive of technology industry research firm CCS Insight, said: “It’s hard to see that ARM will achieve significant growth in smartphones beyond current levels. There is no product that is more important than the iPhone, so ARM has become somewhat Victims of their own success, like Apple.”
Apple woes

For 30 years, the fortunes of ARM and Apple have been intertwined. Cambridge, England-based ARM was founded in 1990 as a joint venture between Apple and British PC maker Acorn Computers and Silicon Valley chipmaker VLSI.

ARM pioneered a new chip architecture that puts more emphasis on processing speed and simplicity of design than pure processing power. The company’s low-power chips are proving to be ideal processor choices for battery-powered handsets. ARM first emerged in the Nokia era, and from 2007 onwards, the development of the iPhone brought even greater growth to the company.

Although Apple funded the creation of ARM, the relationship between ARM and Apple is now complicated. While Apple is one of the most successful manufacturers of phones based on ARM chips, Apple’s name appears only a few times in ARM’s IPO filings, and the iPhone is mentioned only once.

ARM offers several technology licensing models to customers. In the most comprehensive licensing model, customers have unlimited access to their entire IP portfolio under ARM’s “Full Access Agreement”.

Another model is an architecture license with a smaller scope of authorization, which provides customers with the basic components needed to develop highly customized chips. But in this model, ARM’s income is usually not high. Apple holds a long-standing license to the ARM architecture and has spent billions of dollars developing breakthrough ARM-based processors for iPhones and Mac computers.

“What surprised ARM was that they gave up some good deals,” said Dylan Patel, principal analyst at consultancy SemiAnalysis.

ARM, for its part, says it can grow by selling more technology into each smartphone. Jay Goldberg, founder of chip consulting firm D2D Consulting, said in a research note on Tuesday that ARM only gets a small return on the value the company creates. Customers bought 30 billion chips powered by ARM processors last fiscal year, and ARM charges a royalty rate of 2.7% , or $0.11 per chip.

Patel argues that the focus on working with Apple and a handful of big smartphone manufacturers limits ARM’s pricing power, even though phone makers have few alternatives to ARM’s technology.

These customers are unlikely to be lost. ARM estimates that 46% of its royalty revenue last fiscal year came from products released between 1990 and 2012, reflecting the durability of the company’s business model. However, that may not be enough for investors to value ARM at more than $60 billion. Last year, ARM’s revenue fell 1% to $2.7 billion.

“They have to open up new markets,” said Malcolm Penn, chief executive of chip consultancy Future Horizons. “They’re in a different position than they were in the smartphone market. It’s not as easy as it was then because there wasn’t a single major end customer driving the market. “
The future beyond the smartphone

Before SoftBank acquired ARM in 2016, ARM was a company listed in London and New York. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has declared that SoftBank will push ARM to the core of the Internet of Things.

Seven years later, however, analysts point out that ARM has failed to achieve the expected new growth. ARM’s prospectus shows that the company has a 65% share of the industrial Internet of Things and embedded semiconductor market, but the value of products in this area is low, so it is not as profitable as Son envisioned.

Masayoshi Son’s recent obsession with AI, and ARM has also made some progress in this regard. It has partnered with self-driving companies such as GM’s Cruise. Nvidia also uses ARM’s CPUs in its Grace Hopper “superchip” to power AI models in data centers.

When it comes to AI, however, ARM’s technology isn’t at the heart of the devices involved. AI needs more powerful chips, like Nvidia’s H100, and ARM’s technology is more of an enabler.

Still, Patel said there will be a complete transformation in the data center around AI computing, and ARM will be a beneficiary of that transformation. Cloud computing giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft are all developing processors based on ARM technology for data centers.

ARM estimates that the company now has a 10% share of the $18 billion cloud processor market, up from 7% in 2020, and expects the industry to experience double-digit growth in the coming years.

Another key area is the automotive industry. Currently, automakers are increasing the computing power of vehicles, whether it is engine management or assisted driving technology. ARM said it commands a 41% share of the automotive market, and related royalty revenue rose 36% last year.

ARM estimates that of the total potential market of $200 billion, or “all chips that can contain a processor,” the company has captured the potential of nearly half. After conquering the smartphone market, however, ARM may find the second $100 billion market to be tougher.

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The updated Windows Release Health dashboard contains all the details about the issue that causes the camera to go down in ARM-based Windows PCs. According to Microsoft, the vulnerability affects Qualcomm 8cx Gen 1, 8cx Gen 2, Microsoft SQ1 / SQ2 chip devices running Windows 11 version 22H2/21H2 as well as Windows 10 22H2. In other words, it is not an issue unique to the Surface, while the external USB camera works fine.

Some users have reported that the integrated camera is working again, thanks to Microsoft deploying a Critical Troubleshooter to alleviate the issue on most affected Windows devices. This troubleshooter starts automatically and does not require any action from the user. Users can check ARM-powered PCs by looking for the following entries in the troubleshooting history:

"Hardware and Device Troubleshooting

Automatically change system settings to fix problems on the device"

Although the camera is back to normal, Microsoft says the relief is temporary. In addition, the fix is not available on managed devices because the administrator disabled the troubleshooter. Resolving the camera error on these PCs requires the following command to be executed with administrator privileges:

Reg add “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Qualcomm\Camera” /v EnableQCOMFD /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

The command line method can be used on unmanaged devices if the critical troubleshooter has not been received. However, Microsoft warns that it only works on affected devices, so do not feel free to modify the system’s registry if the integrated camera is working properly.

Beyond that, the workaround has side effects, Microsoft says it may disable certain camera features or degrade image quality, and Microsoft is working with OEMs to develop new camera drivers to get the cameras back up and running. it

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The biggest innovation of the Immortalis G720 is the introduction of Deferred Vertex Shader (DVS) technology, a method that reduces memory access and bandwidth usage, thereby saving power and increasing frame rates. According to Arm, one-third of the power consumption in high-performance games comes from memory access, and DVS can reduce bandwidth usage by 40%. Compared to last year’s Immortalis G715, the Immortalis G720 delivers 15 percent more performance per watt, 15 percent more peak performance, and an average 15 percent increase in frame rates. In real-world performance, the Arm measured a 20% improvement over the Immortalis G715, much of which can be attributed to the bandwidth savings from DVS. This means that mobile platforms can achieve more immersive and advanced game effects, and even support PC-level special effects, such as real-time dynamic lighting, blooming, depth of field, and screen space ambient occlusion. In fact, Unreal Engine 5’s desktop renderer is also coming to Android later this year.

It is noticed that in addition to DVS, Immortalis G720 also has some other advantages, such as supporting hardware-level ray tracing, variable rate shading, 2x MSAA modules, etc. These can allow the GPU to better adapt to different game scenarios and needs, providing a more realistic, smoother, and longer-lasting gaming experience. The Immortalis G720 can have up to 16 cores, while the Mali G720 can have 6 to 9 cores (with or without ray tracing). The Mali G620 is a more low-end GPU that can have up to 5 cores.

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ARM’s current licensing policy is to charge manufacturers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek for using its CPU designs based on the chip’s average selling price and licensing fees. However, in the future, ARM will add a small but important change to this policy: if ARM licenses a Cortex CPU to a partner, that partner cannot use its own GPU, ISP, NPU, modem, etc. components.

But companies like Apple and Samsung which have their own CPU designs and custom chips for GPUs, ISPs, NPUs, modems, etc. will not be affected by this policy change because they have their own agreements with ARM. Other companies don’t have that advantage, though.

Twitter user @RGcloudS analyzed the implications of this new authorization policy in a series of tweets. He believes that, in addition to MediaTek and Nvidia’s cooperation, this policy change may also prevent Qualcomm from launching a Snapdragon chip with a custom Oryon core based on technology from Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired. He mentioned that to avoid this, Qualcomm and MediaTek need to register themselves as device manufacturers and build their own factories. However, ARM knows this is risky for both chipmakers and believes they will not take this move but embrace the new changes.

It is unclear whether ARM will file a lawsuit against Qualcomm because of this policy change.

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According to previous reports from Reuters, Arm hopes to raise 8 billion to 10 billion US dollars, but Arm said that the size and price range of the proposed issue has not yet been determined.

SoftBank has been working on listing Arm since its sale of Arm to Nvidia last year for $40 billion fell through due to opposition from U.S. and European antitrust regulators.

Earlier this year, Arm rejected a British government call for a London listing and said it would seek a listing on a U.S. exchange.

Arm’s IPO preparations are being led by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Barclays and Mizuho Financial Group.

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