| A big week of news in the chip industry has brightened the spotlight on an open-sourced architecture known as RISC-V. Why it matters: Arm, whose sale to Nvidia collapsed, has dominated the market for low-power chips for mobile devices. But rivals — such as those using RISC-V — won't waste an opportunity to weaken Arm's stronghold, especially as the British company remains in ownership limbo and deals with a rogue JV (more on that below). Flashback: Softbank acquired Arm in 2016 for $32 billion — at the time, one of the biggest deals in the industry — and last year said it would unload the company for about $40 billion to Nvidia, a Silicon Valley-based chip designer and manufacturer. - For SoftBank, the deal would have meant pocketing a modest profit — and some liquidity for the limited partners in its first Vision Fund, which currently holds 25% of Arm's ownership.
- On the other side, the deal would have transformed Nvidia into the ultimate semiconductor design powerhouse.
But regulators objected, with the FTC filing a lawsuit in December on the heels of U.K. regulators launching an investigation of their own that signaled deep concerns over the deal. The big picture: Arm has grown to dominate the market for low-power chips thanks to efficient, highly customizable architecture that's easy for customers to tweak to fit their exact needs. - Yes, but: In recent years, a number of companies have begun to work on their own in-house chip designs — in no small part to move away from their dependency on Arm.
- "The controversy over Nvidia buying Arm was good for RISC-V because it made people wonder what would happen with Arm," TIRIAS Research principal analyst Kevin Krewell tells Axios. Nvidia competitors were immediately concerned about how the merger could impact Arm's independence and relationship with customers.
What's RISC-V? Designed in 2010 by researchers at the University of California, in Berkeley, RISC-V is a competing chip architecture that's gained momentum in part because it's open-sourced. - Similar to other open-source technologies, a number of startups with various business models have emerged, including vendors of licenses for RISC-V-based chip designs (similar to Arm's business model).
The intrigue: RISC-V got another boost this week: longtime Arm rival Intel announced it's joining RISC-V International, the nonprofit supporting and evangelizing the standard, and committed $1 billion to invest in startups building on the architecture. - "This was just a recognition by Intel that RISC-V has now moved along enough to be invested in," explains Krewell, adding, "I think it's a way for Intel to undercut Arm a bit."
- Other RISC-V collaborators include DARPA, the Pentagon's emerging tech division, and a number of other large tech companies.
- Krewell also notes that by and large, new startups doing central processing unit chips are using the RISC-V architecture instead of Arm's, underscoring the quiet momentum that's already building.
What to watch: Whether Google, a founding member of RISC-V International, releases a version of its Android operating system for the architecture. "That'll be an inflection point," says Krewell. - And of course, what happens with Arm's upcoming IPO.
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