The Japanese have acquired ARM, so Apple can switch to MIPS

The biggest news in the technology circle these days is that a Japanese company, SoftBank, spent 32 billion US dollars to acquire the British company ARM. Some people believe that this is SoftBank's boss Masayoshi Son taking advantage of the sharp drop in the pound, while others say that SoftBank got the money from selling Alibaba shares. ARM founder Hermann Hauser told the media that he was very sad about the company's acquisition.

Although I have seen many people in the industry who are confused about whether the word ARM should be pronounced as "ARM" or read directly, it is undeniable that ARM's products have penetrated into the daily lives of people all over the world. The ARM architecture is a CPU architecture that uses a reduced instruction set (RISC). Almost 100% of the smartphones and smart TVs we use in daily life are based on the ARM architecture. At the same time, many embedded devices that we don't feel much in daily life also use the ARM architecture.

In terms of market share, ARM and Intel's X86 are the two major CPU architectures in the world today. Both companies are the leading players in the semiconductor industry. However, their market strategies are actually very different. The X86 architecture is only licensed to semiconductor companies that can be counted on one's fingers, and Intel's own CPUs have always been dominant, basically the only one in the market; ARM does not produce chips at all. All ARM chips are purchased by third-party companies from ARM and then customized according to their own needs, and then produced by semiconductor factories. Therefore, compared with Intel's self-development, self-production and self-sales, and factories across the country, with more than 100,000 employees, ARM has only one or two thousand employees and can be regarded as a light asset company.

Under such circumstances, the acquisition of ARM, a British company, by the Japanese can't help but cause widespread associations (some even think of boycotting Japanese goods, which is really surprising). However, in fact, this acquisition is unlikely to have much impact on the daily lives of Chinese people. However, many people pointed out that Apple, the leader in smartphones, should think carefully about the future: if the ARM architecture is controlled by the Japanese, should there be a Plan B for the CPU used in future iPhones?

I saw someone suggesting that Apple should cooperate with Intel, which is also an American company. In the future, Apple's computers and mobile phones will be based on the X86 architecture, which is good. But in fact, Intel announced a few months ago that it would give up the mobile processor market, and the more than 10 billion US dollars invested in the past few years were basically burned in vain. In fact, people who are slightly familiar with the semiconductor industry will realize that compared with Intel, the more suitable backup solution for Apple's mobile phone CPU should be MIPS.

Although people now only know ARM but not MIPS, in fact, the MIPS architecture was once as popular as ARM. It once occupied a large share in the field of embedded devices; and there are also many in the consumer field. The familiar Sony PS, PS2, and PSP game consoles are based on the MIPS architecture; in addition, the so-called "China chip", the Loongson developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences for more than ten years, actually paid a licensing fee to MIPS. However, unlike ARM, MIPS is considered to be an academic (its founder John Hennessy is still the president of Stanford University), not good at business development, and has been very declining in recent years. In 2013, after selling 489 patents to a consortium of ARM, IBM, Intel and other companies, MIPS has been acquired by another British company, Imagination Technologies, for only US$60 million. In connection with the US$32 billion sold by ARM, MIPS is really pitiful.

In some ways, MIPS and ARM are very similar. Both use a reduced instruction set, are designed for low-power applications, and are produced through third-party licensing. However, there are actually several major differences between the two. The academic MIPS allows third parties to make significant modifications to the CPU architecture, while ARM only allows a very small number of semiconductor companies in the world to modify the CPU architecture (including Qualcomm, Apple, NVIDIA, and Samsung, all semiconductor giants). Other companies that produce ARM chips directly use the ARM public version design and cannot make any modifications (such as Huawei HiSilicon). ARM's strategy is obviously very suitable for commercial promotion. The technical requirements for third-party companies are also reduced, and the development cycle will be greatly shortened. They only need to find chip foundries to place orders, tape out, and produce according to the ARM public version of the CPU and GPU architecture.

However, the shortcomings are now also exposed. After all, the ARM public version may not meet the specific needs of all third-party manufacturers, and sometimes it will fail. In this regard, the most familiar incident is Qualcomm Snapdragon 810. Since Qualcomm's self-developed chip architecture has been delayed in the market, it just used the ARM public version design to save trouble. As a result, many mobile phones using Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 on the market have overheated and crashed.

Of course, there is another important reason for recommending MIPS to Apple. Apple actually has a long-term cooperative relationship with Imagination Technologies. Apple phones have been using the GPU design provided by Imagination Technologies, namely Power VR, since the first generation of iPhone. Speaking of Power VR, it is not a simple role. In the 1990s, it participated in the desktop graphics card war (Sega's Dreamcast used Power VR graphics chips), and after the failure, it switched to the low-power market. Of course, Power VR did not disappoint Apple's favor. Basically, every generation of iPhone and iPad was the mobile device with the strongest graphics performance at the time, which must be the credit of Power VR.

Unfortunately, although Imagination Technologies bought the MIPS architecture a long time ago and has launched some new products, it has no voice in the smartphone field that has been monopolized by ARM. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is a waste of money. Under this circumstance, if Apple can further cooperate with the company and adopt Imagination Technologies' solutions for both CPU and GPU design, it is really full of imagination. This is not about how much money can be made or how high the score can be, but our world needs diversity. Just look at Intel now. The performance of desktop CPUs has hardly improved much in the past five years, which fully shows that: a monopoly is definitely not a good phenomenon.

Previously, someone suggested that Apple acquire ARM, but I think it would be more appropriate for Apple to acquire Imagination Technologies.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.