Eric Schorn’s Processors for People Blog

This post concludes the “ARM Basics”  tour on how the ARM business model works and why it has been so sucessful. You will need to read the prior ARM basics posts for this to make complete sense. The series of posts start with ARM basics 1.

You will have likely noticed the consistent theme around delivering more functionality to the end-user, sooner, and cheaper. It is what the market demands and what we truly do deliver. To summarize just a few points:

• Integration of discrete processors onto system-on-chip lowers cost and increases performance. The latter allows for the delivery of more functionality to the end-user.
• Integration opens up our opportunity for processor IP. Processor and ecosystem development are incredibly expensive but can now be amortized against massive volume (read: 14 billion units to date), thereby lowering costs.
• Processor IP allows silicon vendors to avoid time+money+resource wastage on reinventing the wheel (read: processor) and instead focus on their core-competencies adding differentiating value to the end-user cheaper and sooner.
• A single architecture target allows an ecosystem to grow and prosper – again, folks can focus on core-competencies rather than messy logistics, and can amortized their efforts against huge TAM.
• OEMs see massive choice, re-use of investments, broad ecosystem, a robust future roadmap, and an IP partner focused on delivering value to them.
• The ultimate culmination of all this is the delivery of more functionality, sooner, and cheaper to the end user.

The end-user scores win #4.

The OEM scores win #3.
The ecosystem scores win #2.
The silicon partner scores win #1.

When everyone is sucessful, it comes back to ARM as win #5 and we reinvest.

Thanks for reading – comments welcome and appreciated.