D2D: RISC V progress and hurdles
Also a look at semiconductor IP's rise and rise, Investor Relations in a downturn, Arm's results, a dubious historical analogy and more
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Highlights from our Blog
We looked at company productivity for a dozen of the biggest semis and tech names, digging into revenue and profits per employees. Not surprisingly, companies with heavy software components to their business - like Broadcom and Apple - fare the best. More surprisingly, Huawei ranks pretty well, especially for a company burdened by years of US sanctions. For semis companies, Qualcomm’s workforce is double its peers, but partially closes the gap with its highly profitable licensing business.
When times are tough - a recession, a missed product cycle, execution problems - public company management’s instincts are to hunker down and communicate less with investors. We think a better path is to use the opportunity to be open about troubles, communicate broadly and build credibility for a time when business improves.
Semiconductor intellectual property (IP), especially designs, are undergoing an important transformation. More companies are building their own chips and chips are becoming very heterogeneous. Leveraging third-party IP is a path to faster times to market and better competitive differentiation.
We attended the RISC V Summit and came away with renewed confidence in the project’s progress. RISC V has a lot of momentum and an enthusiastic community. That being it said, it is starting to encounter growing pains as it searches for the right markets to pursue.
We spent a lot of time at the summit exploring the prospects for RISC V to be used for Android phones. We will have Android on RISC V smartphones soon, but building the chips for them is still a laborious process.
Arm reported its first earnings since its IPO, but we learned more about investors from the results. The numbers were actually pretty good, but due to a series of logistics issues the Street apparently had higher expectations. The Street is still learning how to analyze Arm. To the company’s credit they are providing a lot of information, it will just take investors a moment to digest if fully.
If we are to use history as a guide to the current conflict between the US and China around semiconductors, the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 is possibly the least bad analogy. The treaty angered Japan and led it down a path to more nationalism, but in the end the treaty did not matter much to military outcomes. The focus on old technologies (battleships) proved to be irrelevant in a conflict based on new technologies (aircraft carriers). Hopefully, the US never ends up in a shooting war with China, but in any conflict we suspect leading edge semiconductor manufacturing processes will be less important than new technologies.
If you like this content, you should check out our podcast The Circuit
Noteworthy Items
Semis and Hardware
Microsoft unveiled its long awaited data center silicon. These have been rumored for a very long time including a CPU and an AI accelerator. Our podcast co-host Ben Bajarin provides a good overview. Dylan Patel runs down the specs and points out some of the shortcomings stemming from the fact that these chips were designed prior to the explosion of interest in Large Language Models (LLM). Still, a very strong first effort.
Google wrote up it’s LLM progress, running on 50,000 TPUs. Good reading for how these big systems are built and operated. But also worth appreciating for just the sheer scale of. the system.
RISC V has great momentum (see above), but is starting to reach the stage where group dynamics and politics play a role. Overall, we think the ecosystem is fairly health, but small disputes are trickling under the hood, like this one on a fairly obscure technical decision. It will be interesting to see the role larger companies like Meta, Google and Qualcomm play as the project progresses.
AI is more than GPUs. There is some incredible work being done getting machine learning workloads running on micro-controllers for industrial systems. This is not about making tools that talk (although that will be fun when it happens), but it has the potential to add some pretty incredible features to manufacturing and operations of ‘non-technology’ products. A similar run-down on the topic looking at NXP, another looking at Infineon, and one more looking at Renesas. Do we sense a pattern?
Nordic Semi, maker of bluetooth and connectivity chips, is doing more with RISC V. A good write-up of why they are making the effort, the word flexibility comes up a lot.
Lawfare podcast looking at BIS - the US agency tasked with enforcing the China chip restrictions. This left us with the impression that serious, smart people are working hard on a nearly impossible problem.
Networking and Wireless
Co-packaged optics, where optical fibers connect directly into processors, has been a major area of effort for years. It is hard to do, and has taken ages, but is inching closer.
Do you spend a lot of time thinking about networking cables? We do. And we usually get the different Cats (categories) confused. Until now.
Svalbard is one of the most remote settled places in the world, above the Arctic Circle in the Arctic Ocean. It is also an important hub for global satellite communications. Who knew? The island now has a massive fiber link to connect all that traffic. We tend to think about fiber and satellite as discrete alternatives, but they actually work together a lot.
Ahead of the RISC V Summit Google published a post “Android and RISC-V: What you need to know to be ready”. From our perspective (see above), everyone should read this post because even Google is not quite ready.
Software and the Cloud
Data platform Databricks posted a blog on what “AI” means for their business (and a good summary from the Register). It is clear that this is a very important topic to them and they are layering this across their workloads. At the same time, some of it is fairly vague at least in terms of how these efforts are any different from what they have been doing all along.
Amazon gives Apple special privileges on its e-commerce web-site. This is being scrutinized as part of anti-trust efforts, but also a reminder that Apple is an important, maybe critical, element for electronics retailers, which merits special treatment. That being said, the relationship between the two companies always seems a bit out of kilter.
Amazon is reportedly building its own operating system (OS) for its home networking devices. This is not the first time Amazon has dabbled with OS’s. They are one of the few big companies out there with the capability of building their own OS, but this shows fairly modest ambitions.
Software engineer decides to build some hardware, hilarity ensues.
Diversions
We are very interested in Aztec and Mayan lore and mythology. One of the major sources for our understanding of these has now been fully digitized. That is great, but more fun is this pantheon of modern tech jobs as portrayed by Mayan dieties.
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