As Arm Eyes IPO and Higher Prices, RISC-V May Get a Boost

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Arm, one of the leading providers of RISC IP, is raising the price of its licenses prior to its upcoming IPO, potentially paving the road for wider RISC-V adoption.

www.allaboutcircuits.com/, Apr. 06, 2023 – 

British firm Arm Limited is one of the leading providers of SoCs and processor intellectual property (IP) in the world. In recent years, however, open-source ISA RISC-V–invented at UC Berkeley–has been gaining traction and represents potential competition to Arm's portfolio.

Arm's upcoming IPO and decision to raise licensing costs could accelerate this adoption.

Arm's Role in Embedded Systems

In the next few years, Arm-based architectures are anticipated to account for 30% of PC architectures and half of all CPUs used for cloud services. Arm touts its architectures as high-performant yet energy efficient, representing a "foundation for computing everywhere". Arm generally does not manufacture hardware itself (with the exception of evaluation boards); instead, it sells its IP to a variety of industry partners who layout and manufacture the IP in their own chips instead.

Arm uses reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures. In a RISC architecture, each instruction typically executes in a single clock cycle with a pipelined architecture for maximum efficiency. In a complex instruction set computer (CISC) architecture, a single instruction may take more than one clock cycle and execute multiple functions. Because CISC instruction decode logic is more complex, RISC architectures are preferred in embedded systems for their lower power consumption.

Consequently, Arm architectures have seen significant adoption in the world of embedded electronics.

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