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Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
- forinti 6mo agoArm came from Acorn and Acorn did make the first ARM CPUs for their computers, so it's not really the first time they do this.
- fweimer 6mo agoThey made the Morello research CPUs, but did not sell them. The Acorn/Arm history is somewhat complicated due to the Arm IPO, I think.
- nutjob2 6mo agoOne can split hairs about the corporate responsibility, but I personally bought a VLSI ARM chip in the 90s. VLSI were one of the original 3 partners (along with Apple and Acorn) who owned the newly formed ARM corp and were the first to produce them (for Apple).
- daneel_w 6mo agoThe Acorn Archimedes came with Acorn branded CPUs (the "ARM250" IIRC) already in the late 80s. I can't recall what company made the chips for ARM at that time, but in the later Archimedes models it was VLSI.
- mrbluecoat 6mo ago"in-house" is misleading > Like nearly all fabless AI chipmakers, Arm currently manufactures its CPU at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ’s fabrication plants.
- alain94040 6mo agoIt's not misleading for people in the industry. ARM so far was selling IP (Verilog source code) that other chip makers would include in a full chip design. Now ARM for the first time (this century) is making its own chip [design], which like most of its customers, is manufactured by a fab like TSMC. The title is clear.
- sgerenser 6mo agoSimilarly Apple doesn't manufacture any of its own computers or iPhones (it's all contract manufacturers like FoxConn) but it would clearly be wrong to say "Apple doesn't make computers! Foxconn does!"
- brcmthrowaway 6mo agoNot really verilog source code. TSMC probably provides libraries to Apple Apple is just a systems integrator
- sifar 6mo agoIt's called fables.
- drob518 6mo agoThis is going to be a strategic challenge for ARM unless they are going to focus on chips that nobody else wants to make. And given the AI focus, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I would think that the RISC-V folks would be salivating at the prospect of flipping some existing ARM licensees to RISC-V.
- wmf 6mo agofocus on chips that nobody else wants to make That's what happened here. Meta wants a Neoverse V3 CPU but no one will make it for them. So Arm has to make it.
- leptons 6mo agoARM does not have their own fab, someone else is doing the actual making. ARM helped Meta design the thing.
- audunw 6mo agoThat’s overly pedantic. Then you’d say that Apple doesn’t make their laptops. Foxconn does. The kind of work ARM would do to “make” a chip themselves goes beyond just design. It’s synthesis, P&R, test, packaging (generally a different company than the fab), yield management, inventory/logistics, etc.
- drob518 6mo agoI don’t believe that nobody else would build it for them. This chip is not purely custom to Meta, as I understand it. Rather, ARM is going to be selling it to others and entering the market for “AI chips,” which is surely a market that some other ARM licensees want to be in. So therefore, ARM is competing with its other licensees, and in a potentially very lucrative, leading edge market, which is never a great place for an IP-focused company to be. Qualcomm, for instance, is undoubtedly annoyed at this.
- tsukikage 6mo agoMeta bought a RISC-V startup six months ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=meta+rivos https://hn.algolia.com/?q=meta+rivos Guess at the end of the day, no-one ever got fired for building ARM.
- kaladin-jasnah 6mo agoHow does this fit with Meta's decision to acquire Rivos?
- brcmthrowaway 6mo agoacquihire?
- LeFantome 6mo agoI think they are still working on silicon. But the two solutions do not really compete.
- 3eb7988a1663 6mo agoAfter Amazon, Google, and Apple all have had successes with in house ARM, I had naively assumed Meta would do the same. Given the speeds with which they have been developed, it must not be "that hard" to spin up a chip. You could have easily framed it as a long-term plan - custom chips for the Occlus.
- SilverElfin 6mo agoMeta only recently announced a “long term” partnership with Nvidia: https://about.fb.com/news/2026/02/meta-nvidia-announce-long-term-infrastructure-partnership/ https://about.fb.com/news/2026/02/meta-nvidia-announce-long-... So how does this fit in? Is it a replacement for Nvidia’s portfolio of chips? Or just an alternative option to avoid dependency on one vendor? Something else?
- measurablefunc 6mo agoThis is similar to AWS & their Graviton VMs.
- loeg 6mo agoCPUs and GPUs sit in pretty distinct niches; they don't substitute like you're implying.
- giancarlostoro 6mo agoMakes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.
- redleader55 6mo agoMeta will always need the next platform. Instagram, Facebook phone, Whatsapp, Reels, Marketplace, Portal, VR, AI... Some succed, some fail. When you are an Ads company, the surface where ads are delivered to is important. I don't think it's a fundamentally different business model from Google's. VR addresses an interesting and increasing niche of people that refuse human contact and prefer the online world - for those people clothes, going out, buying a car, spending money on whatever the current society spends money on might not be so interesting, instead a parallel, virtual world, might be. As for Claude and OpenAI, no one has a revenue net positive business model yet. They are much better than Meta's Llamas, but the model quality doesn't equal cash in the bank. Things might still change in the end. More players are better for me as a consumer.
- jazzyjackson 6mo agometa had the gpus to train llama because of their capital spend on horizons, so at least they were in the game, but maybe he didn't see "chatbot" as a trillion dollar product category
- hedayet 6mo agoFacebook's strength has never been innovation, but adapting to the changes; mostly through acquisition. With the 20/20 hindsight - I'd say the VR bet was too early for Facebook. Instead of trying to build a future tech, they should have acquired it another few years later, only after the tech has reached a more mature stage. Meta still has a chance to catch up in the AI race given they are not trying to build afresh, but once again adapt by throwing cash at it (which has been the biggest strength of Facebook and Zuckerberg. see: instagram, whatsapp, reels, and many more...)
- goku12 6mo agoThis may not seem like an appropriate forum to say this, but this is a relevant and serious issue to neglect. With the current political climate and this relentless push for hundreds of these massive datacenters, everyone seems to have completely forgotten about the carbon emissions and climate change. These datacenters are such massive resource hogs that living near them is unviable due to their economic impact and overconsumption. Their impact on global climate, economy and even technology (talking about the RAM crunch) is much worse. But nobody seems to be keeping tabs anymore. One thing to remember is that the climate catastrophe is not a single cataclysmic event like falling off a cliff. It's more like a lanslide that starts small and then gradually accretes into a massive disaster that's barreling towards you. And we're in it already. We're already paying a price in terms of human lives and the planet's biomass as a whole due to natural disasters that are becoming more frequent. We don't notice it because the increase is gradual. And all that for what? Writing reports, reading emails, generating endless slop and waging wars? I'm not against AI or any other technology. But this cost doesn't seem justified considering their contributions to serious endeavors like medical research and habitat loss. This is ironic because we were talking two decades ago about ditching interpreted languages in favor of compiled languages for servers/services, in order to improve their carbon footprint. It looks like a joke today considering what these AI datacenters and crypto farms do. But we really can't really afford to forget it now. Remember that when you pay for AI with your money, someone else pays for it with their blood.
- junofan 6mo agoWe “forgot” about it because climate-as-energy-policy was a lever for control because energy touches everything. Now that AI will touch everything, AI is the focus of those who seek control over others. There has never been an energy transition that wasn’t driven by economics. From wood to whale oil to coal to petroleum. If you care about climate and not control over others, that is the place to focus.
- r14c 6mo agoEveryone else on the planet is doing just fine our policymakers are just pretending like climate change isn't real. We could be investing in and subsidizing proven methods like mass transit, renewable energy, &c. Nobody has to be coerced for this to happen. Unless like getting less subsidies because fossil fuels need to get their externalities priced in is coercion lmao
- ChrisArchitect 6mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506251
- checker659 6mo agoThat is not a dupe
- Eufrat 6mo agoI think it is. The launch announcement explicitly says the same thing, “Meta is our lead partner and customer”.
- checker659 6mo agoOn HN, dupe means duplicate discussion for the same link
- password4321 6mo ago> duplicate discussion for the same link I hate to be the bearer of bad news but this is incorrect per moderator dang at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43765252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43765252: > On HN, dupeness is more a question of whether the underlying story is substantively the same or not I believe dang's most recent in-depth explanation can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43738815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43738815 and you can search for more at https://hn.algolia.com?query=author%3Adang+dupe&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com?query=author%3Adang+dupe&sort=byDate&... Submissions of the same exact URL are automatically merged into the previous discussion server side, and are discouraged for about a year.
- checker659 6mo agoBut one is a press release from ARM and the other is a report from CNBC. How are the two the same? By your logic, there shouldn't be a gazillion posts about Apple Events the day it happens.