Wired
The worry is still coming. Since Google, Qualcomm, Intel, and Microsoft have stopped team to cooperate with Huawei, the British ARM company has officially stopped cooperation with Huawei. Compared with the former, ARM’s behavior may be Huawei’s Xiaolin’s Kirin processor has caused a heavy blow.
What is ARM?
Founded in 1990, ARM is a British chip design company specializing in the design of mobile chips (instruction set architecture). It was acquired by Softbank in September 2016 and its headquarters is still located in the UK after the acquisition. Instead of producing a processor, ARM itself licenses the chip architecture/instruction set and development drawing technology to other companies after the design goes through. You can also understand the public version of ARM’s mobile processor, and attach it to the second development manual to sell. Other manufacturers can use it directly after buying it, or modify it as needed and then “name it” to their own processor. The Huawei Unicorn processor you heard about, the Samsung Exynos processor, Qualcomm Xiaolong and Apple’s Axx, all of which essentially require ARM to participate in providing technology or authorization. Let’s just say that even if Apple has the capital to design and produce something out of thin air, in the end it is necessary to use the ARM instruction set, which requires authorization from others.
The coming is still coming, ARM stops authorization and technical cooperation
According to the BBC, after adding Huawei to the list of entities in the United States, ARM immediately notified all its employees to suspend “all valid contracts, support rights and any pending contracts” with Huawei. Although ARM is a British company, it supported this decision in the memo on the grounds of “using a large number of US origin technologies”.
In ARM’s memo, “Employees are not allowed to provide support, deliver technology (whether software, code or other updates), participate in technical discussions for Huawei, HiSilicon or any other related entity,” the implementation of this memo The coverage of the people even includes employees of ARM China companies. As far as I can see, this ARM China company has no real power at all. To put it bluntly, it is a convenient location for a Chinese office.
What impact might ARM have on its cooperation with Huawei?
Although we learned in our general interview, Huawei already has the permanent license for ARMv8 (this generation of architecture) because it pays and the contract is signed first, even if ARM does not recognize or refuse to do it in the extreme case. Cooperation, but at least Huawei’s development or upgrade on this architecture can still be recognized. Moreover, Huawei has already thoroughly penetrated the ARMv8 architecture, and on this basis, it has no problem to develop a more optimized architecture and system. But now the most worrying situation is that because Android is also made by Americans, although the AOSP protocol can be used, if the country deliberately suppresses the ARM v9 architecture in the operating system, the new version of Android uses v9 architecture than v8. The architecture has more performance advantages. Even some core applications must require the v9 core (new instruction set) to execute. This is a disaster for Huawei Huawei’s Kirin processor that can only stop at the v8 architecture. Unless the Huawei mobile phone OS is also out. But this will cause a situation, that is, Huawei’s market can only be limited to the domestic, because once the mobile phone processor and operating system are using Huawei’s own set, it is likely that some foreign users are critical applications (Google, Facebook, etc.) can’t be executed on it (because the software level is limited and simple). Therefore, it is really embarrassing that ARM has stopped cooperating with Huawei. But this situation has at least some buffer time. What is most frightening now is that once TSMC on the other side refuses to produce Huawei’s chips, then the generals have no chess.
Distressed Huawei, distressed, I wish God bless China.