The strategy they are using to establish a revenue stream that justifies this valuation is to continue to raise prices on their customers. I think this works in the near term (next 5 to 10 years), and generate a ton of money for ARM, but it will drive additional momentum to RISC-V.
The legendary Jim Keller is going all in on RISC-V, if you don't know Google him. His company has many core designs coming as well chiplets: https://tenstorrent.com/risc-v/
Because of Jim Keller and similar efforts I wouldn't be surprised for RISC-V to see both core count as well as per core performance meet ARM over the next few years. Maybe even exceed if Jim can push the chiplet approach faster than ARM can roll theirs out.
Hopefully this drives a lot of innovation and we all benefit as a result.
I think that using ARM is going to be viewed as being locked into ARM's ever increasing licensing fees, where as if you go RISC-V, you are free to switch CPU providers.
> where as if you go RISC-V, you are free to switch CPU providers.
Idk, this really isn't as true as you'd think. Yes RISC-V is an open and free ISA which will cut out some fees, but you'd still have to license IP/chip designs (if you can't make your own) and they could only undercut ARM by a little bit. Further, the lack of mobility across chips/boards/whatever is not usually from the ISA, but from the BSP, SDK, etc. so you still would have substantial lockin unless we somehow standardize on that (lol)
Part of the issue here is that nobody is going to build something free on top of someone else's property. What good is a "free" design if you still have to pay ARM?
Whereas once you have a free ISA which is actually in widespread use, you could get some designs out of universities or major corporations which intend to use them rather than sell them as their primary business and then release the design for the same reason they do for Linux code, potentially under a copyleft-style license.
Those designs aren't going to be competitive with the state of the art, at least in the beginning, but they don't have to be. All they have to be is low power enough to stick in an embedded device and fast enough to run the display on a refrigerator and the lack of a license fee would cause them to replace a zillion ARM chips that currently go into every IoS device and <$200 phone and consumer internet router. That's a huge chunk of ARM's market.
Then someone like Amazon evaluates this thing for something like the Kindle and finds that it's almost good enough, all they have to do is throw a couple of engineers at it for a short period of time, so they do and it gets released because what do they care of some non-competitor uses it in some cheap laptop. Commoditize your complement -- now laptops are cheaper and people buy more laptops on Amazon.
Meanwhile the "small project" uncompetitive boards start to have their own open source BSP and SDK under the BSD license, which means anybody else can fork it for their own thing, and that's a competitive advantage so it happens a lot. But now it's way easier to reverse engineer the code because 95% of it is unmodified, so you start getting community replacements for that stuff and with any luck the OEMs stop even producing it and point you to the open source repository.
It could be a long time before that takes over the high end, if that ever happens, but the low end? It's almost inevitable. And the high end is AMD64 and Apple, the latter of which has all the leverage in the world over ARM because they could always switch to RISC-V.
As a layperson though, how would I be able to tell whether any of this is true? When I have to target platforms as a software developer, the truth is, I’ll do whatever Microsoft and Apple tell me to. By the time Apple is shipping a RISC-V phone I hope to be retired!
> As a layperson though, how would I be able to tell whether any of this is true?
You probably won't ever know. Do you know the architecture of the microcontroller on your first computer's hard drive? I don't.
The stuff that RISC-V will replace first is the low-margin hardware that can be mass-produced by China et. al and exported without license violation. ARM's goose was already cooked in this sense, and even ARM China won't fix it. For IO controllers, ICs and network switches, it's hard to see why manufacturers would stick with higher-margin ARM hardware. If RISC-V cores are cheap, stable and available, you could replace them without the user ever noticing.
> By the time Apple is shipping a RISC-V phone I hope to be retired!
Apple is reportedly looking to replace some of their A-series ICs with RISC-V ones: https://www.techpowerup.com/298936/report-apple-to-move-a-pa...
Hopefully you don't intend to retire this soon :p