Arm Holdings Ltd. is finally going public again as soon as next month, but the chip designer owned by SoftBank Group Corp. just raised the specter of a big potential threat. The company, which filed paperwork for an initial public offering late Monday, develops chip designs known as RISC (reduced instruction set computing) processors — but there is a rival, open-source architecture group, called the RISC-V Foundation, which threatens Arm’s licensing business model.
Arm acknowledges as much in the “risk factors” section of its prospectus. “If RISC-V-related technology continues to be developed and market support for RISC-V increases, our customers may choose to utilize this free, open-source architecture instead of our products,” Arm said in its regulatory filing. Earlier this month, Arm customer Qualcomm Inc.
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which licenses Arm designs for chips such as its Snapdragon processor, joined four other semiconductor companies in supporting RISC-V. Qualcomm and the others will invest in a company focused on accelerating the adoption of and developing commercial products based on RISC-V This alliance, which includes Infineon Technologies
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Robert Bosch and Nordic Semiconductor
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was also referenced by Arm in its F-1 filing. Qualcomm Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkhiwala was asked about RISC-V at a recent JPMorgan tech conference “Over time, there is maybe an opportunity for RISC-V cores to be used very broadly in phones,” Palkhiwala said. “We already today use RISC-V in phones, not in the main CPU, but in cores that go into our audio, video, other technology engines. RISC-V is already being used, and so in the future, you can see an opportunity for RISC-V to have broader usage in phones.” Qualcomm, which represented 11% of Arm’s revenue …
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