IBM tries ARM-style Licensing of PPC Processors

[vidarh]

Too little, too late to matter on a big enough scale.

Depends on your goals. The PPC market is still larger  than the x86 market in number of units shipped. Something like ~500 million PPC cpu's are shipped a year - comparable to MIPS.

Last I checked x86 was closer to 300 million units.

POWER/PPC is clearly still viable as an architecture. The question is if IBM licensing their high end designs can make it viable for market segments like cell phones, tablets or servers (desktops are "hopeless" as long as Windows is so entrenched) where it isn't really present.

(And if WDC's numbers are right, 6502 cores might outstrip x86 too...)

Of course ARM dwarfs all of them, with an estimated 3 billion cpu's likely to get shipped this year...

[vidarh]

" The PPC market is still larger  than the x86 market in number of units shipped"

Really?

Last time I dug up numbers, the PPC market was estimated at ~500 million a year, comparable to MIPS (and far outstripped by ARM - ARM estimates 3 billion cores/year).  

X86 meanwhile were present in ~350-360 million desktops, servers and laptops last year, and embedded usage of x86 is almost a rounding error, so more than ~400 million total is unlikely.

(As an amusing aside, Western Design Centre also still claims "hundreds of millions" of 6502 instruction set cores per year, though a substantial portion of that is likely embedded in custom ASICs)

In terms of *revenue*, though, Intel makes about *7 times* more from their CPUs that Qualcomm (at second place) makes from their CPUs, as a result of a ridiculously higher average revenue per unit.

[vidarh]

They did alright with the current games console generation as PPC was used by all three. Next year they will likely take a beating.

The combined lifetime sales of the current generation games consoles only adds up to 4-5 months worth of PPC sales - losing them won't make much of a dent in terms of units. It will hurt worse in revenue.

[vidarh]

Since 2011, the market has shifted even more in favour of ARM and x86.

I'd question that source. For example, where are Qualcomm and Samsung, the by far two largest (by revenue) ARM licensees on the last chart?

[vidarh]

@vidarh

Keep in mind, that the ppc cpus in washingmachines, microwaves o r printers, as well as routers don't count as if it were computers.

We're talking about "computers", we're talking about CPU's. By that argument about 90% of ARM's volume is irrelevant as well.

[vidarh]

For those who are interested, the source of the graph posted was here:

http://chipdesignmag.com/sld/schirrmeister/tag/intel/

I think this has a bearing on things:

Even then it doesn't make any sense. ST MicroElectronics had about $8.5 billion total revenue for fiscal 2012, and according to their last quarterly report they're on target for similar revenue this year. Qualcomm and Samsung each made about $5 billion on ARM CPU's last year. (EDIT: Notice the difference - both Qualcomm and Samsung are substantially larger than STM if you look at total revenue - this is CPU revenue *only* compared to total revenue for STM)

Never mind that most of STM's CPU's business is in ST Ericsson - a 50/50 joint venture that only accounts for about $300 million of STM's yearly revenues.

STM *may* belong there if they're counting 8-bit microcontrollers, but in that case companies like Zilog should be there too (they bought Samsungs 4-bit and 8-bit microcontroller lines), and architectures like the ST32, Z80, 6502, 8051 and others would also in that case compete in the volume charts. Incidentally, NXP exited the 8051 market at the beginning of last year, and Zilog entered the same market.. (EDIT: Zilog is small in revenue compared to most others there, but then so is STM, Broadcom and NXP in CPU revenue,  so as a company it might belong there, but if counting these types of units it's architectures certainly belong on the architecture chart)

EDIT: Looking up AMD revenue numbers (from their financial filings), that data is even worse. 6.3% of a $94.2 billion market is $5.9 billion. However in 2012 earnings for AMD was $5.4 billion, and when you subtract their graphics division and others from that, you end up closer to $3.5billion to $4 billion (their GPU business alone accounts for $1billion+). So either their total estimated market size is wrong, or the AMD market share number is wrong, or they're charting something entirely different to what they say they're charting.

[vidarh]

That would be quite a disappointment given that there were nearly 2.4 billion shipped in the last quarter alone!

2.4 billion *cores* quite possibly. Because just to make this extra confusing, ARM receives royalty per core and so the number of cores often gets thrown around rather than number of CPUs. Last year they were reported to have received royalties for something like 7.9 billion cores total for the year, shipped in the region of 2.5-3 billion CPUs.