Direct consumer sales of CPUs is pretty niche even on x86, and on ARM side this whole SBC business afaik is pretty niche compared to the commercial (embedded) use. I can easily understand why no-one bothers to invest in that small sliver of a market
I don’t get this. x86 CPU sales isn’t niche. Last I checked, the thousands of PCs at my university alone were all x86.
Demand exists, supply does not. Why? Idk. Maybe it’s a consequence of bad business decisions at ARM.
Apple has recently shown that ARM chips can be competitive with x86. However, I don’t see why we couldn’t have had that a decade ago. Why did we have to wait for a licensee to take this matter into their own hands? It’s like the business execs at ARM are asleep at the wheel. If I were a shareholder, I’d be wanting some different leadership.
You might be interested in this recent Register opinion article, which (in passing) makes the point that Arm and x86 have thus far succeeded largely by concentrating on things the other is not doing rather than by directly trying to take the same path:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/16/riscv_world_dominatio...
If you were a shareholder are you sure you'd rather have Arm focused on trying to sell desktop chips rather than those 30 billion largely embedded and mobile cores they apparently shifted last year?
The key was “direct” sales of CPU - most x86 systems you see are fully integrated and ship with a CPU already loaded from Dell, etc. Few people “build their own”.
Just making desktop-class chips is useless without software. Apple can force both sides of that equation, other vendors can't. You can buy laptops with Windows and ARM, but nobody does for good reason.
