ARM takes down website attacking rival

spartaman64 · July 12, 2018

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For the uninitiated, ARM Holdings designs various architectures and cores that it licenses to major chipmakers around the world. Its tech can be found in over 100 billion chips manufactured by huge names like Apple and Nvidia as well as many other lesser-known players in the low-power market. If ARM is Windows, you can think of RISC-V as an early Linux. Like ARM, it’s an architecture based on reduced instruction set computing (RISC), but it’s free to use and open to anyone to contribute or modify. While ARM has been around since 1991, RISC-V just got started in 2010 but it’s gaining a lot of ground and ARM’s pitiful website could easily be seen as a legitimizing moment for the tech.

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The site riscv-basics is now offline but an archived version is still available. It outlines five basic points for why someone might still consider paying ARM instead of going with the free option. Some of the issues it raises have validity, but it’s so low-information that it’s hard to give ARM much credit. According to the Register, the attack campaign quickly backfired despite the fact that it barely made a blip on the mainstream radar.

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The site – riscv-basics.com – was created at the end of June, and attempted to smear open-source RISC-V, listing five reasons why Arm cores are a better choice over its competitor's designs. However, the stunt backfired, with folks in the tech industry, and within the company's own ranks, slamming the site as a cheap shot and an attack on open source.

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That last part in particular made Arm bosses U-turn: the Softbank-owned CPU design house, responsible for billions of CPU cores in smartphones, tablets, smart cards and other embedded kit, is heavily reliant on an ecosystem of open-source code and developers. Thus laying into the RISC-V movement looked like a declaration of war on open-source technology.

If anything, the site made RISC-V sound like a viable alternative to Arm's crown, giving the upstart architecture more credibility.

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We reached out to ARM for comment on why it published the site in the first place and what prompted its shuttering and got the following statement:

“Our intention in creating a web page to offer key considerations around commercial RISC-V based products was to inform a lively industry debate. Regretfully, the result was something different, a page that wasn’t in line with Arm’s collaborative culture, so we’ve taken it down. Indeed, many of our own people also told us they didn’t like it. One thing to clear up immediately is we absolutely did not want to give the impression we were attacking open source as we are highly committed supporters of open source communities in many different areas.”

Things like this, intel's attack on amd "glued together" cores, and other such attacks teach us again and again that cheap shots don't work and only serve to legitimize their competitor. But the companies don't seem to get it and think that the consumers are imbeciles and will bite down on whatever BS is spoon fed to them.

source: https://gizmodo.com/arm-takes-down-boneheaded-website-attacking-open-source-1827513230

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/

webpage: https://web.archive.org/web/20180710112443/https://riscv-basics.com/

ScratchCat · July 12, 2018

CTS Labs called, they want their methods back.

2 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

we are highly committed supporters of open source communities in many different areas.”

Edited July 12, 2018 by ScratchCat
Editor misbehaving, ignore quote

AGrider · July 12, 2018

If your products are so marginal that the only effective marketing strategy is to seed the market with derision and trash talk as your major selling points, your products are most likely no better. Trashing on other companies as a marketing tactic looks pretty shitty on any company. What ever happened to advertising that promoted your own products features and uses. You know focus on your OWN products positive points.