Nvidia is interested in buying ARM for a reason - the company and its technologies are developing more actively than ever. There are now more ARM-based chips in production than x86, ARC, Power and MIPS combined.
Billions of devices are powered by ARM chips. Tomshardware estimates that about 6.7 billion ARM-based systems were shipped in the last quarter of 2020 alone. That's 842 chips per second.
What kind of chips are produced
We are talking about Cortex-A, Cortex-R, Cortex-M and Mali IP, on the basis of which hundreds of millions of processors, controllers, microcontrollers, graphics systems are produced from around the world. At the same time, the demand for these chips is constantly growing, plus existing technologies are being improved and new ones appear.
An interesting nuance: despite the fact that the media most often talk about Cortex-A-series chips (based on which popular smartphone models are produced), the best-selling products are the Cortex-M line. They are, one might say, ubiquitous and allow a huge number of systems to operate - from thermometers to spacecraft modules. In the last quarter of 2020 alone, 4.4 billion Cortex-M microcontrollers were shipped.
The overall record of 6.7 billion chips for the quarter was driven by growing demand from ARM partners, including both IoT companies and organizations that make mobile devices or develop supercomputers. In 2020, contracts were signed with 175 new companies.
Who is in second place?
This is not x86 at all, as one might think. Unfortunately, there is no official information from AMD, IBM, Intel, MIPS Technologies, Synopsys and Via Technologies on the production volumes of processors, but, in general, some conclusions can be drawn based on the systems sold.
So, according to Gartner, in 2020 global PC shipments amounted to 275 million units. Servers - about 11.75 million units in 2019. Most desktop PCs use one processor, while servers use two or more. It turns out that the market consumes about 300 million x86 processors per year. If we add game consoles, all sorts of data warehouses, single-board devices, supercomputers, etc. to this, we get 350-360 million x86 processors.
This is not second or third place. The second place after ARM is occupied by Synopsys ARC IP chips, which are not often talked about or written about at all. However, Synopsys is also actively expanding. For example, last year the company introduced new families - DesignWare ARC HS5x and HS6x. They are used in SSD controllers, automotive systems, entertainment devices, communications systems, and more.
As for the third place, it is occupied by MIPS chips. In 2012 alone, about 3.6 billion MIPS-based chips were released. Yes, these systems are not used in high-performance systems like game consoles. Instead, they work in hundreds of millions of microcontrollers, consumer electronics, low-power devices, and the like.
