EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: brucehoult on April 02, 2023, 12:20:43 am
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Found on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35405463 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35405463)
http://arm2riscv.com/ (http://arm2riscv.com/)
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Either they are pivoting towards RISC-V or (imo) much more likely it's a Microsoft-style FUD campaign ("Linux - Get the Facts Straight" and other examples) against RISC-V listing all the reasons you shouldn't jump ship towards RISC-V. I think Arm are very worried about RISC-V as it's very possible that a free-as-in-freedom architecture could be competitive. It would only take a big OEM, like Samsung or Apple, announcing they were ditching ARM for RISC-V to really rock the boat. Conversely, it would be a fairly open move for Arm to get involved with RISC-V, though probably welcome.
I'm also seeing a few job ads in my area for companies looking for ASIC/HDL/verification engineers to develop alternatives to Mali GPUs that interoperate with RISC-V. That could be an interesting area to watch. Specifically, I think this could relate to this story (https://www.semianalysis.com/p/arm-changes-business-model-oem-partners), where Arm has said that they will not allow alternatives to Mali to be used within ARM devices. IMO, that kind of behaviour is just suicide from a business perspective, for a company that has previously depended upon a very open ecosystem to support them. It's crazy to think how much damage SoftBank may have done to a British engineering institution within a decade. There is speculation that SoftBank's CEO is extremely bitter over the Nvidia takeover deal being canned by the UK government, as it may have given them a way out of the mess they got into in the first place over Arm (it could be argued they paid too much for the company).
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So, the whole evidence is that they have the same registrar? Sounds pretty weak.
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Some may remember ARM's "riscv-basics.com" site in July 2018. It was taken down two days later, and they've even removed it from the Internet Archive, but something has been preserved:
https://github.com/arm-facts/arm-basics.com/blob/master/index.md
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arm-facts/arm-basics.com/master/assets/img/riscv-basics.com-screenshot.jpg
At that time the only RISC-V hardware you could buy was SiFive's Arduino-like HiFive1 and their brand new a couple of months earlier $999 HiFive Unleashed quad core 1.5 GHz Linux board.
The Kendryte K210 wasn't announced yet. The Gigadevice GD32VF103 wasn't announced yet.
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So, the whole evidence is that they have the same registrar? Sounds pretty weak.
Everything in the registration is redacted so it's kind of hard to know. Except "Organization: ARM Limited", which I guess anyone could put.
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And the original arm.com has even that hidden. So, there is that difference.
It is also interesting that they can selectively hide some fields. All registrars I used only had an all-or-nothing privacy setting.
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Should be pretty fun if that happened.
But the more fun will be when Microsoft buys Canonical. :popcorn:
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And the original arm.com has even that hidden. So, there is that difference.
It is also interesting that they can selectively hide some fields. All registrars I used only had an all-or-nothing privacy setting.
There seems to be a domain name transfer (https://dnshistory.org/historical-dns-records/ns/arm2riscv.com) to that registry shortly after the arm2riscv project (https://github.com/schorrm/arm2riscv) went up on Github....
Does anyone know of other ARM domain purchases that redirect to arm.com? That's the DNS info I want to see....
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I'm pretty sure that the project and the domain are not related to each other. The project just seems to be some one-off research thing with very little activity past the release..
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It has been pointed out in another forum that in fact ARM *does* own the domain. No question about it at all. They were awarded it in a WIPO trademark claim.
https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/case.jsp?case=D2022-1116 (https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/case.jsp?case=D2022-1116)
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So, the transfer happened because they won the claim. They did not actively register it or want it. So, nothing to see here. I bet they own a ton of random domains like that.
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This was an April Fools joke, but arm2riscv.com actually being owed by ARM and redirecting to their domain is a pretty good self-own in my book : )
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This was an April Fools joke, but arm2riscv.com actually being owed by ARM and redirecting to their domain is a pretty good self-own in my book : )
While a joke, they should probably reflect on what happened to MIPS before getting too joyful.
::)
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This was an April Fools joke, but arm2riscv.com actually being owed by ARM and redirecting to their domain is a pretty good self-own in my book : )
Owning it, either preemptively or getting it in a trademark dispute as we have learned, sure. But then simply pointing it to the Arm home page without its own landing page with some short explanation?