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Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

arstechnica.com

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Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#31

Post by jkestner »

photonbeam wrote: post #27
gchadwick wrote: post #17

Would be great if they actually provided some details of what this joint venture actually aims to do. Is it developing CPUs and other IP? Will it produce actual chips? Perhaps it's just a way for the various companies to pool money and resources to develop RISC-V standards and ecosystem things (like conformance test suites) and maybe bits of IP? The current info: > aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally b…

I read this as “If you’re reading this ARM, stop raising prices or we’ll replace you”

It’s too late. ARM has shown that it’s no longer a stable partner. Even if it walks the pricing proposal back, everyone knows it’s on the table the next time ARM changes ownership or has to give shareholders a growth story.

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#32

Post by FirmwareBurner »

lnsru wrote: post #28
aborsy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear Qualcomm also doesn’t pay its engineers well. I wonder if that’s true. I certainly see Qualcomm engineers frequently leave and transition to FANG.

Salary in Germany is good compared to regular automotive companies because Qualcomm has this nice stock bonus. Environment is rather toxic. The salary does not compensate that.

> Environment is rather toxic. The salary does not compensate that.

Same with NXP. Salaries and bonuses are very good(by European standards, ignore FAANG wages) but the overtime, work pressure and workplace toxicity makes that a difficult proposition if you can't stomach the ascension to the level where the REAL money starts to come in.

There are indeed people at these big semi companies who can slack off and collect huge paychecks but those are the exception, as some people in the trenches are burning the candle on both ends to make the deadlines of masks reaching the fabs on time.

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#33

Post by FirmwareBurner »

crote wrote: post #13
Dalewyn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

x86 is locked down by Intel and AMD, and ARM demands tribute-- I mean license fees for ARM. That leaves only RISC-V for those who want to make their own processors without paying someone for the privilege. That's the value add.

You could always go for Xtensa, PIC/AVR, or 68k. Still plenty of those around - although ARM has rapidly been eating their lunch the last few years.

PIC and AVR (along with 8051 and 6502 based designs) are still used in current consumer products reusing older designs. Yes, ARM Cortex-M0 can cost the same while offering 2x the processing processing power, but redesigning the PCB and rewriting the entire codebase for a new MCU would offset the processing power gains, which are not needed anyway.

Most white-label consumer goods just need to poll some keypad buttons, react to some interrupts, and turn a relay ON/OFF depending on a simple state machine reading an ADC, where an 8-/16-bit PIC/AVR is more than enough. If they have a built-in DSP even better.

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#34

Post by rwmj »

pgeorgi wrote: post #16
xvilka wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UEFI is a bad choice for embedded. It has too much of the PC quirks, which is mostly irrelevant on ARM or RISC-V. They should have tried to create something new, without x86 cruft.

ARM: "This document defines the Boot and Runtime Services expected by an enterprise platform Operating System or hypervisor, for an SBSA-compliant Arm AArch64 server which follows the UEFI and ACPI specifications." ( https://documentation-service.arm.com/static/5fb7e415d77dd80... ) Also "This document identifies the Arm and industry standard firmware interfaces applicable to the Arm 64-bit architecture. They include…

OpenSBI is open source so hardly comparable to SMM. https://github.com/riscv-software-src/opensbi

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#35

Post by aborsy »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #32
lnsru wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salary in Germany is good compared to regular automotive companies because Qualcomm has this nice stock bonus. Environment is rather toxic. The salary does not compensate that.

> Environment is rather toxic. The salary does not compensate that. Same with NXP. Salaries and bonuses are very good(by European standards, ignore FAANG wages) but the overtime, work pressure and workplace toxicity makes that a difficult proposition if you can't stomach the ascension to the level where the REAL money starts to come in. There are indeed people at these big semi companies who can slack off and collect…

Can you mention examples of toxic practices to better see the situation?

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#36

Post by FirmwareBurner »

aborsy wrote: post #35
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Environment is rather toxic. The salary does not compensate that. Same with NXP. Salaries and bonuses are very good(by European standards, ignore FAANG wages) but the overtime, work pressure and workplace toxicity makes that a difficult proposition if you can't stomach the ascension to the level where the REAL money starts to come in. There are indeed people at these big semi companies who can slack off and collect…

Can you mention examples of toxic practices to better see the situation?

Heavily depends on manager/team/business unit, but the main issue is usually insane workload and insane deadlines on projects that are already late from the moment they start because sales/marketing/execs promised $MAJOR_CUSTOMER something totally unrealistic will be delivered.

The churn level is high. People are constantly fired, let go, or leave after their relocation bonus expires if they don't see any promotions after their tolls.

Lots of "Game of Thrones" backstabbing going on behind the scene inside the org between managers, each trying to get the spotlight for the successes on them to get that sweet promotion, while disregarding their team and workers as disposable commodities that can always be replaced by overseas workers if they don't fall in line and deliver on the impossible deadlines.

The difference in pay between junior and seniors/managers is huge, so they dangle that carrot in front of you so you put up with everything just for the chance of hopefully making it to that level one day.

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#37

Post by RicoElectrico »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #32
lnsru wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salary in Germany is good compared to regular automotive companies because Qualcomm has this nice stock bonus. Environment is rather toxic. The salary does not compensate that.

> Environment is rather toxic. The salary does not compensate that. Same with NXP. Salaries and bonuses are very good(by European standards, ignore FAANG wages) but the overtime, work pressure and workplace toxicity makes that a difficult proposition if you can't stomach the ascension to the level where the REAL money starts to come in. There are indeed people at these big semi companies who can slack off and collect…

Any insider knowledge of other chip companies culture for a someone laid off SNPS, please?

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#38

Post by snvzz »

pgeorgi wrote: post #16
xvilka wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UEFI is a bad choice for embedded. It has too much of the PC quirks, which is mostly irrelevant on ARM or RISC-V. They should have tried to create something new, without x86 cruft.

ARM: "This document defines the Boot and Runtime Services expected by an enterprise platform Operating System or hypervisor, for an SBSA-compliant Arm AArch64 server which follows the UEFI and ACPI specifications." ( https://documentation-service.arm.com/static/5fb7e415d77dd80... ) Also "This document identifies the Arm and industry standard firmware interfaces applicable to the Arm 64-bit architecture. They include…

>SBI, which is RISCV's poor-man's implementation of x86 SMM,

SMM is totally opaque and does whatever it wants, kidnapping the cpu and giving it back after a random amount of time if at all. Fuck determinism or meeting any sort of hard realtime requirements. It hides bugs and architecture details from the OS, and it often can't even be disabled.

SBI serves a similar role, without the opacity. OS can make requests to it through APIs that are part of the spec, and even take over all its roles. It has been co-designed by hardware and software (operating systems and embedded) people across the industry, both companies and independent members. It's not even comparable.

Go read the SBI 1.0 spec, and the SBI 2.0 draft.

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#39

Post by RetroTechie »

photonbeam wrote: post #27
gchadwick wrote: post #17

Would be great if they actually provided some details of what this joint venture actually aims to do. Is it developing CPUs and other IP? Will it produce actual chips? Perhaps it's just a way for the various companies to pool money and resources to develop RISC-V standards and ecosystem things (like conformance test suites) and maybe bits of IP? The current info: > aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally b…

I read this as “If you’re reading this ARM, stop raising prices or we’ll replace you”

Or as "hey ARM, we'll replace you anyway, but if you sweeten the deal we won't hurry"

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#40

Post by treyd »

crote wrote: post #12
baq wrote: post #3

Not a word about uefi or any other kind of standardized booting. Not surprising given the use case list but still disappointing.

Uefi is pretty pointless when your device doesn't even run a full-blown operating system. In the embedded world your software knows exactly what hardware it is going to run on, so uefi is just a waste of time. You only need something like uefi when you start using mostly hardware-independent software, like trying to run Linux on it. A lot of the chips these companies make are not even remotely close to that.

Many of these devices will run Linux though, and it's becomming increasingly more common as even the low end chips are pretty capable nowadays. It could be worthwhile to build some lightweight alternative to UEFI that just handles disk identification and handing off a devtree to whatever bootloader comes after it instead of implementing the behemoth of a spec that is all of UEFI. Call it "LWFI", "light-weight firmware interface"?
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