Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 82 posts

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#51

Post by monocasa »

treyd wrote: post #40
crote wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 firmwar…

That just sounds like uboot.

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#53

Post by FirmwareBurner »

hashtag-til wrote: post #47
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…

I actually heard good things from friends working at NXP. Long term career incentives, good salary, training and incentives to collaborate to OSS… quite good signs to me

In which country/division?

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#54

Post by szundi »

nomilk wrote: post #11
crote wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet that is just a matter of multinationals not wanting to bother with tiny startups. Unless you are ordering hundreds of thousands of chips, they are not even going to respond to your emails. You just aren't worth their time, so they except you to stick to public documentation, buy their dev kit, and figure out out on your own. Want to use a part without public documentation? Tough luck!

I have no idea if it's a lot or not, but for reference, Comma's initial (trial) order was for 10k chips.

That’s nothing in automotive

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#55

Post by FirmwareBurner »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #37
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…

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

No idea what's SNPS and how to help you with that.

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#57

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #7
5ADBEEF wrote: post #2

Qualcomm, Nordic, NXP, Infineon, Bosch. Wonder what the value add for smaller companies is. Nordic is incorporating RISC-V cores into their new part but they have never done automotive certs before. also Qualcomm and Nordic partnering is like cats and dogs living together lol

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.

> "That leaves only RISC-V for those who want to make their own processors without paying someone for the privilege."

OpenSPARC? OpenPOWER? There are plenty of solid open ISAs for anyone who wants to do that.

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#58

Post by constantcrying »

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 think you can tell a lot from the companies themselves.

It seems extremely likely that the goal is to create a RISC-V ecosystem, which ranges from design, to chips, to endproducts in automotive.

To rival ARM you need an actual competitive industrial product.

- You need to define use-cases "what chips does a car need?", specific technical requirements "what communication, what instruction sets, what speed, etc.?"

- Figure out how produce chips at scale

- Create suitable development environments, libraries and integration into other buisiness tools

-Use that tooling to create an embedded product

ARM has all of that in their ecosystem, RISC-V does not. None of the companies listed can do all of that on their own. If they want to compete with ARM they need to compete with the entire ARM ecosystem and it seems that is their goal.

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#59

Post by lnsru »

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?

There are insane deadlines in semiconductor industry. We started many times already being too late to make main customer happy. I was able to catchup couple times doing 55-65 hour weeks. But it gets slowly normal practice instead of exception.

Tooling is also very specific. There are gazillions of scripts written in all possible languages for all sorts of semiconductors. Some colleagues will happily backstab you not sharing information about their tools.

Re: Qualcomm starts a RISC-V joint venture

#60

Post by FirmwareBurner »

lnsru wrote: post #59
aborsy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are insane deadlines in semiconductor industry. We started many times already being too late to make main customer happy. I was able to catchup couple times doing 55-65 hour weeks. But it gets slowly normal practice instead of exception. Tooling is also very specific. There are gazillions of scripts written in all possible languages for all sorts of semiconductors. Some colleagues will happily backstab you not…

>Some colleagues will happily backstab you not sharing information about their tools

Oh yeah, that sounds familiar.

Post reply on HN