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Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

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Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#11

Post by snvzz »

nahnahno wrote: post #7
dietr1ch wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's already a great thing for RISC-V, imagine things somehow go well for Qualcomm, do you really think they wouldn't prepare a plan B given ARM tried to get them out of the market?

I don’t think they have a plan B. Architectures take half a decade of work. Porting from risc-v to arm is not a matter of a backup plan, it’s that of a very costly pivot.

Qualcomm's been involved with RISC-V for several years now.

If anything, ARM is the plan B that they'll likely end up abandoning.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#12

Post by mkl »

nahnahno wrote: post #7
dietr1ch wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's already a great thing for RISC-V, imagine things somehow go well for Qualcomm, do you really think they wouldn't prepare a plan B given ARM tried to get them out of the market?

I don’t think they have a plan B. Architectures take half a decade of work. Porting from risc-v to arm is not a matter of a backup plan, it’s that of a very costly pivot.

Qualcomm has been working on RISC-V for a while, at outwardly-small scale. It's probably intended as a long-term alternative rather than a ready-to-go plan B. From a year ago: "The most exciting part for us at Qualcomm Technologies is the ability to start with an open instruction set. We have the internal capabilities to create our own cores — we have a best-in-class custom central processing unit (CPU) team, and with RISC-V, we can develop, customize and scale easily." -- https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2023/09/what-is-risc-v-and..., more: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qualcomm+risc-v&t=fpas&ia=web

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#14

Post by brucehoult »

nahnahno wrote: post #7
dietr1ch wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's already a great thing for RISC-V, imagine things somehow go well for Qualcomm, do you really think they wouldn't prepare a plan B given ARM tried to get them out of the market?

I don’t think they have a plan B. Architectures take half a decade of work. Porting from risc-v to arm is not a matter of a backup plan, it’s that of a very costly pivot.

Qualcomm have a Plan B.

This time last year they were all over the RISC-V mailing lists, trying to convince everyone to drop the "C" extension from RVA23 because (basically confirmed by their employees) it was not easy to retrofit mildly variable length RISC-V instructions (2 bytes and 4 bytes) to the Aarch64 core they acquired from Nuvia.

At the same time, Qualcomm proposed a new RISC-V extension that was pretty much ARMv8-lite.

The proposed extension was actually not bad, and could very reasonably be adopted.

Dropping "C" overnight and thus making all existing Linux software incompatible is completely out of the question. RISC-V will eventually need a deprecation policy and procedure -- and the "C" extension could potentially be replaced by something else -- but you wouldn't find anyone who thinks the deprecated-but-supported period should be less than 10 years.

So they'd have to support both "C" and its replacement anyway.

Qualcomm tried to make a case that decoding two instruction widths is too hard to do in a very wide (e.g. 8) instruction decoder. Everyone else working on designs in that space ... SiFive, Rivos, Ventana, Tenstorrent ... said "nah, it didn't cause us any problems". Qualcomm jumped on a "we're listening, tell us more" from Rivos as being support for dropping "C" .. and were very firmly corrected on that.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#15

Post by magnio »

MBCook wrote: post #10

Let’s just assume this happens for a moment. What do Android OEMs do? They can’t use Apple chips, or now Qualcomm chips. Switching to another architecture is a big deal. Would this basically hand the Android market to Samsung and their Exynos chips? Or does another short term viable competitor exist?

MediaTek is still available.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#16

Post by jjpprrrr »

MBCook wrote: post #10

Let’s just assume this happens for a moment. What do Android OEMs do? They can’t use Apple chips, or now Qualcomm chips. Switching to another architecture is a big deal. Would this basically hand the Android market to Samsung and their Exynos chips? Or does another short term viable competitor exist?

There is MTK that offers the Dimensity series SoCs with Arm cores. Qcom can also go back to using Arm Cortex cores in the next Snapdragon SoC.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#17

Post by jsheard »

MBCook wrote: post #10

Let’s just assume this happens for a moment. What do Android OEMs do? They can’t use Apple chips, or now Qualcomm chips. Switching to another architecture is a big deal. Would this basically hand the Android market to Samsung and their Exynos chips? Or does another short term viable competitor exist?

This move doesn't stop Qualcomm from licensing ARMs reference cores, it only blocks them from designing their own in-house ARM cores like Apple does. The vast majority of Qualcomm chips currently on the market are built around reference cores, they only recently got back into the custom core game with their acquisition of Nuvia which also kicked off this dispute with ARM.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#18

Post by wmf »

brucehoult wrote: post #14
nahnahno wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they have a plan B. Architectures take half a decade of work. Porting from risc-v to arm is not a matter of a backup plan, it’s that of a very costly pivot.

Qualcomm have a Plan B. This time last year they were all over the RISC-V mailing lists, trying to convince everyone to drop the "C" extension from RVA23 because (basically confirmed by their employees) it was not easy to retrofit mildly variable length RISC-V instructions (2 bytes and 4 bytes) to the Aarch64 core they acquired from Nuvia. At the same time, Qualcomm proposed a new RISC-V extension that was pretty muc…

Dropping "C" overnight and thus making all existing Linux software incompatible is completely out of the question.

Android was never really Linux though.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#19

Post by plussed_reader »

magnio wrote: post #15
MBCook wrote: post #10

Let’s just assume this happens for a moment. What do Android OEMs do? They can’t use Apple chips, or now Qualcomm chips. Switching to another architecture is a big deal. Would this basically hand the Android market to Samsung and their Exynos chips? Or does another short term viable competitor exist?

MediaTek is still available.

I notice how 'viable' isn't an operative in your statement.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#20

Post by bhouston »

talldayo wrote: post #2

Could be the best thing that's ever happened for RISC-V!

Most people do not realize how slow RISC-V is right now. Yes, it will definitely get better, but it will take some time given how far behind it is.

Like 30x slower than a top of the line Apple Mx series CPU. Maybe there is a high performing RISC-V chip out there but I haven't yet run into one.

RISC-V benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=RISC-V. Compare to an Apple M4 benchmark: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8224953

That said, RISC-V is good for embedded applications where raw performance isn't a factor. I think no other markets are yet accessible to RISC-V chips until their performance massively improves.

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