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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

#41

Post by hajile »

bhouston wrote: post #20
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.geekbenc…

We're not quite there yet. A bunch of mission critical stuff like SIMD were only added in the last 2-3 years. As it takes 4-5 years to design/ship high-performance chips, we still have a ways to go.

Ventana Veyron looks interesting. Tenstorrent's upcoming 8-wide design should perform well.

Qualcomm pitched making a bunch of changes to RISC-V that would move it closer to ARM64 and make porting easier, so I think it's an understatement to say that they are considering the idea. If ISA doesn't matter, why pay tons of money for the ISA?

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#42

Post by gruez »

greesil wrote: post #34
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?

Everyone's going to have to buy a Pixel phone, ahahahahaahahha.

Samsung phones are presumably firm as well. They recently switched to snapdragon (qualcomm) chips but before they were using exynos (samsung) chips.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#43

Post by dagmx »

snvzz wrote: post #35
dagmx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe fine for Android but this will set their windows plans back another decade if it happens It has taken them that long to make arm be a thing on windows and that’s building on people porting stuff to arm for Mac to finally get momentum. RISC-V with windows will be an eternity to be feasible.

>RISC-V with windows will be an eternity to be feasible. Will it now? Microsoft was already deeply involved in 2021 as per that years' summit RISC-V Foundation's technical talks. Ztso was pushed by them.

Whether Microsoft has windows running on an architecture is a very different level from whether it’s feasible to use it as a daily driver on windows. The ecosystem is what matters for most people.

Windows for arm hails back to 2011. They’re only just now getting native arm ports for several major packages. That’s ~13 years for a well established architecture that’s used much more universally than RISC-V. They don’t even have arm ports for lots of software that has arm ports on macOS.

RISC-V will take an aeon longer to get a respectable amount of the windows ecosystem ported over.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#44

Post by Narishma »

dv_dt wrote: post #30
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 are probably Risc-V companies eagerly anticipating an opportunity in that space, but I don't know if any are in the performance ballpark right now.

Qualcomm itself is one such company.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#45

Post by chx »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #33

Next week, Qualcomm will likely announce a 64 core RISC-V RVA23. ARM really shouldn't pursue an aggressive posture with lines outside iOS or Win11 ecosystems. The leverage won't hold a position already fractured off a legacy market. =3

1. I am fairly sure games and other performance sensitive apps are using the Android NDK which is not available for RISC-V.

2. I am fairly sure a competitive RISC-V CPU is not days or weeks but years away.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#46

Post by hajile »

bhouston wrote: post #21

And Qualcomm is the only competitive ARM chip on the market besides Apple's. And now they are being taken out by ARM. Is it really that expensive to re-license things? This seems self-defeating.

Now that the Nvidia deal has fallen through, SoftBank is trying to ramp up profitability while continuing to search for another buyer.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#47

Post by mappu »

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.

Without (complete) kernel sources, they're already e-waste.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#49

Post by dagmx »

snvzz wrote: post #11
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's been involved with RISC-V for several years now. If anything, ARM is the plan B that they'll likely end up abandoning.

It’s a bit much to say their primary product that they’ve done for decades is a plan B. By definition it cannot be a plan B if it’s executed first and is successful.

I think a lot of RISC-V advocates are perhaps a little too over eager in their perception of the landscape.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#50

Post by chasil »

mushufasa wrote: post #36

Qualcomm is known for having a particularly aggressive & hardball-style legal department to enforce its patents on core telecom IP. I believe the most likely outcome is they just settle the dispute here. Arm fighting hardball with hardball. Which would not really affect the ecosystem of phones using Qualcomm arm chips, it would just change the margins / market cap of Qualcomm. Yes, longterm Q might invest in their ow…

The phones haven't been custom ARM chips since 32-bit Krait, IIRC.

This is about Nuvia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krait_(processor)

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