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Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

bloomberg.com

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Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#71

Post by tightbookkeeper »

svnt wrote: post #64
tightbookkeeper wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Naive question) then is it really a big hurdle for a company who knows how to make arm chips to try making riscv chips?

The question is more of will your customers agree to go along with this major architectural shift that sets you back on price-performance-power curves by at least five years and moves you out of the mainstream of board support packages, drivers, and everything else software-wise for phones. Also we should not pretend that ARM is just going to sit there waiting for RISC-V to catch up.

Yes. This caveat is most clear. I am wondering about the question of performance raised in this thread,

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#72

Post by snvzz »

dagmx wrote: post #43
snvzz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 e…

>The ecosystem is what matters for most people.

Absolutely agree.

The key development Microsoft has demonstrated recently is the ability to run x86 Windows software in non-x86 Windows systems.

Now that this is in place -and will only get better-, there is no longer a chicken and egg situation.

Instead, what we have is a clearly defined path to migrate away from x86.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#73

Post by Atotalnoob »

dagmx wrote: post #43
snvzz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 e…

Arm on windows may date to 2011, but it was mostly a side project with 1-2 maintainers. With sufficient investment, it shouldn’t take 13 years to build up RISC-V support.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#74

Post by [deleted] »

devsda wrote: post #58
gruez wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Samsung still uses qualcomm in US markets and exynos outside US even for their flagships.

[deleted]

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#75

Post by coder543 »

nemothekid wrote: post #62
hajile wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualcomm doesn't have nearly as much to lose as ARM does and they know it. Qualcomm is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer. If ARM loses, Qualcomm doesn't have to pay out. If ARM wins, Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM loses even harder in the long-term. The most likely outcome is that Qualcomm agrees to pay a slight bit more than they are currently paying, but nowhere near what ARM is demanding and in the meantim…

> Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM loses even harder in the long-term. I think long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. How long until: 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM 2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V Unless you are Apple I see such a transition taking a decade easily.

> 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM

Virtually all high performance processors these days operate on their own internal “instructions”. The instruction decoder at the very front of the pipeline that actually sees ARM or RISC-V or whatever is a relatively small piece of logic.

If Qualcomm were motivated, I believe they could swap ISAs relatively easily on their flagship processors, and the rest of the core would be the same level of performance that everyone is used to from Qualcomm.

This isn’t the old days when the processor core was deeply tied to the ISA. Certainly, there are things you can optimize for the ISA to eke out a little better performance, but I don’t think this is some major obstacle like you indicate it is.

> 2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V

#2 is the only sticking point. That is ARM’s only moat as far as Qualcomm is concerned.

Many Android apps don’t depend directly on “native” code, and those could potentially work on day 1. With an ARM emulation layer, those with a native dependency could likely start working too, although a native RISC-V port would improve performance.

If Qualcomm stopped making ARM processors, what alternatives are you proposing? Everyone is switching to Samsung or MediaTek processors?

If Qualcomm were switching to RISC-V, that would be a sea change that would actually move the needle. Samsung and MediaTek would probably be eager to sign on! I doubt they love paying ARM licensing fees either.

But, all of this is a very big “if”. I think ARM is bluffing here. They need Qualcomm.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#76

Post by Atotalnoob »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8
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.

No kidding; and while RISC-V is a massive improvement, I hate to be the wet blanket, but RISC-V will not change signed boot, bootloader restrictions, messy or closed source drivers, carrier requirements, DRM implementation, or other painful day to day paper cuts. Open source architecture != Open source software and certainly != Open source hardware; no matter what the YouTubers think.

Until arm or risc-v fix standardize the bootloader, it’s always going to be a big deal for each arm/risc device added anywhere…

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#77

Post by topspin »

1123581321 wrote: post #61
tightbookkeeper wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Naive question) then is it really a big hurdle for a company who knows how to make arm chips to try making riscv chips?

It’s not a big hurdle so long as they hire Jim Keller to rapidly improve yet another architecture. (Only half-joking.)

Jim Keller is actually working on this right now at Tenstorrent.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#78

Post by hajile »

nemothekid wrote: post #62
hajile wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualcomm doesn't have nearly as much to lose as ARM does and they know it. Qualcomm is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer. If ARM loses, Qualcomm doesn't have to pay out. If ARM wins, Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM loses even harder in the long-term. The most likely outcome is that Qualcomm agrees to pay a slight bit more than they are currently paying, but nowhere near what ARM is demanding and in the meantim…

> Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM loses even harder in the long-term. I think long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. How long until: 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM 2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V Unless you are Apple I see such a transition taking a decade easily.

ARM already did the hard work. Once you've ported your app to ARM, you've no doubt made sure all the ISA-specific bits are isolated while the rest is generic and portable. This means you already know where to go and what to change and hopefully already have testing in place to make sure your changes work correctly.

Aside from the philosophy, lots of practical work has been done and is ongoing. On the systems level, there has already been massive ongoing work. Alibaba for example ported the entirety of Android to RISC-V then handed it off to Google. Lots of other big companies have tons of coders working on porting all kinds of libraries to RISC-V and progress has been quite rapid.

And of course, it is worth pointing out that an overwhelming majority of day-to-day software is written in managed languages on runtimes that have already been ported to RISC-V.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#79

Post by zbshqoa »

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.

Ah? ARM doesn't build chips but provides the architecture and license it to other companies.

There are plenty of ARM chips designed by multiple companies and built by multiple foundries

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#80

Post by snvzz »

Atotalnoob wrote: post #73
dagmx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Arm on windows may date to 2011, but it was mostly a side project with 1-2 maintainers. With sufficient investment, it shouldn’t take 13 years to build up RISC-V support.

This.

It is evident to anybody paying attention that Microsoft has RISC-V support well underway.

But even if they had to start from scratch, it would be much easier, thanks to ARM having paved the way.

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