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

Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 480 posts

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#81

Post by NavinF »

hajile wrote: post #78
nemothekid wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, t…

Interesting, does anyone know what percentage of top Android apps run on RISC-V? I'd expect a lot of apps like games to only have binaries for ARM

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#82

Post by a-dub »

hajile wrote: post #52
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…

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…

is risc-v anywhere near the same efficiency ballpark?

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#83

Post by Pet_Ant »

NavinF wrote: post #81
hajile wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

Interesting, does anyone know what percentage of top Android apps run on RISC-V? I'd expect a lot of apps like games to only have binaries for ARM

Aren’t Android binaries in Dalvik so you only need to port that to get it to run on RISC-V?

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#84

Post by refulgentis »

snvzz wrote: post #38
refulgentis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is officially too much quibbling, even if we settled philosophical questions like "Is Android Linux?" Then "If not, would dropping C make RISC nonviable", there isn't actually an Android version that'll do RISC anywhere near on the horizon. Support _reversed_ for it, got pulled 5 months ago

>Support _reversed_ for it, got pulled 5 months ago Cursory research will yield that this was a technicality with no weight in Google's strong commitment to RISC-V Android support.

If you trust PR (I don't, and I worked on Android for 7 years until a year ago) - this is a nitpick 5 levels down -- regardless of how you weigh it, there is no Android RISC-V

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#85

Post by dagmx »

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.

So which of Microsoft’s false starts would you take as them taking ARM seriously?

Why do you think they’d take RISC-V any more seriously than their previous attempts at ARM?

There are two fallacies to overcome here.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#86

Post by andyferris »

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.

Keep in mind, Apple _did_ actually take a good decade from starting with ARM to leaving x86.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#87

Post by NavinF »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #83
NavinF wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, does anyone know what percentage of top Android apps run on RISC-V? I'd expect a lot of apps like games to only have binaries for ARM

Aren’t Android binaries in Dalvik so you only need to port that to get it to run on RISC-V?

https://developer.android.com/ndk

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#89

Post by MBCook »

jsheard wrote: post #55
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 phones use both, in a very literal sense. Their flagship devices usually have both Snapdragon and Exynos variants for different regions, and their lower end devices are mostly Exynos across the board. The S23 line was an exception in using Snapdragon worldwide, but then the S24 line switched back to using Snapdragon in NA and Exynos everywhere else, except for the S24 Ultra which is still Snapdragon everywher…

Is the Qualcomm chip still considered significantly better than the Exynos? I remember that was the case a few years ago.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#90

Post by dagmx »

snvzz wrote: post #80
Atotalnoob wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you imagine ARM having helped?
Post reply on HN