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

111–120 of 480 posts

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#111

Post by godzillabrennus »

andyferris wrote: post #86
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.

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

Is the transition fully over if the latest MacOS still runs an x86 emulator for old software?

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#112

Post by canucker2016 »

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?

Many games, multimedia apps (native FFMPEG libs), and other apps that require native C/C++ libs would require a recompile/translation for RISC-V.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#113

Post by speed_spread »

fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #98
andyferris wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With 100% control of the stack and an insanely good emulator in Rosetta.

Qualcomm's migration would be much easier than Apple's.

Most of the Android ecosystem already runs on a VM, Dalvik or whatever it's called now. I'm sure Android RISC-V already runs somewhere and I don't see why it would run any worse than on ARM as long as CPUs have equal horsepower.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#114

Post by x0x0 »

coder543 wrote: post #75
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.

> 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…

> 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 that's true, then what is arm licensing to Qualcomm? Just the instruction set or are they licensing full chips?

Sorry for the dumb question / thanks in advance.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#115

Post by snvzz »

duxup wrote: post #107
snvzz wrote: post #13

Bloomberg disappoints by failing to mention RISC-V at all in the entire article. They have to be doing this deliberately, as it's hard to explain otherwise.

If the comments in here are correct, RISC-V is really not an option at this time due to performance.

>due to performance

That would require pretending Ventana Veyron V2, Tenstorrent Ascalon/Alastor, SiFive P870, Akeana 5000-series and others do not exist or do not yet have any customers.

Pretending, because they actually exist, have customers, and are thus bound to show up in actual products anytime now.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#116

Post by dagmx »

zbshqoa wrote: post #79
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

ARM licenses cores for both CPU and GPU, not just the architecture.

There are not “plenty of ARM chips designed by multiple companies”, almost all of them except for Apple (and now Qualcomm) use ARMs off the shelf design.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#117

Post by sgc »

coder543 wrote: post #75
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.

> 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…

Naively, it would seem like it would be as simple as updating android studio and recompiling your app, and you would be good to go? There must be less than 1 in 1000 (probably less than 1 in 10,000) apps that do their own ARM specific optimizations.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#118

Post by MBCook »

philistine wrote: post #105
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.

That's what's magical about Apple. It was a decade-long transition. All the 32-bit code that was removed from macOS back in 2017 was all in preparation for the move in 2019.

Apple has done it multiple times now and has it down to a science.

68k -> PPC -> x86 -> ARM, with the 64 bit transition you mixed in there for good measure (twice!).

Has any other consumer company pulled a full architecture switch off? Companies pulled off leaving Alpha and Sparc but that was servers which has a different software landscape.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#120

Post by refulgentis »

snvzz wrote: post #91
refulgentis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

There is no Android RISC-V. There isn't an Android available to run on RISC-V chips. There is no code to run on RISC-V in the Android source tree, it was all recently actively removed.[1]

Despite your personal feelings about their motivation, these sites were factually correctly relaying what happened to the code, and they went out of their way to say exactly what Google said and respected Google's claim that they remain committed, with 0 qualms.

I find it extremely discomfiting that you are so focused on how the news makes you feel that you're casting aspersions on the people you heard the news from, and ignoring what I'm saying on a completely different matter, because you're keyword matching

I'm even more discomfited that you're being this obstinate about the completely off-topic need for us all to respect Google's strong off-topic statement of support[2] over the fact they removed all the code for it

[1] "Since these patches remove RISC-V kernel support, RISC-V kernel build support, and RISC-V emulator support, any companies looking to compile a RISC-V build of Android right now would need to create and maintain their own fork of Linux with the requisite ACK and RISC-V patches."

[2] "Android will continue to support RISC-V. Due to the rapid rate of iteration, we are not ready to provide a single supported image for all vendors. This particular series of patches removes RISC-V support from the Android Generic Kernel Image (GKI)."

Post reply on HN