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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

#121

Post by snvzz »

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.

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

This would suggest that RISC-V is starting from scratch.

Yet in reality it is well underway; RISC-V is rapidly growing the strongest ecosystem.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#122

Post by lights0123 »

ddingus wrote: post #119

Damn! So what happens to the Raspberry Pi? Edit: OK, following the discussion now. Nothing in the short term, potentially longer term.

The Raspberry Pi uses Broadcom, not Qualcomm chips. It also uses cores designed by Arm, which are not affected by today's news.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#123

Post by monocasa »

a-dub wrote: post #82
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…

is risc-v anywhere near the same efficiency ballpark?

RISC-V is very competitive with ARM when comparing similar PPA niches.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#124

Post by kmeisthax »

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

Funnily enough Qualcomm tried to persuade RISC-V to let them drop compressed instructions. Presumably because they're trying to crowbar a RISC-V decoder onto the Nuvia design and compressed instructions are breaking it somehow.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#125

Post by snvzz »

refulgentis wrote: post #120
snvzz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 re…

[flagged]

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#126

Post by coder543 »

x0x0 wrote: post #114
coder543 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Qualcomm has historically licensed both the instruction set and off the shelf core designs from ARM. Obviously, there is no chance the license for the off the shelf core designs would ever allow Qualcomm to use that IP with a competing instruction set.

In the past, Qualcomm designed their own CPU cores (called Kryo) for smartphone processors, and just made sure they were fully compliant with ARM’s instruction set, which requires an Architecture License, as opposed to the simpler Technology License for a predesigned off the shelf core. Over time, Kryo became “semi-custom”, where they borrowed from the off the shelf designs, and made their own changes, instead of being fully custom.

These days, their smartphone processors have been entirely based on off the shelf designs from ARM, but their new Snapdragon X Elite processors for laptops include fully custom Oryon ARM cores, which is the flagship IP that I was originally referencing. In the past day or two, they announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which will bring Oryon to smartphones.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#127

Post by refulgentis »

snvzz wrote: post #125
refulgentis wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#128

Post by [deleted] »

x0x0 wrote: post #114
coder543 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#129

Post by hajile »

MBCook wrote: post #118
philistine wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't believe any major company has done it. Even Intel failed numerous times to move away from x86 with iAPX432, i960, i860, and Itanium all failing to gain traction.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#130

Post by dagmx »

monocasa wrote: post #110
dagmx wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you imagine ARM having helped?

The x86 emulator for one.

Fair, though I don’t think translation is a good long term strategy. You need native apps otherwise you’re always dealing with a ~20-30% disadvantage.

The competition isn’t sitting still either and QC already hit this with Intel stealing their thunder with Lunar Lake. They’re efficient enough that the difference in efficiency is far overshadowed by their compatibility story.

Ecosystem support will always go to the incumbent and this would place RISC-V third behind x86 and ARM. macOS did this right by saying there’s only one true way forward. It forces adoption.

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