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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

#131

Post by coder543 »

sgc wrote: post #117
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…

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.

Without any ARM specific optimizations, most apps wouldn’t even have to recompile and resubmit. Android apps are uploaded as bytecode, which is then AOT compiled by Google’s cloud service for the different architectures, from what I understand. Google would just have to decide to support another target, and Google has already signaled their intent to support RISC-V with Android.

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023/10/android-and-risc-v...

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#132

Post by snvzz »

dagmx wrote: post #49
snvzz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Typo. Meant to write "ARM is the plan A that they'll likely end up abandoning".

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#133

Post by KRAKRISMOTT »

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

The thing about RISC-V is that they indirectly have the R&D coffers of the Chinese government backing them for strategic reasons. They are the hardware equivalent of Uber's scale-first-make-money later strategy. This is not a competition that ARM can win purely relying on their existing market dominance.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#134

Post by MBCook »

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.

Like everything else, it doesn’t matter much. Windows ran on Itanium, Alpha, and as pointed out ARM for over a decade.

Without the ISVs, it’s a flop for consumers.

MS has had an abysmal time getting them to join in on ARM, only starting to have a little success now. Saying “Ha ha, just kidding, it’s RISC-V now” would be a disaster. That’s the kind of rug pull that helped kill Windows Mobile.

Emulators aren’t good enough. They’re a stop gap. Unless the new chip is so much better than the old it’s faster with emulation then the old one was native no one will accept it long. Apple’s been there, but that’s not where MS sits today.

And if your emulator is too good, what stops ISVs from saying “you did it for us, we don’t have to care”? So once again they don’t have to do it at all and you have no native software.

MS can’t drop their ARM push unless they want to drop all non-x86 initiatives for a long time.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#135

Post by saagarjha »

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.

> Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM

That’s what Oryon is, in theory.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#136

Post by snvzz »

nahnahno wrote: post #7
dietr1ch wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's already a great thing for RISC-V, imagine things somehow go well for Qualcomm, do you really think they wouldn't prepare a plan B given ARM tried to get them out of the market?

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.

It would be naive to think that Qualcomm is only starting its RISC-V effort today and from scratch.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#138

Post by MBCook »

hajile wrote: post #129
MBCook wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For Apple it was do or die the first few times. Until x86, if they didn’t move they’d just be left in the dust and their market would disappear.

The ARM transition wasn’t strictly necessary like the last ones. It had huge benefits for them, so it makes sense, but they also knew what they were doing by then.

In your examples (which are great) Intel wasn’t going to die. They had backups, and many of those seem guided more by business goals than a do-or-die situation.

I wonder if that’s part of why they failed.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#139

Post by saagarjha »

speed_spread wrote: post #113
fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NDK exists.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#140

Post by saagarjha »

snvzz wrote: post #103
topspin wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ascalon (claiming Zen5-tier performance) is done, and has been available for licensing for about a year now. It was then made public that LG bought a license right away.

It’s easy to claim a lot of things.
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