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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

#141

Post by snvzz »

dagmx wrote: post #130
monocasa wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

>You need native apps

For native apps, you need users. For users, you need emulation.

It cannot be overstated how important successful x86 emulation is for the migration to anything else to be feasible.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#142

Post by gonzo »

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…

> Qualcomm is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer.

You think Qualcomm is larger than Apple?

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#143

Post by qiqitori »

bhouston wrote: post #20
talldayo wrote: post #2

Could be the best thing that's ever happened for RISC-V!

Most people do not realize how slow RISC-V is right now. Yes, it will definitely get better, but it will take some time given how far behind it is. Like 30x slower than a top of the line Apple Mx series CPU. Maybe there is a high performing RISC-V chip out there but I haven't yet run into one. RISC-V benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=RISC-V . Compare to an Apple M4 benchmark: https://browser.geekbenc…

There is a chip out there that contains both an ARM and a RISC-V core, the RP2350. It's reasonable to assume that the ARM part and RISC-V part are manufactured in the same process. There are some benchmarks pitting the two against each other on e.g. this page: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=375268

For a generic logic workload like Fibo(24), the performance is essentially the same (quote from above page):

    Average Runtime = 0.020015 Pico 2
    Average Runtime = 0.019015 Pico 2 RiscV
Note that neither core on the RP2350 comes with advanced features like SIMD.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#144

Post by saagarjha »

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

#145

Post by Joel_Mckay »

kmeisthax wrote: post #124
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.

They should buy the intel alumni founded RISC-V startup, and pour resources into a RVA23 based chip with dual on-chip SDR asic sections (they have the IP).

i.e. create a single open-chip solution for mid-tier mobile communication platforms.

They won't do this due to their cellular chip line interests. However, even if it just ran a bare bones Linux OS... it would open up entire markets. =3

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#146

Post by snvzz »

MBCook wrote: post #134
snvzz wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

>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.

x86 emulation enables adoption.

Adoption means having an user base.

Having an user base means developers will consider making the platform a target.

>Saying “Ha ha, just kidding, it’s RISC-V now” would be a disaster.

Would it now? If anything, offering RISC-V support as well would further reinforce the idea that Windows is ISA-independent, and not tied to x86 anymore.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#147

Post by javawizard »

gonzo wrote: post #142
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 is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer. You think Qualcomm is larger than Apple?

Apple has (to a first approximation) a royalty-free license to ARM IP by virtue of the fact that they co-founded ARM - so yes, Qualcomm is most likely paying ARM more than Apple is.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#148

Post by IshKebab »

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…

1. That doesn't mean you can just slap a RISC-V decoder on an ARM chip and it will magically work though. The semantics of the instructions and all the CSRs are different. It's going to be way more work than you're implying.

But Qualcomm have already been working on RISC-V for ages so I wouldn't be too surprised if they already have high performance designs in progress.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#149

Post by msh »

monocasa wrote: post #123
a-dub wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is risc-v anywhere near the same efficiency ballpark?

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

High performance and low power laptop and phone SoC’s, no way. There exists no competitive risc-v chip.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#150

Post by IshKebab »

phkahler wrote: post #92
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 Done. Qualcomm is currently gunning for Intel. 2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V Android phones use a virtual machine which is largely ported already. Linux software is largely already ported.

2. Except games...

But ARM and RISC-V are relatively similar and it's easy to add custom instructions to RISC-V to make them even more similar if you want so you could definitely do something like Rosetta.

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