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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

#151

Post by MBCook »

snvzz wrote: post #146
MBCook wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Anymore? It’s been independent since the 90s. It’s only ISVs that have been an issue.

And a rug pull is a fantastic way to scare all the ISVs far far away.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#152

Post by snvzz »

saagarjha wrote: post #140
snvzz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>It’s easy to claim a lot of things.

It certainly is easy to casually spread fear and doubt.

But it is really far-fetched to think that the people at Tenstorrent, who have successfully delivered very high performance microarchitectures in other companies before, are lying about Ascalon, and that LG is helping them do that.

It would even be more far fetched to claim that Ventana Veyron V2, SiFive P870, Akeana 5000-series, all of them available high performance IP, are lying about performance.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#153

Post by saagarjha »

snvzz wrote: post #152
saagarjha wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to claim a lot of things.

>It’s easy to claim a lot of things. It certainly is easy to casually spread fear and doubt. But it is really far-fetched to think that the people at Tenstorrent, who have successfully delivered very high performance microarchitectures in other companies before, are lying about Ascalon, and that LG is helping them do that. It would even be more far fetched to claim that Ventana Veyron V2, SiFive P870, Akeana 5000-ser…

[flagged]

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#154

Post by IshKebab »

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…

You're confusing the ISA with the chip. Current RISC-V chips are slower than high performance ARM ones, but that's because you don't start by designing high performance chips! You start with small embedded cores and work your way up.

Exactly the same thing happened with ARM. It started in embedded, then phones, and finally laptops and servers. ARM was never slow, they just hadn't worked up to highly complex high performance designs yet.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#155

Post by x0x0 »

coder543 wrote: post #126
x0x0 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, wh…

thank you for explaining

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#156

Post by coder543 »

IshKebab wrote: post #148
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…

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.

That is a good comment, and I agree things like CSR differences could be annoying, but compared to the engineering challenges of designing the Oryon cores from scratch… I still think the scope of work would be relatively small. I just don’t think Qualcomm seriously wants to invest in RISC-V unless ARM forces them to.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#157

Post by dzaima »

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]

Here are the actual commits that all the fuss was about: https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/kernel/build/+/306... and those at https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/topic:%22ack_riscv...

It's certainly more than just disabling a build type - it's actually removing a decent bit of configuration options and even TODO comments. Then again, it's not actually removing anything particularly significant, and even has a comment of "BTW, this has nothing to do with kernel build, but only related to CC rules. Do we still want to delete this?". Presumably easy to revert later, and might even just be a revert itself.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#158

Post by imp0cat »

plussed_reader wrote: post #19
magnio wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MediaTek is still available.

I notice how 'viable' isn't an operative in your statement.

They've come a long way, Samsung is apparently considering Mediatek chips for their next flagship phone (S25).

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#159

Post by electronbeam »

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 should put a giant bid on SiFive tomorrow, to remind ARM that its not unassailable

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#160

Post by kijin »

MBCook wrote: post #89
jsheard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Last time I checked, the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon was faster and more energy efficient than the latest Exynos. Especially the top-binned chips that Samsung gets.

Still, the fact that Samsung can swap out the chip in their flagship product with virtually no change other than slightly different benchmark scores means that these chips are pretty much fungible. If either manufacturer runs into serious problems, the other one is ready to eat their market share for lunch.

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