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Let’s just assume this happens for a moment. What do Android OEMs do? They can’t use Apple chips, or now Qualcomm chips. Switching to another architecture is a big deal. Would this basically hand the Android market to Samsung and their Exynos chips? Or does another short term viable competitor exist?
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.
MediaTek 9400 is literally the top-performing SoC on the market.
Samsung Exynos 2400, 2400e
MediaTek Dimensity 9400, 9300 Plus, 9300
What am I not seeing here? I think they'll just settle.
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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.
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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.
I don’t think anyone said they don’t exist.
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> 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.
Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture, that was a decade of design and manufacturing already, they VC'ed the independence of the CPU. The staffing and knowledge came from Acorn.
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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 m…
In a way that's also true for the x86->ARM transition, isn't it? I had an MacbookAir 2018. And.. "it was crap" is putting it very, very mildly. Yes it was still better than any Windows laptop I got since and much less of a hassle than any Linux laptop that I'm aware of in my circle. But the gap was really, really small and it cost twice as much. But the most important part for the working of the transition is probabl…
I think a very important part was that even with the Rosetta overhead, most x86 programs were faster on the m1 than on the machines which it would have been replacing. It wasn’t just that you could continue using your existing software with a perf hit; your new laptop actually felt like a meaningful upgrade even before any of your third party software got updated.
I'm wondering because to me as a layman it sounds like it's 'only' a different language, so why is it not that easy to take already existing designs and modify them to 'speak' that language and that's it?
Or is an ISA more than just a different 'language'?
Or is hardware not really the biggest problem, but rather Software like compilers, kernels, etc.?
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> 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.
Raspberry Pi RP2350 already ships with ARM and RISC-V cores. https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/
It seems that the RISC-V cores don't take much space on the chip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192341
Of course, microcontrollers are a different from mobile CPUs, but it's doable.
> If Arm follows through with the license termination, Qualcomm would be prevented from doing its own designs using Arm’s instruction set i'm not sure this is true. certainly "chip" IP has been a real legal quagmire since, forever. but it was my understanding that you could neither patent nor copyright simply an "instruction set". presumably what you get from ARM with an architecture license would be patent licenses…
You can patent something like "any possible hardware circuit that implements [the functionality of some weird yet mandatory ARM instruction]". The patent doesn't cover emulators because they're not hardware. Way back in the day there were some MIPS patents that only covered a few instructions so people would build not-quite-MIPS clone CPUs without paying any royalties.
sheesh, patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US4814976A/en is a real "gem"
but its probably a good example: faulty patent (later invalidated) to do something obvious
MIPS sues a company that doesn't even implement the odd instructions because it traps them, allowing a possibility of emulation.
there's literally no case here
just to sue them into oblivion and squish them with superior cash resources. and then to get squished by ARM because they weren't paying attention.
it's like a dark fairy tale. i hate corporate lawyers.