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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

#191

Post by t43562 »

starspangled wrote: post #93
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…

Just the impact of making this move will have a chilling effect, regardless of the long term outome. ARM Ltd wants to position itself as the ISA. It is highly proprietary of course, but the impression they want to give is that it is "open" and freely available, no lock-in, etc. This really brings the reality back into focus that ARM controls it with an iron fist, and they're not above playing political games and sidi…

Qualcomm is slightly bigger than ARM so it seems like a fair fight to me. Does Qualcomm police it's IP at all?

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#192

Post by haerwu »

lizknope wrote: post #69
chasil wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phones haven't been custom ARM chips since 32-bit Krait, IIRC. This is about Nuvia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krait_(processor)

Snapdragon 805 had a 32-bit Krait designed by Qualcomm https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartpho... 810 had a 64-bit core designed by ARM https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartpho... 820/821 had a 64-bit Kryo custom core designed by Qualcomm https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartpho... After that it was all cores from ARM. The custom CPU team worked on their se…

When you look at https://gpages.juszkiewicz.com.pl/arm-socs-table/arm-socs.ht... table then you can see that in Snapdragon 8xx series the first "ARM cores out of shelf" was 888 in 2020.

865 (2019) has Cortex-A77 + Kryo 4xx Silver 888 (2002) uses Cortex-X1 + Cortex-A78 + Cortex-A55 cores

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#193

Post by happymellon »

billti wrote: post #188
happymellon wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify for those that don't know ARMs history, Acorn were building computers and designing CPUs before they spun out the CPU design portion. 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.

> Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture I believe they had a big hand in ARM64. Though best reference I can find right now is this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368489

Oh, I was just wanting to clarify the "Apple co-founded".

They had the Newton project, found ARM did a better job than the other options, but there were a few missing pieces. They funded the spun out project so they could throw ARM a few new requirements for the CPU design.

As a "cofounder" of ARM, they didn't contribute technical experience and the architecture did already exist.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#194

Post by t43562 »

SushiHippie wrote: post #178

Because of all the discussions in the comments about ARM and RISC-V, could someone explain to me the difficulties of designing a chip for a new ISA? 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…

Your view even of human languages is simplistic. Forgive me, I don't mean to be rude, I'm just trying to explain.

You might think that languages are just have different words for the same things.

In reality the problems are where the same things don't exist. People don't view the world the same way and don't have an equivalent word. In Turkish it's very important whether your aunt is on your mother's side or your father's side so there are different words for each....but there's no words for "he" or "she" as they don't bother with gender in sentences.

So for example every conversation converted from Turkish to English loses an important bit of meaning about relationships and the sex of a person has to be inferred from context which is not easy to do automatically.

Similarly computer software....and there's a lot of it.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#195

Post by f1shy »

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 moves to RISC-V and ARM

That is a HUGE cost!

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#196

Post by eigenform »

coder543 wrote: post #156
IshKebab wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I just don’t think Qualcomm seriously wants to invest in RISC-V unless ARM forces them to.

That makes a lot of sense. RISC-V is really not at all close to being at parity with ARM. ARM has existed for a long time, and we are only now seeing it enter into the server space, and into the Microsoft ecosystem. These things take a lot of time.

> I still think the scope of work would be relatively small

I'm not so sure about this. Remember that an ISA is not just a set of instructions: it defines how virtual memory works, what the memory model is like, how security works, etc. Changes in those things percolate through the entire design.

Also, I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that verification of a very high-powered RISC-V core that is going to be manufactured in high-volume is probably much more expensive and time-consuming than the case for an ARM design.

edit: I also forgot about the case with Qualcomm's failed attempt to get code size extensions. Using RVC to approach parity on code density is expensive, and you're going to make the front-end of the machine more complicated. Going out on another limb: this is probably not unrelated to the reason why THUMB is missing from AArch64.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#197

Post by darksaints »

saagarjha wrote: post #139
speed_spread wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The companies with large relevant apps running on the NDK are well staffed and funded enough to recompile.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#198

Post by m463 »

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 doesn't have nearly as much to lose as ARM does and they know it.

question: isn't arm somewhat apple?

...Advanced RISC Machines Limited and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI Technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Founding

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#199

Post by ajb »

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.

IBM also did it, with mainframes. But otherwise, no.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#200

Post by smolder »

tacticus wrote: post #100
refulgentis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're pretty good. Just can't beat qualcomm / Apple flagship. So around Intel level ;)

300W in a phone chip is a bit toasty.

Intel's latest Arrow Lake stuff, about to go on sale, is said to have much better power efficiency, FWIW. Something like half the wattage for roughly equivalent benchmark results, according to them.
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