Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 480 posts

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#201

Post by starspangled »

t43562 wrote: post #191
starspangled wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Qualcomm is slightly bigger than ARM so it seems like a fair fight to me.

I'm not really sure what you're responding to. It's got nothing to do with size whether or not something is fair, it's what is in the contract. None of us know exactly what's there so if it becomes disputed then a court is going to have to decide what is fair.

But that was entirely not the point of my comment though. I'm talking about how corporations looking to make chips or get into the ecosystem view ARM and its behavior with its architecture and licensing. ARM Ltd might well be in the right here by the letter of their contracts, but that canceling their customer's license (ostensibly if not actually siding with another customer who is in competition with the first) is just not a good look for positioning they are going for.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#202

Post by ajb »

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.

Nevertheless, several companies that originally had MIPS implementations did exactly this, to implement ARM processors.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#203

Post by biosboiii »

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…

Thing is businesses don't work like side-projects do.

Qualcomm is more or less a research company, the main cost of their business is paying engineers to build their modems/SoCs/processors/whatever.

They have been working with ARM for the last, I dont know, 20 years? Even if they manage to switch to RISC-V, and each employee has negative performance impact of like 15% for 2-3 years this ends up in billions of dollars, because you have to hire more people or lose speed.

If corporate would force me to work with idk Golang instead of TypeScript I could certainly manage to do so, but I would be slower for a while, and if you extrapolate that on an entire company this is big $$.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#204

Post by dagmx »

PhilippGille wrote: post #190

Most comments here seem to think that Qualcomm has to settle or switch to RISC-V. But from my understanding the article is only about their license to design custom chips with ARM IP, not about using ARM's designs. For example the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 uses 1 ARM Cortex-X2, 3 ARM Cortex-A710 and 4 ARM Cortex-A510, which are ARM designs. Their latest announced chip though, Snapdragon 8 Elite, uses 8 Oryon cores, which Qu…

They’re only losing their license to make custom cores. They’re still free to use ARMs own cores.

The reason being that ARM gave Nuvia a license to design cores at a specific rate, then Qualcomm bought them to use those cores. ARM claims that the license to design cores does not have a transferable rate to it.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#205

Post by HeuristicsCG »

dagmx wrote: post #116
zbshqoa wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah? ARM doesn't build chips but provides the architecture and license it to other companies. There are plenty of ARM chips designed by multiple companies and built by multiple foundries

ARM licenses cores for both CPU and GPU, not just the architecture. There are not “plenty of ARM chips designed by multiple companies”, almost all of them except for Apple (and now Qualcomm) use ARMs off the shelf design.

Also NPU

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#206

Post by immibis »

darksaints wrote: post #197
saagarjha wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NDK exists.

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

it's not about that, it's about running the apps whose makers are out of business or just find it easier to tell their customers to buy different phones

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#208

Post by mytailorisrich »

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…

On modem side they can move to whatever they want without impacts. But on the apps side they need to run Linux/Android/Windows/etc so are dependent on Arm.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#209

Post by The_Colonel »

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…

> Everyone is switching to Samsung or MediaTek processors?

Why not? MediaTek is very competitive these days.

It would certainly perform better than a RISC-V decoder slapped onto a core designed for ARM having to run emulation for games (which is pretty much the main reason why you need a lot of performance on your phones).

Adopting RISC-V is also a risk for the phone producers like Samsung. How much of their internal tooling (e.g. diagnostics, build pipelines, testing infrastructure) are built for ARM? How much will performance suffer, and how much will customers care? Why take that risk (in the short/medium term) instead of just using their own CPUs (they did it in some generations) or use MediaTek (many producers have experience with them already)?

Phone producers will be happy to jump to RISC-V over the long term given the right incentives, but I seriously doubt they will be eager to transition quickly. All risks, no benefits.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#210

Post by brucehoult »

eggsome wrote: post #183
brucehoult wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualcomm have a Plan B. This time last year they were all over the RISC-V mailing lists, trying to convince everyone to drop the "C" extension from RVA23 because (basically confirmed by their employees) it was not easy to retrofit mildly variable length RISC-V instructions (2 bytes and 4 bytes) to the Aarch64 core they acquired from Nuvia. At the same time, Qualcomm proposed a new RISC-V extension that was pretty muc…

What do you mean by Plan B? From what you've just said it sounds like their proposal was rejected, so there is no plan b now?

They can roll their sleeves up and do the small amount of work that they tried to persuade everyone else was not necessary. And I'm sure they will have done so.

It's not that hard to design a wide decoder that can decode mixed 2-byte and 4-byte instructions from a buffer of 32 or 64 bytes in a clock cycle. I've come up with the basic schema for it and written about it here and on Reddit a number of times. Yeah, it's a little harder than for pure fixed-width Arm64, but it is massively massively easier than for amd64.

Not that anyone is going that wide at the moment. SiFive's P870 fetched 36 bytes/cycle from L1 icache, but decodes a maximum of 6 instructions from it. Ventana's Veyron v2 decodes 16 bytes per clock cycle into 4-8 instructions (average about 6 on random code).

Post reply on HN