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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

#211

Post by mrweasel »

SG- wrote: post #68
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

you think they can just flip a RISC-V switch and keep all the performance instantly? I can't really understand the logic from some people here.

People also seem to forget that everything needs to be ported. If you're an Android manufacturer, you're not going to stop shipping phones, waiting for the Android RISC-V to catch-up to ARM, or for RISC-V to get the speed and features of current ARM CPUs. You're going to buy ARM processors from another vendor.

The Windows ARM port is going to take even longer, I doubt that Microsoft has that working at anything beyond research stage, if that.

Getting the RISC-V ecosystem up to par with ARM is going to take years.

If you want to spin this in RISC-Vs favor, then yes, forcing a company like Qualcomm to switch would speed things up, but it might also give them a bit of a stranglehold on the platform, in the sense that they'd be the dominant platform, with all of their own customisations.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#213

Post by tails4e »

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…

The transition to RISC-V depends entirely on how much of the cpu core susbstem is from ARM. The ISA itself is one part, there are branch predictors, l1,l2 and 3 caches, MMUs, virtualization, vector extensions, the pipeline architecture, etc etc. So moving away from ARM means they need performant replacements for all that.

I'm sure there are folks like SiFive that have much of this, but how is it competitively I don't know, and how the next snapdragon would compete if even one of those areas is lacking... Interesting times.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#214

Post by Brian_K_White »

nemothekid wrote: post #62
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 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.

Switches like that are major, but get easier every year, and are easier today than they were yesterday, as everyones tools at all levels up and down both the hardware and software stacks get more powerful all the time.

It's an investment with a cost and a payoff like any other investment.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#216

Post by pjmlp »

snvzz wrote: post #97
NavinF wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://developer.android.com/ndk

Aren't most applications NOT using the ndk?

Everyone that doesn't want to write Java/Kotlin is using the NDK.

Although from Google's point of view the NDK only purpose is for enabling writing native methods, reuse of C and C++ libraries, games and real time audio, from point of view of others, it is how they sneak Cordova, React Native, Flutter, Xamarin,.... into Android.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#217

Post by nottorp »

biosboiii wrote: post #203
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…

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

Yes and 9 women can make a baby in 1 month :)

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#218

Post by numpad0 »

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…

Switching CPU architecture is not about changing a compilation option, it's about eliminating centuries old assembly codes, binaries, and third party components and re-engineering everything to be self hosted on-prem at the company. Commercial software companies are reckless and stupid lazy and unbelievably inept, so lots of them won't be able to do this, especially for the second time.

In case this translation was needed at all. The point is the point is not a "-riscv" compilation option.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#220

Post by numpad0 »

t43562 wrote: post #194
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 fat…

It's interesting that many with CS/CE background believes in irreversible death of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and victory of the Universal Grammar Theory, while many from the exact same cohort are able to trivially explain how tightly coupled ISA and CPU implementation are and how mutually incompatible different ISAs can be.

I mean, it's most likely overlaps and not actually the same set of people, but I find it ironic and funny.

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