241–250 of 480 posts
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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.
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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 has 50,000 employees, $51 billion assets and $35 billion revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm
ARM Holdings has 7000 employees, $8 billion assets and $3 billion revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings
I think "slightly bigger" is an understatement.
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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…
This is a bit off topic, but has anyone demonstrated it's possible to design a big RISC-V core, that's performance competitive with the fastest x86 and ARM designs?
On the in-order side, I can see on-par performance with the ARM A5x series quite easily.
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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…
> If corporate would force me to work with idk Golang instead of TypeScript I think the most evil thing to do would be to switch places: TS for backend, Go for frontend. It can certainly work though!
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That's what's magical about Apple. It was a decade-long transition. All the 32-bit code that was removed from macOS back in 2017 was all in preparation for the move in 2019.
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.
What is often overlooked on this topic is, that ARM also has a duty to protect its ecosystem. By using its dominant position in Smartphone chipsets, Qualcomm is in progress to establish a custom ARM-architecture as the new standard for several industries, fragmenting the ARM-ecosystem. For decades, ARM is carefully avoiding this to happen, by allowing selected partners to "explore" evolutions of the IP in an industry…
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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 :)
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.
Samsung and MediaTek make pretty competitive ARM processors. MediaTek 9400 is literally the top-performing SoC on the market. Samsung Exynos 2400, 2400e MediaTek Dimensity 9400, 9300 Plus, 9300 https://nanoreview.net/en/soc-list/rating
The ordering in ranking is a little weird.
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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…
There is a chip out there that contains both an ARM and a RISC-V core, the RP2350. It's reasonable to assume that the ARM part and RISC-V part are manufactured in the same process. There are some benchmarks pitting the two against each other on e.g. this page: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=375268 For a generic logic workload like Fibo(24), the performance is essentially the same (quote from above pag…
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Aren’t Android binaries in Dalvik so you only need to port that to get it to run on RISC-V?
Many games, multimedia apps (native FFMPEG libs), and other apps that require native C/C++ libs would require a recompile/translation for RISC-V.
It redirects calls to x86 libraries to native RISC-V versions of the library.