Live data from Hacker News

Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

bloomberg.com

251–260 of 480 posts

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice how 'viable' isn't an operative in your statement.

They've come a long way, Samsung is apparently considering Mediatek chips for their next flagship phone (S25).

Their flagship tablets line up, Galaxy Tab S10 plus and ultra, is entirely Mediatek too.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#253
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because you have to hire more people or lose speed Yes and 9 women can make a baby in 1 month :)

In Norse mythology, Heimdallr was born of nine sisters. I'm not sure that it took any less time than usual, but I enjoy the story all the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Mothers_of_Heimdallr

and Norse mythology has 9 world dimensions, so maybe it worked for them

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is true you can find slow ARM chips. But you cannot find fast RISC-V chips.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#255
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We're not quite there yet. A bunch of mission critical stuff like SIMD were only added in the last 2-3 years. As it takes 4-5 years to design/ship high-performance chips, we still have a ways to go. Ventana Veyron looks interesting. Tenstorrent's upcoming 8-wide design should perform well. Qualcomm pitched making a bunch of changes to RISC-V that would move it closer to ARM64 and make porting easier, so I think it's…

It is much more than just SIMD.

I think RISC-V chips in the wild do not do things like pipelining, out-of-order, register renaming, multiple int/float/logic units, speculation, branch predictors, smart caching.

I think all existing RISC-V chips in the wild right now are just simplistic in-order processors.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#256

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

I never thought I would hear MediaTek and top chip maker in the same line

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#257

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…

Last time I checked, Qualcomm did not introduce any custom instructions into the ISA. What damage are you speaking of?

The merge of the Qualcomm architecture with the Nuvia IP they acquired, which was created under a far-reaching license ARM granted to Nuvia. Combining both creates a custom architecture different from ARMs consolidated and harmonized designs offered to licensees (i.e. Blackhawk or Cortex-X).

The IP of Nuvia was not supposed to be used in all the use-cases that Qualcomm intends to deploy it in (and moreover there is still the ongoing legal dispute that Qualcomm is actually not allowed to use it)

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

TS running under Node.js for the backend, I'd dare say, looks pretty standard.

But I like to imagine the Web frontend made in Go, compiled to WASM. Would be a fun project, for sure.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#260

Damn! So what happens to the Raspberry Pi? Edit: OK, following the discussion now. Nothing in the short term, potentially longer term.

Broadcom (The makers of the chips used on the pi) did have a bid to acquire Qualcomm back in 2017 [0] but the bid was withdrawn after Trump blocked the deal.

So nothing will happen to the Pi (Arm also has a a minority stake in Raspberry Pi)

[0] https://investors.broadcom.com/news-releases/news-release-de...

Post reply on HN