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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

#271

Post by delfinom »

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…

>Yes, longterm Q might invest in their own RISC implementations

Q is investing over $1billion into RISC-V.

ARM is fucked long term. Sure Qualcomm themselves are no angel. But the absurdities of this case are basically making ARM toxic to any serious long term investment. Especially when ARM is in Apple's pocket and ARM isn't releasing any chip designs competitive with Apple's chips where they get free reign to do as they want. Basically a permanent handicap on ARM chip performance.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#272

Post by delfinom »

rickdeckard wrote: post #257
neonsunset wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

So when is ARM going after Apple for their custom architecture?

Afai, Q hasn't diverged from the standard instruction set at all in the Oryon snapdragons.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#273

Post by CamperBob2 »

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?

Does Qualcomm police it's IP at all?

Traditionally they've been known as a tech company that employs more lawyers than engineers, if that tells you anything.

I'd probably go up against IBM or Oracle before I tugged on Qualcomm's cape. Good luck to ARM, they'll need it.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#274

Post by delfinom »

MBCook wrote: post #89
jsheard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung phones use both, in a very literal sense. Their flagship devices usually have both Snapdragon and Exynos variants for different regions, and their lower end devices are mostly Exynos across the board. The S23 line was an exception in using Snapdragon worldwide, but then the S24 line switched back to using Snapdragon in NA and Exynos everywhere else, except for the S24 Ultra which is still Snapdragon everywher…

Is the Qualcomm chip still considered significantly better than the Exynos? I remember that was the case a few years ago.

Yes, Exynos is still behind in performance and thermals. Exynos modems are also still garbage and plague Pixel phones with issues. Though slowly improving with each generation, it's awful that it's being troubleshot in public over years.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#275

Post by dmitrygr »

x0x0 wrote: post #114
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…

> 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 that's true, then what is arm licensing to Qualcomm? Just the instruction set or are they licensing full chips? Sorry for the dumb question / thanks in advance.

A well-designed (by apple [1], by analyzing millions of popular applications and what they do) instruction set. One, where there are reg+reg/reg+shifted_reg addressing modes, only one instruction length, and sane useful instructions like SBFX/UBFX, BFC, BFI, and TBZ. All of that is much better than promises of a magical core that can fuse 3-4 instructions into one magically.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368681

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#276

Post by delfinom »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #145
kmeisthax wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough Qualcomm tried to persuade RISC-V to let them drop compressed instructions. Presumably because they're trying to crowbar a RISC-V decoder onto the Nuvia design and compressed instructions are breaking it somehow.

They should buy the intel alumni founded RISC-V startup, and pour resources into a RVA23 based chip with dual on-chip SDR asic sections (they have the IP). i.e. create a single open-chip solution for mid-tier mobile communication platforms. They won't do this due to their cellular chip line interests. However, even if it just ran a bare bones Linux OS... it would open up entire markets. =3

With how poorly Intel is doing, not sure "Intel alumni" is a plus. Lmao.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#277

Post by f1shy »

wmf wrote: post #167
fargle wrote: post #102

> If Arm follows through with the license termination, Qualcomm would be prevented from doing its own designs using Arm’s instruction set i'm not sure this is true. certainly "chip" IP has been a real legal quagmire since, forever. but it was my understanding that you could neither patent nor copyright simply an "instruction set". presumably what you get from ARM with an architecture license would be patent licenses…

You can patent something like "any possible hardware circuit that implements [the functionality of some weird yet mandatory ARM instruction]". The patent doesn't cover emulators because they're not hardware. Way back in the day there were some MIPS patents that only covered a few instructions so people would build not-quite-MIPS clone CPUs without paying any royalties.

That is what was done with the THUMB instructions. IIRC

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#278

Post by detourdog »

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.

I think it takes Apple at least 9 years to prepare and 1 year to implement.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#279

Post by f1shy »

prmoustache wrote: post #232
fargle wrote: post #102

> If Arm follows through with the license termination, Qualcomm would be prevented from doing its own designs using Arm’s instruction set i'm not sure this is true. certainly "chip" IP has been a real legal quagmire since, forever. but it was my understanding that you could neither patent nor copyright simply an "instruction set". presumably what you get from ARM with an architecture license would be patent licenses…

Are there remaining patents relative to arm architecture that haven't expired already?

For ARM7TDMI probably no, but for the A, R and M cores, for sure there is. That is the name of the game.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#280

Post by delfinom »

05 wrote: post #249
qiqitori wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's a Cortex-M33, a 32bit microcontroller core with no virtual memory. Are we really comparing microcontrollers to modern aarch64 processors?

Yes? Because nobody has released a RISC-V MPU comparable to what you perceive as "moden" arm64 MPUs.

RISC-V is simply a ISA and not a core. The ISA affects some of the core architecture but the rest is also implementor specific. High-end cores will take time to reach market. Companies with big guns like Qualcomm can most likely pump out if they wanted to, and will most likely be doing so in the future since they are pumping over $1 billion into the effort.

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