I hope Qualcomm wins and wins its countersuits too.
[flagged]
Apple sheep?
Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
281–290 of 480 posts
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#282Earlier 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…
> because you have to hire more people or lose speed Yes and 9 women can make a baby in 1 month :)
It's called pipelining, and the concept works well in all modern processors. Can also work with people, you only have a initial setup delay :)
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Qualcomm is slightly bigger than ARM so it seems like a fair fight to me. Does Qualcomm police it's IP at all?
According to Wikipedia, 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.
That's roughly the same size -- like swamp thing vs namor -- both are name brand, almost blue chip heros.
Or put another way -- as they said in gawker[1] -- if you're in a lawsuit with a billionaire you better have a billionaire on your side or you're losing.
In this case -- it's unlikely that qualcomm will have quite enough juice to just smoosh Arm, in the same way that they would be able to just smoosh a company that's 100th the size of arm (not just 1/10th), regardless of the merits of the case.
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Naively, it would seem like it would be as simple as updating android studio and recompiling your app, and you would be good to go? There must be less than 1 in 1000 (probably less than 1 in 10,000) apps that do their own ARM specific optimizations.
Without any ARM specific optimizations, most apps wouldn’t even have to recompile and resubmit. Android apps are uploaded as bytecode, which is then AOT compiled by Google’s cloud service for the different architectures, from what I understand. Google would just have to decide to support another target, and Google has already signaled their intent to support RISC-V with Android. https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023…
I remember when Intel was shipping x86 mobile CPUs for Android phones. I had one pretty soon after their release. The vast majority of Android apps I used at the time just worked without any issues. There were some apps that wouldn't appear in the store but the vast majority worked pretty much day one when those phones came out.
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#285Earlier 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…
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…
"Chilling effect" implies that we should want ARM to succeed.
IMO we need to question the premises of the current IP ecosystem. Obviously, the principles of open-source are quite the opposite to how ARM licenses IP. (Afaik, ARM also licenses ready-to-go cores, which is very different from what Q is getting.)
It's easy to see how RISC-V avoids the conflict of interest between owning the ISA and licensing specific implementations.
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oracle v Qualcomm would be epic.
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oracle v Qualcomm would be epic.
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Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#288Qualcomm 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…
The Qualcomm online defenders are something else too.
Qualcomm have been acting badly for years, including attempting to turn RISC-V into Arm64 but without the restrictions. You cannot trust people that behave like this, where everything they do is important and everything you do is worthless.
The funny thing is Qualcomm do have some wildly impressive tech which is kept secret despite being so ubiquitous, but they have had persistent execution failures at integrations which lead to them throwing their partners under the bus.
Qualcomm have the same sort of corporate difficulty you see at Boeing, only in a less high profile sector.
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
you don't start by designing high performance chips! You start with small embedded cores and work your way up. I disagree. For example, the first PowerPC was pretty fast and went into flagship products immediately. Itanium also went directly for the high end market (it failed for unrelated reasons). RISC-V would be much better off if some beastly chips like Rivos were released early on.
The high end requires specifications that were not available until RVA22 and Vector 1.0 were ratified. First chips implementing these are starting to show up as seen in e.g. MILK-V Jupiter, which is one of the newest development boards in the market. With the ISA developed in the open, the base specs microcontrollers can target would naturally tend to be be ratified first, and thus microcontrollers would show up firs…
Isn't the problem the lack of advanced features for executing the current ISA with speed? I thought RISC-V chips seen in the wild do not pipelining, out-of-order, register renaming, multiple int/float/logic units, speculation, branch predictors, multi-tier caching, etc. The lack of speed isn't really related to a few missing vector instructions.
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#290Earlier 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 is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer. You think Qualcomm is larger than Apple?
Absolutely.
There are nearly 2B smartphones sold each year and only 200M laptops, so Apple's 20M laptop sales are basically a rounding error and not worth considering.
As 15-16% of the smartphone market, Apple is generally selling around 300m phones. I've read that Qualcomm is usually around 25-35% of the smartphone market which would be 500-700M phones.
But Qualcomm almost certainly includes ARM processors in their modems which bumps up those numbers dramatically. Qualcomm also sells ARM chips in the MCU/DSP markets IIRC.