Wasn't/isn't Arm for sale?
Is this just a ploy to strongarm Qualcomm into buying Arm?
Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
311–320 of 480 posts
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#312Qualcomm 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…
Qualcomm’s business strategy has become hold everyone at gun point then act surprised when everyone looks for alternative customers/partners/suppliers.
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#313Earlier 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 :)
No but 9 women can have 9 babies in 9 months.
Which is a 9x output.
Production and development requires multiple parties. This mythical man month stuff is often poorly applied. Many parts of research and development need to be done in parallel.
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#314Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#315Earlier 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 :)
Just take a guess at how the baby will be like and get everyone to pretend it already exists for the 8 months (and throw away the experience if mispredicted afterwards) :)
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#316Qualcomm 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…
> If ARM wins, Qualcomm moves to RISC-V
Around 30-40% of Android apps published on play store include native binaries. Such apps need to be recompiled for RISC-V otherwise they won’t run. Neither Qualcomm nor Google can do that because they don’t have source codes for these apps.
It’s technically possible to emulate ARMv8 on top of RISC-V, however doing so while keeping the performance overhead reasonable is going to be insanely expensive in R&D costs.
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Apple was a founding partner of ARM back when Advanced RISC Machines was first created and owned almost half of the company when it was created.
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#318What does all this have to do with Intel and AMD calling a truce?
Not much I'd say. Intel has its own massive yield / fab issues to deal with, and AMD's GPU business is being eaten by NVIDIA while its CPU business never had much market share to begin with... it doesn't make sense for these two to fight each other, not when NVIDIA is knocking on both their doors.
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#319Earlier 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…
> If ARM wins, Qualcomm moves to RISC-V Around 30-40% of Android apps published on play store include native binaries. Such apps need to be recompiled for RISC-V otherwise they won’t run. Neither Qualcomm nor Google can do that because they don’t have source codes for these apps. It’s technically possible to emulate ARMv8 on top of RISC-V, however doing so while keeping the performance overhead reasonable is going to…
Binary-only translators exist, for instance Apple has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)
Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not sure how well it fits the timeline (i.e. x86 images for the Android emulator becoming popular due to better performance than the ARM images vs. actual x86 devices being available), but at least these days a lot of apps shipping native code probably maintain an x86/x64 version purely for the emulator.
Maybe that was the case back then, too, and helped with software availability?