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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

#321

Post by Joel_Mckay »

delfinom wrote: post #276
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, the Intel installed base has enough market inertia to last a business cycle or two with AMD.

Even with the recent silicon defects... People will tolerate the garbage as they want the NVIDIA+Intel performance.

Architecturally speaking, there were better options available... just never the equivalent price over performance of consumer grade hardware. =)

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#322

Post by iggldiggl »

coder543 wrote: post #131
sgc wrote: post #117

Earlier 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…

> Android apps are uploaded as bytecode, which is then AOT compiled by Google’s cloud service for the different architectures, from what I understand.

No, Android apps ship the original bytecode which then gets compiled (if at all) on the local device. Though that doesn't change the result re compatibility.

However – a surprising number of apps do ship native code, too. Of course especially games, but also any other media-related app (video players, music players, photo editors, even my e-book reading app) and miscellaneous other apps, too. There, only the original app developer can recompile the native code to a new CPU architecture.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#323

Post by SoftTalker »

MBCook wrote: post #118
philistine wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MacOS (as NeXTSTEP and/or OpenStep) also ran on SPARC and PA-RISC I believe.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#324

Post by coder543 »

iggldiggl wrote: post #322
coder543 wrote: post #131

Earlier 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…

> Android apps are uploaded as bytecode, which is then AOT compiled by Google’s cloud service for the different architectures, from what I understand. No, Android apps ship the original bytecode which then gets compiled (if at all) on the local device. Though that doesn't change the result re compatibility. However – a surprising number of apps do ship native code, too. Of course especially games, but also any other…

> No, Android apps ship the original bytecode which then gets compiled (if at all) on the local device.

Google Play Cloud Profiles is what I was thinking of, but I see it only starts “working” a few days after the app starts being distributed. And maybe this is merely a default PGO profile, and not a form of AOT in the cloud. The document isn’t clear to me.

https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/baselineprof...

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#325

Post by verditelabs »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #273
t43562 wrote: post #191

Earlier 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.

I am an ex Qualcomm employee. We often called ourselves a law firm with a tech problem. QC doesn't actually have more lawyers than engineers, but I'd not be surprised if the legal department got paid more than all the engineers combined.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#326

Post by Joel_Mckay »

mrweasel wrote: post #266
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, the Raspberry Pi foundation could easily move 3 million 1.8GHz RVA23 in 1 quarter... with 64 cores + DSP ops it wouldn't necessarily need a GPU initially. =3

The Raspberry Pi community would probably jump on a RISC-V board, but that doesn't help Qualcomm or it's customers.

Manufacturers adapt quickly to most architectural changes.

If you are running in a posix environment, than porting a build is measured in days with a working bootstrap compiler. RISC-V already has the full gcc and OS available for deployment.

We also purchase several vendors ARM products for deployment. Note, there was a time in history, when purchasing even a few million in chips would open custom silicon options.

Given how glitched/proprietary/nondeterministic ARM ops are outside the core compatibility set, it is amazing it was as popular as the current market demonstrates.

Engineers solve problems, and ARM corporation has made themselves a problem. =3

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#327

Post by Const-me »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #319
Const-me wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

Apple gross revenue is 10x the Qualcomm, and the difference in net income is even larger. Apple could easily afford these R&D costs.

Another obstacle, even if Qualcomm develops an awesome emulator / JIT compiler / translation layer, I’m not sure the company is in the position to ship that thing to market. Unlike Apple, Qualcomm doesn’t own the OS. Such emulator would require extensive support in the Android OS. I’m not sure Google will be happy supporting huge piece of complicated third-party software as a part of their OS.

P.S. And also there’re phone vendors who actually buy chips from Qualcomm. They don’t want end users to complain that their favorite “The Legendary Cabbage: Ultimate Loot Garden Saga” is lagging on their phone, while working great on a similar ARM-based Samsung.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#328

Post by dwaite »

hajile wrote: post #60
svnt wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re suggesting that Snapdragon processors would switch to RISC-V and that would be no big deal? Presumably Qualcomm is committed to numerous multi-year supplier agreements for the arm chipsets.

Qualcomm pitched Znew quite a while ago. It mostly ditched 16-bit instructions and added a bunch of instructions that were basically ripped straight from ARM64. The idea was obviously an attempt at making it as easy as possible to replace ARM with RISC-V without having to rework much of the core. https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-profiles/attachment/332/0/cod...

Actually, it was an attempt to reuse as much of the ARM design they got when they bought Nuvia moving to a different CPU architecture. They were worried about ASIC design not software code.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#329

Post by IshKebab »

wmf wrote: post #170
IshKebab wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing the ISA with the chip. Current RISC-V chips are slower than high performance ARM ones, but that's because you don't start by designing high performance chips! You start with small embedded cores and work your way up. Exactly the same thing happened with ARM. It started in embedded, then phones, and finally laptops and servers. ARM was never slow, they just hadn't worked up to highly complex high perf…

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 first PowerPC chip was introduced in 1992! Itanium was in 2001, wasn't a from-scratch design and was famously a disaster!

Not really comparable.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#330

Post by dang »

daeros wrote: post #268
daeros wrote: post #186

I hope Qualcomm wins and wins its countersuits too.

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