Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 480 posts

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#331

Post by x0x0 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #275
x0x0 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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=3…

1 - thank you

2 - thank you again for sharing your eink hacking project!

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#332

Post by kernal »

hajile wrote: post #52
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…

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 doesn't have nearly as much to lose as ARM does and they know it.

Not even close. Android OEM's can easily switch to the MediaTek 9400 that delivers the same performance as the Qualcomm high-end mobile chip at a significantly reduced price or even the Samsung Exynos. Qualcomm, on the other hand, has everything to lose as most of their profits rely on the sales of high-end Snapdragon chips to Android OEM's.

Qualcomm thought they were smart by trying to use the Nuvia ARM design license, which was not transferable, as part of their acquisition instead of doing the proper thing and negotiating a design license with ARM. Qualcomm is at the mercy of ARM as ARM has very many revenue streams and Qualcomm does not. It's only a matter of time before Qualcomm capitulates and does the right thing.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#333

Post by iggldiggl »

coder543 wrote: post #324
iggldiggl wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yup, it's just a PGO profile (alternatively, developers can also create their own profile and ship that for their app).

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#334

Post by MBCook »

MBCook wrote: post #294
hnaccount_rng wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way that's also true for the x86->ARM transition, isn't it? I had an MacbookAir 2018. And.. "it was crap" is putting it very, very mildly. Yes it was still better than any Windows laptop I got since and much less of a hassle than any Linux laptop that I'm aware of in my circle. But the gap was really, really small and it cost twice as much. But the most important part for the working of the transition is probabl…

I don’t think so. I’ve got a 2019 MBP and yeah, the heat issue is a big problem. But they weren’t going to be left in the performance dust like the last times. Their chip supplier wasn’t going to stop selling chips to them. They would have likely had to give up on how thin their laptops were, but they could have continued on just fine. I do think the ARM transition wasn’t strictly good, it let them stay thin and quie…

> I do think the ARM transition wasn’t strictly good

That’s a total typo I didn’t catch in time. I’m not sure what I tried to type, but I thought the transition was good. They didn’t have to but I’m glad they did.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#336

Post by slashdave »

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.

> Companies pulled off leaving Alpha and Sparc

Considering the commercial failure of these efforts, I might disagree

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#337

Post by slashdave »

SoftTalker wrote: post #323
MBCook wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OpenStep was developed on SunOS, and was the primary GUI out of the box

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#338

Post by [deleted] »

SushiHippie wrote: post #178

Because of all the discussions in the comments about ARM and RISC-V, could someone explain to me the difficulties of designing a chip for a new ISA? I'm wondering because to me as a layman it sounds like it's 'only' a different language, so why is it not that easy to take already existing designs and modify them to 'speak' that language and that's it? Or is an ISA more than just a different 'language'? Or is hardware…

[deleted]

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#339

Post by GeekyBear »

fidotron wrote: post #288
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…

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 ha…

> throwing their partners under the bus

I found it telling that every single smartphone vendor refused to license Qualcomm's proprietary tech for smartphone to satellite messaging.

> In a statement given to CNBC, Qualcomm says smartphone makers “indicated a preference towards standards-based solutions” for satellite-to-phone connectivity

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/qualcomm-kills-its-c...

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#340

Post by zjjsij »

hajile wrote: post #290
gonzo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Qualcomm's modems aren't ARM processors, they're Hexagon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Hexagon

Post reply on HN