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

351–360 of 480 posts

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#351

Post by shash »

hajile wrote: post #41
bhouston wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people do not realize how slow RISC-V is right now. Yes, it will definitely get better, but it will take some time given how far behind it is. Like 30x slower than a top of the line Apple Mx series CPU. Maybe there is a high performing RISC-V chip out there but I haven't yet run into one. RISC-V benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=RISC-V . Compare to an Apple M4 benchmark: https://browser.geekbenc…

We're not quite there yet. A bunch of mission critical stuff like SIMD were only added in the last 2-3 years. As it takes 4-5 years to design/ship high-performance chips, we still have a ways to go. Ventana Veyron looks interesting. Tenstorrent's upcoming 8-wide design should perform well. Qualcomm pitched making a bunch of changes to RISC-V that would move it closer to ARM64 and make porting easier, so I think it's…

There were two competing SIMD specs, and personally I'm glad that RVV won out over PSIMD. It's an easier programmer's view and fewer instructions to implement.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#352

Post by wang_li »

coder543 wrote: post #296
mazurnification wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fan of the Jeff Geerling Youtube series in which he is trying to make GPU (AMD/Nvidia) run on Raspbery Pi. It is not easy - and they have linux kernel source code available to modify. Now imagine all Qualcomm clients have to do similar stuff with their third party hardware, possibly with no access to source code of drivers. Then debug and fix for 3y all the bugs that pop up in the wild. What a nightmare. Apple a…

Hardware drivers certainly can be annoying, but a hobbyist struggling to bring big GPUs’ hardware drivers to a random platform is not at all indicative of how hard it would be for a company with teams of engineers. If NVidia wanted their GPUs to work on Raspberry Pi, then it would already be done . It wouldn’t be an issue. But NVidia doesn’t care, because that’s not a real market for their GPUs. Most OEMs don’t have…

> If NVidia wanted their GPUs to work on Raspberry Pi, then it would already be done. It wouldn’t be an issue. But NVidia doesn’t care, because that’s not a real market for their GPUs.

It's weird af that Geerling ignores nVidia. They have a line of ARM based SBCs with GPUs from Maxwell to Ampere. They have full software support for OpenGL, CUDA, and etc. For the price of an RPi 5 + discreet GPU, you can get a Jetson Orin Nano (8 GB RAM, 6 A78 ARM cores, 1024 Ampere cores.) All in a much better form factor than a Pi + PCIe hat and graphics card.

I get the fun of doing projects, but if what you're interested in is a working ARM based system with some level of GPU, it can be had right now without being "in the shop" twice a week with a science fair project.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#353

Post by xg15 »

GeekyBear wrote: post #339
fidotron wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"We're disinclined to acquiesce to your request.

Means 'no'."

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#354

Post by shash »

refulgentis wrote: post #120
snvzz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There is no Android RISC-V. There isn't an Android available to run on RISC-V chips. There is no code to run on RISC-V in the Android source tree, it was all recently actively removed.[1] Despite your personal feelings about their motivation, these sites were factually correctly relaying what happened to the code, and they went out of their way to say exactly what Google said and respected Google's claim that they re…

Actually, https://github.com/google/android-riscv64?tab=readme-ov-file

And the mailing list is pretty active too: https://lists.riscv.org/g/sig-android/topics?sidebar=true

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#355

Post by HDThoreaun »

bhouston wrote: post #248
bufferoverflow wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung and MediaTek make pretty competitive ARM processors. MediaTek 9400 is literally the top-performing SoC on the market. Samsung Exynos 2400, 2400e MediaTek Dimensity 9400, 9300 Plus, 9300 https://nanoreview.net/en/soc-list/rating

The geekbench scores of Apple are highest and then Qualcomm according to this page. MediaTek’s top chip is literally 25% slower according to his listing. The ordering in ranking is a little weird.

25% slower than apple is more than enough for a mobile chip. The new apple chips are faster than desktop chips from a few years ago

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#356

Post by steeeeeve »

happymellon wrote: post #193
billti wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture I believe they had a big hand in ARM64. Though best reference I can find right now is this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368489

Oh, I was just wanting to clarify the "Apple co-founded". They had the Newton project, found ARM did a better job than the other options, but there were a few missing pieces. They funded the spun out project so they could throw ARM a few new requirements for the CPU design. As a "cofounder" of ARM, they didn't contribute technical experience and the architecture did already exist.

Sigh. Newton. So far ahead of it's time.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#357

Post by refulgentis »

shash wrote: post #354
refulgentis wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no Android RISC-V. There isn't an Android available to run on RISC-V chips. There is no code to run on RISC-V in the Android source tree, it was all recently actively removed.[1] Despite your personal feelings about their motivation, these sites were factually correctly relaying what happened to the code, and they went out of their way to say exactly what Google said and respected Google's claim that they re…

Actually, https://github.com/google/android-riscv64?tab=readme-ov-file And the mailing list is pretty active too: https://lists.riscv.org/g/sig-android/topics?sidebar=true

I don't know why people keep replying as if I'm saying Android isn't going to do RISC-V.

I especially don't understand offering code that predates the removal from tree and hasn't been touched since. Or, a mailing list, where we click on the second link and see a Google employee saying on October 10th "there isn't an Android riscv64 ABI yet either, so it would be hard to have [verify Android runs properly on RISC-V] before an ABI :-)"

That's straight from the horses mouth. There's no ABI for RISC-V. Unless you've discovered something truly novel that you left out, you're not compiling C that'll run on RISC-V if it makes any system calls.

I assume there's some psychology thing going on where my 110% correct claim that it doesn't run on RISC-V today is transmutated to "lol risc-v doesn't matter and Android has 0 plans"

I thoroughly believe Android will fully support RISC-V sooner rather than later.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#358

Post by Narishma »

cesarb wrote: post #304
brucehoult wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can roll their sleeves up and do the small amount of work that they tried to persuade everyone else was not necessary. And I'm sure they will have done so. It's not that hard to design a wide decoder that can decode mixed 2-byte and 4-byte instructions from a buffer of 32 or 64 bytes in a clock cycle. I've come up with the basic schema for it and written about it here and on Reddit a number of times. Yeah, it's…

> Yeah, it's a little harder than for pure fixed-width Arm64, but it is massively massively easier than for amd64. For those who haven't read the details of the RISC-V ISA: the first two bits of every instruction tell the decoder whether it's a 16-bit or a 32-bit instruction. It's always in that same fixed place, there's no need to look at any other bit in the instruction. Decoding the length of a x86-64 instruction…

Why do they use two bits for it? Do they plan to support other instruction lengths in the future?

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#359

Post by kernal »

electronbeam wrote: post #159
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 should put a giant bid on SiFive tomorrow, to remind ARM that its not unassailable

So a business that is entirely dependent on ARM IP and, for the most part, Android should "remind" the company they're dependent upon? Let's do a thought experiment - Qualcomm switches to RISC-V while the other Android SoC makers (MediaTek, Samsung, Google, Xiaomi, etc.) stay on ARM. Who buys the new Snapdragon RISC-V phone?

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#360

Post by kernal »

delfinom wrote: post #271
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…

Since I don't see the Android or IOS app stores ever switching to RISC-V I think ARM will be fine.
Post reply on HN