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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

#361

Post by kernal »

coder543 wrote: post #75
nemothekid wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM loses even harder in the long-term. I think long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. How long until: 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM 2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V Unless you are Apple I see such a transition taking a decade easily.

> 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM 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 Qualcomm were motivated, I believe they could swap ISAs relatively easily on their flagship processors, and…

>Many Android apps don’t depend directly on “native” code, and those could potentially work on day 1. With an ARM emulation layer, those with a native dependency could likely start working too, although a native RISC-V port would improve performance.

This is only true if the application is written purely in Java/Kotlin with no native code. Unfortunately, many apps do use native code. Microsoft identified that more than 70% of the top 100 apps on Google Play used native code at a CppCon talk.

>I think ARM is bluffing here. They need Qualcomm.

Qualcomm's survival is dependent on ARM. Qualcomm's entire revenue stream evaporates without ARM IP. They may still be able to license their modem IP to OEMs, but not if their modem also used ARM IP. It's only a matter of time before Qualcomm capitulates and signs a proper licensing agreement with ARM. The fact that Qualcomm's lawyers didn't do their due diligence to ensure that Nuvia's ARM Architecture licenses were transferable is negligent on their part.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#362

Post by talldayo »

bhouston wrote: post #254
qiqitori wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a chip out there that contains both an ARM and a RISC-V core, the RP2350. It's reasonable to assume that the ARM part and RISC-V part are manufactured in the same process. There are some benchmarks pitting the two against each other on e.g. this page: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=375268 For a generic logic workload like Fibo(24), the performance is essentially the same (quote from above pag…

It is true you can find slow ARM chips. But you cannot find fast RISC-V chips.

I wager that statement would be turned on it's head if we restricted the comparison to chips of similar transistor density. Fast ARM chips do exist, as ARMv8 designs fabbed on 5nm TSMC with noncompliant SIMD implementations. If there were RISC-V chips in the same vein as Ampere or Nvidia's Grace CPU, I don't see any reason why they couldn't be more competitive than an ARM chip that's forced to adhere directly to the ISA spec.

RISC-V hedged it's bet by creating different design specs for smaller edge applications and larger multicore configurations. Right now ARM is going through a rift where the last vestiges of ARMv6/7 support is holding out for the few remaining 32-bit customers. But all the progress is happening on the bloating ARMv9 spec that benefits nobody but Apple and Nvidia. For all of ARM's success in the embedded world, it would seem like they're at an impasse between low-power and high-power solutions. RISC-V could do both better at the same time.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#363

Post by h_tbob »

starspangled wrote: post #93
hajile wrote: post #52

Earlier 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…

I don’t understand how they can copyright just the ISA. Didn’t a recent Supreme Court case in oracle v google Java issue decide that you can copy the api if you impelement it differently? So what exactl is arm pulling? Implementation hardware specs? I suspect Qualcomm can do that on its own

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#365

Post by dagmx »

adrian_b wrote: post #342
dagmx wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a LOT of conjecture in your comment. Your very first line is one to begin with. ARM also doesn’t seem to care if QC design their own cores. They just care that they renegotiate the royalty agreement. This is clear if you actually read their statements.

Because Arm wants to increase the royalties for the cores designed by Qualcomm, that is a pretty certain indication that these royalties have been smaller than for the cores licensed from Arm. Therefore Arm cares a lot if Qualcomm designs their own cores, because that would cause a smaller revenue for Arm. If Arm had not cared whether Qualcomm designs their own cores, they would have never sued Qualcomm. The official…

ARM want to raise the royalties for the cores designed by Nuvia, whose IP has now permeated all of Qualcomms IP.

Again, your comments are pure conjecture not based on anything factual. I might as well just start saying how QC wants to rip off ARM IP and it would be as factually relevant as your comments.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#366

Post by Tostino »

kernal wrote: post #360
delfinom wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Why would you think that? The Play store already supports x86 binaries when necessary.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#367

Post by hajile »

bhouston wrote: post #255
hajile wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is much more than just SIMD. I think RISC-V chips in the wild do not do things like pipelining, out-of-order, register renaming, multiple int/float/logic units, speculation, branch predictors, smart caching. I think all existing RISC-V chips in the wild right now are just simplistic in-order processors.

You are wildly mistaken here.

Back in 2016, BOOMv1 (Berkley Out-of-Order Machine) had pipelining, register renaming, 3-wide dispatch, branch predictor, caches, etc. A quick google seems to indicate that it was started in 2011 and had taped out 11 times by 2016 (with actual production apparently being done on IBM 45nm).

They are on BOOMv3 now.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#368

Post by TheFlyingFish »

h_tbob wrote: post #363
starspangled wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t understand how they can copyright just the ISA. Didn’t a recent Supreme Court case in oracle v google Java issue decide that you can copy the api if you impelement it differently? So what exactl is arm pulling? Implementation hardware specs? I suspect Qualcomm can do that on its own

I think it might actually be patents rather than copyright restrictions that are in play here.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#369

Post by hajile »

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

Intel supposedly put in a multi-billion dollar offer and got laughed out of the room.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#370

Post by preisschild »

mazurnification wrote: post #228
coder543 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM 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 Qualcomm were motivated, I believe they could swap ISAs relatively easily on their flagship processors, and…

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…

AFAIK the new SiFive dev board actually supports AMD discrete grsphics cards over PCIe
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