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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

#411

Post by snvzz »

shash wrote: post #351
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…

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.

RVV was not going to lose this one. RVV's roots run deeper than RISC-V's.

RISC-V was created because UC Berkeley's vector processor needed a scalar ISA, and the incumbents were not suitable. Then, it uncovered pre-existing interest in open ISAs, as companies started showing up with the desire for a frozen spec.

Legend is that MIPS quoted UC Berkeley some silly amount. We can thank them for RISC-V. Ironically, they ended up embracing RISC-V as well.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#412

Post by [deleted] »

billti wrote: post #188
happymellon wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify for those that don't know ARMs history, Acorn were building computers and designing CPUs before they spun out the CPU design portion. Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture, that was a decade of design and manufacturing already, they VC'ed the independence of the CPU. The staffing and knowledge came from Acorn.

> 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

[deleted]

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#413

Post by starspangled »

ywvcbk wrote: post #409
markhahn wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Chilling effect" implies that we should want ARM to succeed. IMO we need to question the premises of the current IP ecosystem. Obviously, the principles of open-source are quite the opposite to how ARM licenses IP. (Afaik, ARM also licenses ready-to-go cores, which is very different from what Q is getting.) It's easy to see how RISC-V avoids the conflict of interest between owning the ISA and licensing specific impl…

> RISC-V We’d just get a bunch of proprietary cores which might not even be compatible with each other due to extensions. Companies like Qualcomm would have zero incentives to share their designs with anyone. ARM is not perfect but it at least guarantees some minimal equal playing field. > Afaik, ARM also licenses ready-to-go cores Which is the core of Qualcomm’s business. All their phone chips are based on Cortex. O…

> We’d just get a bunch of proprietary cores which might not even be compatible with each other due to extensions.

No different than ARM. Apple has matrix extensions that others don't, for example.

The ecosystem (e.g., Linux and OSS) pressure will strongly encourage compatible subsets however. There is some concern about RISCV fragmentation hell that ARM used to suffer from, but a least in the Linux-capable CPU space (e.g., not highly embedded or tiny), a plethora of incompatible cores will probably not happen.

> Companies like Qualcomm would have zero incentives to share their designs with anyone.

ARM cores are also proprietary. All ARM cores actually, you can't get an architectural license from ARM to create an open source core. With RISCV at least you can make open cores and there are some out there.

But opening the ISA is attacking a different level of the stack than the logic and silicon.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#414

Post by neonsunset »

rickdeckard wrote: post #404
AlotOfReading wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wrinkle is that nuvia's IP supposedly wasn't used here. Qualcomm set up an IP firewall during the acquisition and immediately switched the team over to doing new work under the existing Qualcomm license. It's about the right timeframe for the v2 chips at the very least.

That's not Qualcomm's position in court. Do you have any legitimate source for that statement? Also, the foundation of Qualcomm's "Oryon" is clearly Nuvia's "Phoenix" core, which is based on Arm’s v8.7-A ISA. After Acquisition, Qualcomm formed a team to redesign Phoenix for use in consumer-products instead of servers, creating Oryon. That's the issue they have. Qualcomm was/is confident to resolve this IP issue of th…

In a way, the legalese details are less relevant to the industry perception of ARM as the move is seen as lighting the house on fire in attempt to win an argument.

Qualcomm is the supplier of high-performance ARM-based SoCs in consumer segment, with the best performing core design. ARM is not doing damage to Qualcomm here but to ARMv8/9s long-term survival.

I, for one, am greately unhappy about it because RISC-V is a disgusting design that happened to be in the right place at the right time, becoming yet another example of the industry pushing for abysmally inferior choice due to circumstantial factors. I sincerely hope it fails in all possible ways (especially the RVV extension) and a completely redone, better design that is very close to ARMv8-A takes its place.

But, in the meantime, we have ARMv8/9-A, which is the best general-purpose ISA, even with the shortcomings of SVE/2, where AVX family, with especially AVX512VL extension, is just so much better.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#415

Post by starspangled »

t43562 wrote: post #264
starspangled wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Qualcomm is slightly bigger than ARM so it seems like a fair fight to me. I'm not really sure what you're responding to. It's got nothing to do with size whether or not something is fair, it's what is in the contract. None of us know exactly what's there so if it becomes disputed then a court is going to have to decide what is fair. But that was entirely not the point of my comment though. I'm talking about how cor…

You might be right, but they do perhaps also have to establish that their contracts are going to be defended/enforced. Otherwise they have nothing.

Big middle ground before nuclear option of canceling license entirely though. It's a bad look too because Nuvia/QC has bad blood with Apple, and Apple is suspected to be a very favored client for ARM, so ARM has this problem of potentially appearing to be taking Apple's side against Qualcomm.

I'm not saying that's what happened or that ARM did not try to negotiate and QC was being unreasonable and the whole thing has nothing at all to do with Apple, or that ARM had any better options available to them. Could be they were backed into a corner and couldn't do anything else. I don't know. That doesn't mean it's not bad optics for them though.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#416

Post by camel-cdr »

neonsunset wrote: post #414
rickdeckard wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not Qualcomm's position in court. Do you have any legitimate source for that statement? Also, the foundation of Qualcomm's "Oryon" is clearly Nuvia's "Phoenix" core, which is based on Arm’s v8.7-A ISA. After Acquisition, Qualcomm formed a team to redesign Phoenix for use in consumer-products instead of servers, creating Oryon. That's the issue they have. Qualcomm was/is confident to resolve this IP issue of th…

In a way, the legalese details are less relevant to the industry perception of ARM as the move is seen as lighting the house on fire in attempt to win an argument. Qualcomm is the supplier of high-performance ARM-based SoCs in consumer segment, with the best performing core design. ARM is not doing damage to Qualcomm here but to ARMv8/9s long-term survival. I, for one, am greately unhappy about it because RISC-V is a…

Are there anything you think are missing in RVV? I'm trying to collect such things and create a list of instructions that could improve it.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#417

Post by nottorp »

tsunamifury wrote: post #313
nottorp wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you make screws, sure :)

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#418

Post by aseipp »

starspangled wrote: post #413
ywvcbk wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RISC-V We’d just get a bunch of proprietary cores which might not even be compatible with each other due to extensions. Companies like Qualcomm would have zero incentives to share their designs with anyone. ARM is not perfect but it at least guarantees some minimal equal playing field. > Afaik, ARM also licenses ready-to-go cores Which is the core of Qualcomm’s business. All their phone chips are based on Cortex. O…

> We’d just get a bunch of proprietary cores which might not even be compatible with each other due to extensions. No different than ARM. Apple has matrix extensions that others don't, for example. The ecosystem (e.g., Linux and OSS) pressure will strongly encourage compatible subsets however. There is some concern about RISCV fragmentation hell that ARM used to suffer from, but a least in the Linux-capable CPU space…

> RISCV fragmentation hell that ARM used to suffer from

Does "fragmentation hell" refer to Age Old problem of massive incompatibility in the Linux codebase, or the more "modern" problem people refer to which is the problem of device trees and old kernel support for peripheral drivers? Because you can rest assured that this majestic process will not be changed at all for RISC-V devices. You will still be fed plenty of junkware that will require an unsupported kernels with blobs. The ISA isn't going to change the strategy of the hardware manufacturers.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#419

Post by gruturo »

delfinom wrote: post #272
rickdeckard wrote: post #257

Earlier 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.

> So when is ARM going after Apple for their custom architecture?

As soon as they violate the terms of their architectural license, which seemingly hasn't happened yet.

Re: Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

#420

Post by dragonwriter »

sangnoir wrote: post #403
dragonwriter wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dudn’t a recent Supreme Court case in oracle v google Java issue decide that you can copy the api if you impelement it differently No, it didn’t. It ruled that the specific copying and use of that Google did with Java in Android was fair use, but did not rule anything as blanket as “you can copy an API as long as you re-implement it”.

It was a little more nuance than that. Oracle was hoping SCOTUS would rule that API Structure, sequence and organization are copyrightable - the court sidestepped that question altogether by ruling that if APIs are copyrightable[1], the case fell under fair use. So the pre-existing case law holds (broadly, it's still fine to re-implement APIs - like s3 - for compatibility since SCOTUS chose not to weigh in on it in G…

> So the pre-existing case law holds (broadly, it's still fine to re-implement APIs - like s3 - for compatibility since SCOTUS chose not to weigh in on it in Google v. Oracle).

There is no clear preexisting national case law on API copyrightability, and it is unclear how other, more general, case law would apply to APIs categorically (or even if it would apply a categorical copyrightable-or-not rule), so, no, its not “ok”, its indeterminant.

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