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How did Qualcomm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their Oryon SoC?

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Re: How did Qualcomm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their Oryon SoC?

#11

Post by ksec »

amluto wrote: post #4

This all sounds so inept on Qualcomm’s part that I have trouble believing the explanation. Qualcomm is trying to make money on the whole shebang, not on the PMICs. They’re trying to sell, for lack of a better word, a system on multiple chips. Intel and AMD do this too (see their chipsets, for example). When someone makes a laptop, the the CPU vendor accounts for some of the BOM cost, and that’s their revenue. The man…

Remember , and for those who don't know. This is semiaccurate, known for hyperbole. I can't remember a single thing they got right.

Re: How did Qualcomm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their Oryon SoC?

#12

Post by throwaway57546 »

amluto wrote: post #4

This all sounds so inept on Qualcomm’s part that I have trouble believing the explanation. Qualcomm is trying to make money on the whole shebang, not on the PMICs. They’re trying to sell, for lack of a better word, a system on multiple chips. Intel and AMD do this too (see their chipsets, for example). When someone makes a laptop, the the CPU vendor accounts for some of the BOM cost, and that’s their revenue. The man…

I distinctly recall my disappointment when I heard it was Qualcomm that acquired Nuvia because I knew they'd find a way to f*ck it up. This is unfortunately incredibly on brand for Qualcomm. They do the same bundling with the 5G Radios and Snapdragon SoC's. They're more of a patent law firm than a tech company.

Re: How did Qualcomm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their Oryon SoC?

#13

Post by phonon »

chasil wrote: post #9

DEC's Alpha was doomed at release, because the operating systems licensed with it were a minimum of $30k just to get the install CD (for VMS or OSF/1 "Unix"). There must have been desperation among the design team, as 3rd party Alpha motherboards slowly began to appear that ran basic Linux. However, Alpha was a glutton for power. DEC then designed the StrongARM, which amazingly worked out far better for low power app…

Linux and Windows NT were also available.

Re: How did Qualcomm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their Oryon SoC?

#14

Post by wkat4242 »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #2

Honestly was ever Qualcomm not a master of proprietary cash grabs? After all, even in 90s they had their own standards as opposed to GSM. It is in their DNA. We could have been better off had any of the more "universal" chip companies won the Android SoC race (like TI, Freescale and so on)

Even after GSM they lobbied for their CDMA standard which is why 3G and its successors are based on it. Due to their parents.

It's too bad because GSM was good tech with guaranteed cell capacity and better on weak connections.

Re: How did Qualcomm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their Oryon SoC?

#15

Post by justsomehnguy »

distract8901 wrote: post #5

This is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. To sum up: - Qualcomm mandated that manufacturers use their power supply chips with their processor - these power supply chips are wildly inappropriate for laptops, requiring 4-6 in parallel when a single properly spec'd chip would work - said chips are designed for space-constrained phones, and are so small they require a different type of PCB - those PCBs can't hand…

> For... Reasons?

"Hey, engineer, can we bundle our chipset with something to force the buyers to buy both?"

"Well, maybe, we can use the power supply for some appli.."

"Great, starting selling a forced bundle to a notebook vendors tomorrow."

*Engineer hesitates for some seconds*

"Please, be advised what these power chips are not..."

*C-level glances at the engineer*

"Did I asked you to how to do the business?"

"Sorry. I would leave now."

"Good."

Don't forget, not only they a business conglomerate in which the top lost connection with the entire company decades ago, it's a company which has "never say no to a senior" in it's DNA.

Re: How did Qualcomm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their Oryon SoC?

#16

Post by amluto »

throwaway57546 wrote: post #12
amluto wrote: post #4

This all sounds so inept on Qualcomm’s part that I have trouble believing the explanation. Qualcomm is trying to make money on the whole shebang, not on the PMICs. They’re trying to sell, for lack of a better word, a system on multiple chips. Intel and AMD do this too (see their chipsets, for example). When someone makes a laptop, the the CPU vendor accounts for some of the BOM cost, and that’s their revenue. The man…

I distinctly recall my disappointment when I heard it was Qualcomm that acquired Nuvia because I knew they'd find a way to f*ck it up. This is unfortunately incredibly on brand for Qualcomm. They do the same bundling with the 5G Radios and Snapdragon SoC's. They're more of a patent law firm than a tech company.

I was mostly disappointed because I hoped that Nuvia would result in a product that was fairly open from the perspective of users. You can buy an Intel or AMD CPU, pair it with pretty much anything, and do whatever you want with it. You need to deal with awkward firmware messes and a frequently messy security ecosystem, but it mostly just works. You don’t need software blobs from Intel or (ignoring sometimes messy graphics) AMD.

Even Apple is fairly good in this regard.

Qualcomm, OTOH, does not have a good track record in this regard.

Re: How did Qualcomm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their Oryon SoC?

#17

Post by sigilis »

stefan_ wrote: post #10
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit off topic, it it keeps surprising me how many dedicated chips cellphones have. iPhone 15 Pro has 10 different power management chips. It has one dedicated transmitter and two receiver chips. It has two different rf front end chips. Plus four chips for cellular modem, wifi/BT, uwb, and nfc. And then two chips for envelope tracking and clock generating. I have this feeling that designs in general really are multi…

It’s interesting. A big reason why Qualcomm got to making CPUs in the first place was that they could sell it as a value add to their modem chips everyone was using: now you can have both in one chip! We have seen Apple try to make a modem of course, but it seems to have fizzled out again. Wonder why they never looked at WiFi/BT, it’s a lot easier and Intel recently sold theirs iirc.

Apple isn’t making WiFi/bt precisely because it’s not that hard. There are a number of potential companies they can partner with so they can negotiate better rates. CPUs and modems are different, they effectively had a single supplier that will work for their requirements which meant that they couldn’t differentiate their products from other companies and had to deal with a third party supplier who essentially had them over a barrel at the negotiating table.

If they can pull off making their own modem, Qualcomm can’t charge them like they’re the only option even if not all iPhones use the new modem. The makers of various easier to make ICs already know they are not the only option and charge accordingly.

Re: How did Qualcomm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their Oryon SoC?

#18

Post by chasil »

phonon wrote: post #13
chasil wrote: post #9

DEC's Alpha was doomed at release, because the operating systems licensed with it were a minimum of $30k just to get the install CD (for VMS or OSF/1 "Unix"). There must have been desperation among the design team, as 3rd party Alpha motherboards slowly began to appear that ran basic Linux. However, Alpha was a glutton for power. DEC then designed the StrongARM, which amazingly worked out far better for low power app…

Linux and Windows NT were also available.

...after quite some time.

That delay was the kiss of death, for an architecture that could never have a low-power implementation (and thus could not run in a laptop), and had insanely weak memory barriers in an SMP configuration.

No, Alpha would not have survived. There was just no way.

Re: How did Qualcomm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their Oryon SoC?

#19

Post by kjs3 »

chasil wrote: post #9

DEC's Alpha was doomed at release, because the operating systems licensed with it were a minimum of $30k just to get the install CD (for VMS or OSF/1 "Unix"). There must have been desperation among the design team, as 3rd party Alpha motherboards slowly began to appear that ran basic Linux. However, Alpha was a glutton for power. DEC then designed the StrongARM, which amazingly worked out far better for low power app…

Not sure if this is weird revisionism or simple ignorance, but it's not remotely right (I worked for a DEC reseller back in those days and had lots of quality time with Alpha (which I miss)).

Neither VMS nor OSF/1 were remotely like $30k unless you're talking about the DEC 4000/7000/10000 superminis (which ran to the US$1m range). I'd have to dig up a BoM from the old days to be exact, but the workstation license was in the US$100s/low US$1k unit price, depending on the box, and install media shipped with the box AFAIK. I have a couple of dozen copies of OSF/1 install media in a box in storage someplace so I guess I should get them on eBay ASAP.

Other than the early DEC 3000 line, Alpha ran M$ WinNT on DEC hardware with the right ARC firmware (user installable, tho I seem to recall there were some NT-only products), and Linux was ported very quickly. Many of our customers never even considered VMS or OSF/1 AFAIK. We sold a lot of Alphas to run NT+SQLServer in otherwise x86 Windows shops.

Third party Alpha motherboards existed but were never a big deal in the market mostly because the DEC OEM motherboards (e.g. PC164) were very good and reasonably priced (for the high end), and came in standard ATX form factors. There were, however, a lot of 3rd parties who took DEC OEM boards, put them in their own case and sold them under their own brand.

Comparing Alpha and StrongARM is...weird, since they were for completely different markets. It's like saying Xeon is doomed because Atom or ARM9 is so much more power efficient. And in Alphas heyday, absolutely noone was talking about TDP outside of mobile.

Alphas problem IMHO was there was never a 'low end' to capture market. Alpha was always a 'high-end PC' to 'workstation' class chip (no, Multia/21066 don't count...they were awful). In the end, AMD got 64-bit and AMD & Intel got performance competitive quickly and at the end of the day software is more important than hardware and why would end users want to have x86-64 on the low end and AXP on the high end when they can have one arch across the board.

Re: How did Qualcomm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their Oryon SoC?

#20

Post by kjs3 »

chasil wrote: post #18
phonon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux and Windows NT were also available.

...after quite some time. That delay was the kiss of death, for an architecture that could never have a low-power implementation (and thus could not run in a laptop), and had insanely weak memory barriers in an SMP configuration. No, Alpha would not have survived. There was just no way.

EV4 shipped in '92. WinNT for Alpha shipped in '93 or close to it. Is that really 'quite some time'?
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