selling intel to Qualcomm, would the equivalent of selling yourself to a vampire instead of selling blood.
the reason Apple ended up making their own wireless chips is due to Qualcomm
Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel
71–80 of 109 posts
Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meanwhile x86 has maintained backwards compat for (checks calendar) yeah decades. Literally decades. With standards up the wazoo to avoid the disaster that is the Arm ecosystem without UEFI or something like it. Every Arm SoC being a snowflake needing special attention by the OS is a huge hassle. There's a reason there's no simplified Arm installer for operating systems.
Historically this backwards compatibility was a competitive moat for intel – having a large supply of weird instructions with some undocumented behaviour thrown in makes it more expensive to make competing chips.
The ISA isn't what makes x86 easier for operating systems to support than ARM SoCs. It's things like generic ACPICA instead of hardcoded devicetrees.
Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel
#73Qualcomm still hasn't shipped any of the Snapdragon X dev kits, two months and counting. If they can't deliver on their promises (that and CoPilot PCs having very disappointing sales), how could they do anything besides further drag down Intel? Not only that, it sounds like a major customer (Apple) is close to finally ditching Qualcomm's wireless chips? (At least that's been rumored [1]) [1] https://appleinsider.com/…
... Intel wasn't able to ship on EUV, so they would be in great company.
Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically this backwards compatibility was a competitive moat for intel – having a large supply of weird instructions with some undocumented behaviour thrown in makes it more expensive to make competing chips.
The ISA isn't what makes x86 easier for operating systems to support than ARM SoCs. It's things like generic ACPICA instead of hardcoded devicetrees.
Some ARM systems (mainly servers) do support ACPI; allowing for one image to run on multiple processors and devices.
However… ACPI is apparently a pretty awful thing to implement. When it doesn’t work, or mistakes are made (looking at my own 13th gen HP laptop right now - borked ACPI tables means unpatchable broken sleep on Linux), then it’s pure frustration.
Device trees on the other hand are much more binary. Either everything generally works or it doesn’t at all. It’s a valid approach.
Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel
#75Qualcomm still hasn't shipped any of the Snapdragon X dev kits, two months and counting. If they can't deliver on their promises (that and CoPilot PCs having very disappointing sales), how could they do anything besides further drag down Intel? Not only that, it sounds like a major customer (Apple) is close to finally ditching Qualcomm's wireless chips? (At least that's been rumored [1]) [1] https://appleinsider.com/…
When this platform was heralded as the “AI” desktop, I pre-ordered both the dev kit and a laptop. Like many of you, I’ve experienced a months-long delay in the delivery of the dev kits. Although I STILL don't have my devkit, I received my laptop pretty much on time. -- and I quickly discovered that despite Windows on ARM (WOA) being over a decade old, the support for open-source tooling is as complete as Swiss cheese…
> After some digging, I’ve learned that just four overworked developers in Prague make up the core team unclogging this tooling dependency log-jam. Gah!
What an embarrassment. So basically, it’s not a serious product.
Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
When this platform was heralded as the “AI” desktop, I pre-ordered both the dev kit and a laptop. Like many of you, I’ve experienced a months-long delay in the delivery of the dev kits. Although I STILL don't have my devkit, I received my laptop pretty much on time. -- and I quickly discovered that despite Windows on ARM (WOA) being over a decade old, the support for open-source tooling is as complete as Swiss cheese…
Why run Windows on ARM, when Linux on ARM is so.much more mature? Or are you buildings a Windows-specific product?
My plan was to run the laptop Windows and the 'devkit' Linux. This first batch of laptops (AFAICT) can NOT dual boot.
My thinking is this, if Windows ARM is a success -- there will be more units out there that can ALSO run Linux too. If Windows ARM is a failure, then Linux will suffer too.
Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically this backwards compatibility was a competitive moat for intel – having a large supply of weird instructions with some undocumented behaviour thrown in makes it more expensive to make competing chips.
The ISA isn't what makes x86 easier for operating systems to support than ARM SoCs. It's things like generic ACPICA instead of hardcoded devicetrees.
To be clear, I wasn’t claiming anything about operating systems. Merely that adding many weird instructions was a strategy intel used to try to make the jobs of amd and centaur and suchlike harder.
Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Qualcomm makes lots of their money by holding a monopoly on wireless chip patents. They use lawyers to bully other companies out of the space. You can compare this with the patent wars of the companies in Silicon Valley which came to halt when the orgs realized they were effectively giving money to lawyers instead of innovating. Qualcomm doesn’t really have real competition in Southern California. It’s cheaper for th…
so Qualcomm is basically Oracle?
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Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel
#79After a decade of being assured that the short support window for Android devices had a root cause in the lack of support device makers received from Qualcomm, they are the last company that I want to see buy Intel.
Intel squandered its dominance on the CPU market for decades. Qalcomm sucking the remaining life of it would be a fitting end for a player that lost its way. Wonder if the increasing backwards compatibility became too much to bear, but IMO it never really tried to tread new grounds for risk of losing a comfortable position.
Qualcomm main business is mobile phone chips and 5g modems.
Majority of it's revenue goes to Taiwan for TSMC as margins.
Having Intel fab, will cut the middle man, and revenue will skyrocket, all while no money leaves the USA.
Re: Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ISA isn't what makes x86 easier for operating systems to support than ARM SoCs. It's things like generic ACPICA instead of hardcoded devicetrees.
Some ARM systems (mainly servers) do support ACPI; allowing for one image to run on multiple processors and devices. However… ACPI is apparently a pretty awful thing to implement. When it doesn’t work, or mistakes are made (looking at my own 13th gen HP laptop right now - borked ACPI tables means unpatchable broken sleep on Linux), then it’s pure frustration. Device trees on the other hand are much more binary. Eithe…
You can override broken ACPI tables. The keyword to search for is "dsdt". For example, if you have an HP Omen this repo has a fix:
https://github.com/j0hnwang/OMEN-Transcend-16-ACPI-fix
But yes, device trees are far nicer to work with.