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This isn't going to do good things for anyone who doesn't own a lot of Nvidia stock. This is going to do especially bad things for anyone who needs to buy a ce
by bleepblorp 6y ago
This isn't going to do good things for anyone who doesn't own a lot of Nvidia stock.
This is going to do especially bad things for anyone who needs to buy a cell phone or the SoC that powers one. There's no real alternative to ARM-based phone SoCs. Given Nvidia's business practices, any manufacturer who doesn't already have a perpetual ARM license should expect to have to pay a lot more money into Jensen Huang's retirement fund going forward. These costs will be passed on to consumers and will also provide an avenue for perpetual license holders to raise their consumer prices to match.
- bgorman 6y agoAndroid worked on x86 and MIPS in the past, it could presumably be ported to work with RISC-V
- saagarjha 6y agoIt might pretty much work today, perhaps with a few config file changes.
- bleepblorp 6y agoAndroid still works on x86-64; indeed there are quite a few actively maintained x86-64 Android ports that are used, both on bare metal PCs and virtualized, for various purposes. The problem is that there are no x86 SoCs that are sufficiently power efficient to be battery-life competitive with ARM SoCs in phones.
- seizethegdgap 6y agoCan confirm, just spun up Bliss OS on my Surface Book. Not at all the smoothest experience I've ever had using an Android tablet, but it's nice.
- janoc 6y agoYou would first need an actual working RISC-V silicon that it would be worth porting to. Not the essentially demo chips with poor performance that are around now. RISV-V is a lot of talk and hype but the actual silicon that you could buy and implement into a product is hard to come by. With the exception of a few small microcontroller efforts (GigaDevice, Sipeed).
- Zigurd 6y agoMIPS support was removed from the Android NDK, though older versions of the NDK stand a good chance of working, still. So app developers with components needing the NDK support have a bit of work to remain compatible.
- jacques_chester 6y ago> This isn't going to do good things for anyone who doesn't own a lot of Nvidia stock. If it makes you feel any better, studies of acquisitions show that most of them are duds and destroy acquirer shareholder value.
- imtringued 6y agoWell, the commenter is actively worried about Nvidia destroying shareholder value. If you destroy ARM in the process of acquiring it the combined company will be worth less in the long run. If the acquisition was actually motivated by synergy then Nvidia could have gotten away with a much cheaper license from ARM.