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I guess ARM really does want to push RISC-V forward. Qualcomm dominates the high-end, high-margin ARM chip market (the part that uses ARM designs). They also i
by hajile 4y ago
I guess ARM really does want to push RISC-V forward.
Qualcomm dominates the high-end, high-margin ARM chip market (the part that uses ARM designs). They also invested a bunch into SiFive and the SiFive CEO is from Qualcomm. By pushing for the entire Nuvia design to be thrown out, ARM is aiming for the 1.5B acquisition jugular.
I'm sure that there's at least idle talk about what to do if ARM wins or demands huge royalties in a settlement. Porting their design to RISC-V means keeping most of their work. It means they have a better negotiation position with ARM moving forward for other designs. It also increases their negotiation position with SiFive in the future (maybe even giving them enough positioning for an acquisition).
The market is already shifting toward RISC-V with MediaTek (largest Android low-end chip maker) creating a wholly-owned corp that is doing RISC-V designs. The JVM port is now mainlined and Alibaba has made a ton of progress with their Android port. China and India are both pushing hard for RISC-V too.
Meanwhile, RISC-V is moving hard into the embedded space where it's simplicity translates into a lot fewer gates while not paying 1-3% to ARM means either increased profits or more competitive pricing.
Qualcomm announcing a RISC-V version of Nuvia could be a disastrous opening of the floodgates for ARM.
TL;DR -- What a great time for ARM to prove to the world how switching to an open ISA would eliminate a lot of these bureaucratic issues.
- markhahn 4y agoit sounds more like ARM wants to quash any leakage, and keep fingers in every possible ARM-arch pie. that's pretty much the opposite of wanting to promote RISC-V...
- hajile 4y agoI'm talking about unintended consequences. They are threatening their largest partner with billions in losses and even if Qualcomm were to win, it would still cost a fortune to play out in the courts. They are exemplifying why "copyleft" hardware specs are better and companies notice. If ARM isn't materially better than RISC-V, why not switch and eliminate the problem? It's about as tone deaf as when they created that RISC-V attack site a few years ago. If this induces companies to switch, even winning the case would be a pyrrhic victory.
- adrian_b 4y agoUnfortunately the ARM ISA is materially better than the RISC-V ISA. So you cannot have all the good things. You have to choose between a nice ISA with an ugly license and an ugly ISA with a nice license.
- brucehoult 4y agoMaterially better, how? Aarch64 instructions are on average bigger than RISC-V ones and sometimes do slightly more work, but the complicated ones are split into µops and the number of clock cycles ends up similar. RISC-V code is demonstrably a lot more compact than ARM -- download any Linux distro that supports both (Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora...) and compare binary sizes. The RISC-V ones are consistently 20%+ smaller, despite currently still using the original RV64GC ISA. Binaries using the new stuff ratified in November last year will be smaller again. In similar µarches, RISC-V cores are faster than ARM cores. The SiFive U74 is faster than the ARM A55 (not to mention A53). The P550 is faster than the A76. M1-class RISC-V is coming -- often worked on (e.g. at Rivos) by many of the same engineers and managers who made M1. Nuvia was ARM's great hope for a competitive core that wasn't Apple-internal. I don't see how ARM can make Nuvia delete their plans. They can stop them selling the results, sure. What prevents Qualcomm converting the existing µarch work to RISC-V? Nothing that I can see. The ISA are very similar. It's mostly just a different instruction decoder and CSRs and delete a few things such as the condition codes.