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Nuvia chose Arm when RISC-V was available. "Nothing useful in return" isn't correct. There is clearly a lot of Arm IP on offer to licensees - eg see Amazon and

Nuvia chose Arm when RISC-V was available. "Nothing useful in return" isn't correct. There is clearly a lot of Arm IP on offer to licensees - eg see Amazon and Graviton. I get the enthusiasm for RISC-V and its great in many ways but some of the 'boosterism' doesn't do it any favours.

dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
The Nuvia people had just spent years developing high performance ARM cores (for Apple) and as a small company obviously want a ready market for their designs. By "nothing in return" I mean if you want to design a CPU from scratch, what exactly are you getting from licensing the ARM arch? Software compatibility? That doesn't mean anything for servers where compatibility is largely a recompile away. Of course ARM is a huge supplier of IP and their ability to design processors in not question, but they only supply IP for one arch which they control. If you want to design something different you must get ARM's permission and they have proven to be fickle about that. It's not "boosterism" is a real and hard fact that freedom for the fundamental parts of any class of technology means that a vibrant ecosystem can flourish around it. That's the fundamental difference here and the technical challenges have proven not to be a barrier.
- klelatti 4y ago
  By all accounts Nuvia got substantial help (and probably quite a bit of IP) from Arm and I imagine that would be the case for any architectural licensee - they weren't just get sent a copy of the ISA spec and left to it! So 'nothing in return' just isn't true.
snvzz 4y ago
>Nuvia chose Arm when RISC-V was available. Nuvia chose ARM way because RISC-V spec wasn't there yet, for what they were trying to do. The RISC-V base spec, the unprivileged one (no supervisor vs user, or MMU), was ratified in 2019. Vector extension, hypervisor extension and a bunch other important ones were ratified... in December 2021. Nuvia wouldn't pick ARM today. Plus, with the ongoing ARM-Qualcomm lawsuit, we'll have to see whether Qualcomm's future server chips remain ARM.

dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago

The Nuvia people had just spent years developing high performance ARM cores (for Apple) and as a small company obviously want a ready market for their designs. By "nothing in return" I mean if you want to design a CPU from scratch, what exactly are you getting from licensing the ARM arch? Software compatibility? That doesn't mean anything for servers where compatibility is largely a recompile away. Of course ARM is a huge supplier of IP and their ability to design processors in not question, but they only supply IP for one arch which they control. If you want to design something different you must get ARM's permission and they have proven to be fickle about that. It's not "boosterism" is a real and hard fact that freedom for the fundamental parts of any class of technology means that a vibrant ecosystem can flourish around it. That's the fundamental difference here and the technical challenges have proven not to be a barrier.

klelatti 4y ago
By all accounts Nuvia got substantial help (and probably quite a bit of IP) from Arm and I imagine that would be the case for any architectural licensee - they weren't just get sent a copy of the ISA spec and left to it! So 'nothing in return' just isn't true.

snvzz 4y ago

>Nuvia chose Arm when RISC-V was available. Nuvia chose ARM way because RISC-V spec wasn't there yet, for what they were trying to do. The RISC-V base spec, the unprivileged one (no supervisor vs user, or MMU), was ratified in 2019. Vector extension, hypervisor extension and a bunch other important ones were ratified... in December 2021. Nuvia wouldn't pick ARM today. Plus, with the ongoing ARM-Qualcomm lawsuit, we'll have to see whether Qualcomm's future server chips remain ARM.