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Qualcomm says ARM to prohibit proximity of CPU and 3rd-party modules in one chip

242 points by mpweiher 4y ago

benob 4y ago
Can we interpret that as good news for opensource drivers?
stevefan1999 4y ago
Full text: The litigation between Arm and Qualcomm has taken an unexpected turn. The British developer of processor architectures decided to radically change its business model: first, license fees will have to be paid by manufacturers of end devices, including smartphones and tablets; second, third-party components, including GPUs, NPUs and ISPs, will be prohibited in chips with Arm processors. In late August Arm filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm. Qualcomm absorbed server processor developer NUVIA and, according to Arm, had to update its license agreement because it deemed all previous agreements with the company invalid after it bought it. Qualcomm filed a countersuit against the British developer, and new documentation on the case contains crucial details. Qualcomm's updated lawsuit says that after 2024, Arm will stop licensing its processor architecture to semiconductor component manufacturers - payments will be charged to end-device manufacturers. Arm, according to the U.S. company, has already told OEMs that soon the only way for them to get Arm-based chips will be through direct license fees, and they'll have to accept these rules of the game. But that's not all. The British company has also decided to tighten its policy with respect to chip developers like Qualcomm: they will not be able to use third-party components in single-chip platforms with Arm processors if Arm offers their analogs as a licensed product. This will affect graphics and network processors, as well as image processors. In other words, Arm will prohibit the creation of duos like Samsung and AMD chips, as well as MediaTek and Imagination - both pairs of companies cooperate in the field of mobile graphics. And Qualcomm itself does not use GPUs from Arm, but its own. Such an initiative Arm has clear signs of anti-competitive behavior, notes the resource SemiAnalysis, and it is possible that these steps will accelerate the companies' efforts to develop chips based on open architecture RISC-V. However, some of the British company's partners may not be affected by the new rules. For example, NVIDIA has a 20-year license for the development of components with Arm-architecture. Apple was at the origins of Arm, so it is unlikely that this tandem can be destroyed so easily. There is also a version that a mutually beneficial cooperation binds Arm with Broadcom. Thus, the dispute between Arm and Qualcomm in just over two years threatens to affect the interests of many smaller players.
- stevefan1999 4y ago
  tl;dr summary: 1. Arm will stop licensing its processor architecture to semiconductor component manufacturers by charging payments to end-device manufacturers. 2. Only way for OEMs to get Arm-based chips will be through direct license fees 3. Third-party components such are custom GPUs and NPUs are no longer directly incorporable with Arm processors. This would probably mean they need to operate as a coprocessor of some kind that would not be tightly integrated. 3.1 This means Samsung's Exynos, AMD's PSP and Imagination's PowerVR are probably *fucked* Conclusion: ARM is really fed up with Qualcomm and is wishing to step up the game by hurting itself. But that said, it's more like "Friendship ended with Qualcomm, Samsung and AMD (but it's more like a frenemy), now Apple and NVIDIA are my homies"
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > ARM is really fed up with Qualcomm Everyone is fed up with Qualcomm at that point.
  - speed_spread 4y ago
    > Imagination's PowerVR are probably fucked I would have no issue paying for a RISC-V + licensed PowerVR core that's well supported in Wayland and Mesa.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      Good news, the StarFive JH7110 in the upcoming VisionFive 2 and Pine64's Star64 should fit that bill.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    Your post is missing a big "according to Qualcomm, a company known for stretching the rules and truth to favour itself and currently being sued for its misuse of ARM intellectual property following the Nuvia acquisition" disclaimer at the beginning. I would need at least some OEMs confirmation and a statement for Samsung before I believe it.
rwmj 4y ago
Good news for RISC-V. As Arm tightens licensing conditions, the "permissionless" and cost-free model of RISC-V looks better and better.
- colonwqbang 4y ago
  Eh. The ISA of RISC-V is free and open. Actual implementations of RISC-V are not, in general. The point of RISC-V is that you may have the option to switch implementations if you become fed up with your current supplier, without having to switch ISA.
  - oytis 4y ago
    As far as I understand in Qualcomm case it is exactly a third-party implementation of licensed ARM ISA. So looks like an ideal case for switching to RISC-V.
    - madeofpalk 4y ago
      As far as I understand, Arm ISA is a lot stricter, whereas RISC-V implementations can have more variations. So it's 'easier' to switch to a different implementation of Arm as you'll be more sure that the processor works the same way. At least, that's the idea.
  - UltraViolence 4y ago
    First of all: the licensing of RISC-V is much cheaper than ARM. I've seen Chinese RISC-V MCU's that only cost a dime or less. And these aren't itty-bitty 4-bit parts mind you, but comparable to ARM M0 or M4. Secondly, there are numerous open-source RISC-V designs out there to give any company a head start and the freedom to modify it as they see fit.
    - delfinom 4y ago
      Those OSS RISCV designs are academic largely. True performance RISCV designs are going to be people's money maker and never open sourced. A head start is great but that still costs expensive skilled engineering time to actually make a worthwhile product. And due to licensing of OSS, it may be a bad thing for a company to build their multi-billion dollar business on something they need to open source for someone to immediately knock them off and kill their business. In the hardware world, we live and die by our design secrets. If someone can simply copy you exactly, they can completely undercut you and basically put you out of business. A bit different than the software world.
aix1 4y ago
Could someone explain the implications?
- meltyness 4y ago
  Arm had a good idea to drive up sales of their non-core IP, didn't realize how much device manufacturers really like device specialization for sub-ms asynchronous time warp, low power hot-word detection, not needing to get directly involved in fab, nor did they realize how much this looks like an antitrust case since "i wannabe the sole chip manufacturer on the board" isn't that subtle, "chips per board" is actually a reported metric in quarterlies for public chip companies.
farseer 4y ago
Proximity means in a single ic package? Does that mean no vector processors coupled with ARM chips if ARM offers its own vector processors/DSP/tpus?
jagged-chisel 4y ago
Anti-competitive. That’s all I can see here. What other possible benefit could there be for this?
- meltyness 4y ago
  Recovering losses from wework if Softbank can get away with this?
- Varloom 4y ago
  Stifling innovation like no tomorrow to maintain market domino. Luckily we have something called RISC-V ready to takeover.
greatgib 4y ago
How can this even be legal? Wouldn't this be against anti trust laws? It is like Intel saying that it is forbidden to have an Nvidia GPU in their laptop if an Intel CPU is used.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- outsomnia 4y ago
  Aren't they saying it has to be on a different chiplet? It's not like they can't have them "on the same laptop", AFAIk they're on separate chiplets or even chips today.
- Zandikar 4y ago
  Not quite. This is more like saying what Intel has done from day 1, where a 3rd party can't take an intel CPU, add their own GPU (or whatever accelerator/silicon of choice) into the chip in place of Intel's own iGPU, and then release it, at least not without getting intel's blessing and paying a licensing fee. you can still add a 3rd party modem or gpu to an arm device, it just can't be on the same ARM SoC. Unlike intel, ARM seems at least open to the idea to licensing such packages somewhat (see Nvidia, Apple) whereas Intel traditionally hasn't been too interested in letting 3rd parties fiddle under the lid of their silicon. It's a regression of how things used to be with ARM, but it's not saying you can't connect 3rd party accelerators to an ARM SoC fullstop, just that it has to be seperate dies/chiplet/SoC. Your example of adding an Nvidia GPU into an intel system is still fine, so long as they are separate components. So no, this is not antitrust worthy in the slightest.
  - blackoil 4y ago
    Unlike Intel, ARM is not in business of selling chips. They license ISA so the treatment will be different.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      How is that relevant? Is there a law that says you’re allowed to do that except if you have the wrong business model? Licensing the ISA does not mean that they abandon their IP or anything. They still have the exact same rights as Intel, give or take the license agreements they have in place, things like FRAND commitments, and antitrust issues. If there is any reason to treat them differently, that would be the weight they have in the mobile CPU market, not the fact that they decided to sell licenses.
rowanG077 4y ago
That seems no SoC FPGAs anymore I guess. Those were kinda neat and fulfilling a unique need.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  Wait how does that follow from this news? Unless your design is implementing a neural network, image processing, or a GPU there is no 'competition' with ARM's IP offer? Right?
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    You are right! I missed the part where it said this only applies to IP ARM offers as well.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
I didn't realise Arm were such big fans of RISC-V. This will really drive adoption.
commoner 4y ago
This is a poorly rewritten version of the original SemiAnalysis article: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/arm-changes-business-model-oem-partners https://www.semianalysis.com/p/arm-changes-business-model-oe... HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371725
- SSLy 4y ago
  @dang, we need a URL change or merge.
- dagmx 4y ago
  I’d also add that SemiAnalysis posts a lot of conjecture as fact and loves sensationalism. In this case it’s taking Qualcomms word for it and not representing Arms own dispute of the claim. So the original source for all of these articles is flawed to begin with as well. I would describe SemiAnalysis as a technical tabloid. Like The Daily Mail, there’s some small truth to the claims but the rest is just made up for clicks.
- dang 4y ago
  Ok, we've switched to that from https://www.ryzencpu.com/2022/10/arm-will-prohibit-proximity-of-its-cpu.html https://www.ryzencpu.com/2022/10/arm-will-prohibit-proximity.... Thanks!
londons_explore 4y ago
I forsee RISC-V ports of Android rapidly gathering speed... Ports of Android 12 are already running on dev boards. Most of the work was done by Alibaba, and Google has just agreed to merge it into AOSP, making RISC-V a supported Android platform. If they do, all that's needed is a good compat layer that can emulate ARM for app compatibility, and the app ecosystem to be updated to compile all the native code to RISC-V for new apps too. Intel tried and mostly failed at this step, with Googles help, so it's a tough task.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Remember most native libraries are native libraries because they do some compute-heavy task. They probably involve lots of hand crafted SIMD ARM assembly. Porting that to RISC-V isn't trivial, and most app developers can't be bothered for the tiny number of low-end RISC-V users. Instead, those users end up using the ARM apps via an emulator, and that makes them even slower on an already slow cheap phone. End result: RISC-V gets a reputation as a very slow and very crap CPU architecture. Just like MIPS and x86 on mobile got.
  - Varloom 4y ago
    Apple transitioned from x86 to ARM in less than a year. It can be done, using mix of native applications and emulation. And as long the emulation speed is indistinguishable from native (Like Rosetta 2), end users won't notice it and won't complain. Google & Meta can team up to transition all their apps to RISC-V and that would be 70% of the most used daily apps, other will follow the lead.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      > in less than a year. I think they'd been working on it for many years beforehand. Getting the software stack ready for a new architecture, especially one where there is a lot of 3rd party code you can't touch, is a lot of work. After all, step one was porting their darwin kernel in 2007. Then the 'Unified Platform' work of 2017 made the userspace work on ARM... Then 2020 they released an ARM desktop product... So it was a lot of years!!
BluSyn 4y ago
I think ARM is upset their NVidia buy-out was cancelled. This essentially forces someone else to purchase the company, as the total license fees for a company like Google/Apple could outstrip the straight acquisition cost. It's the only plausible explanation I have, as this is basically a giant foot-gun set on destroying the ARM ecosystem right as it's becoming ubiquitous. Either that or the MBA's have taken over, the engineers have left the building, and there's no innovation left in their product roadmap. If there's no future in their IP then ARM is just a glorified patent troll; in which case I'll gladly watch them burn down as RISC-V takes over.
- jacooper 4y ago
  RISC-V is looking pretty good right now.
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    Is there a good overview somewhere of what the realistic path to market is for it? I don't mean this as sass— I'm genuinely curious. As far as I'm aware there are only a handful of real chips/devkits available at this point; mostly it's still people synthesizing cores on FPGAs. Basically the whole story looks pretty experimental. I know "can I buy it on Digi-Key" is irrelevant to an entity like Google or Apple, but I feel like hobbyist accessibility is at least something of a proxy for general readiness.
    - zi0 4y ago
      In August, Intel announced Intel® PathFinder to bootstrap (thanks to the pre-silicon development environment) the adoption of RISC-V, FYI. FPGAs everywhere https://riscv.org/blog/2022/08/risc-v-international-and-intel-team-up-to-accelerate-risc-v-adoption-introducing-intel-pathfinder-for-risc-v-intel-corporation/ https://riscv.org/blog/2022/08/risc-v-international-and-inte...
    - kragen 4y ago
      I think Western Digital has been shipping disk drives driven by RISC-V microcontrollers in volume for years. I think they won't sell you the microcontrollers, but they definitely aren't the only company doing this, just the loudest. They do offer their designs as free IP cores https://www.westerndigital.com/en-us/company/innovation/open-source/risc-v https://www.westerndigital.com/en-us/company/innovation/open... and apparently run Linux on some of them: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/wd-licenses-risc-v-cpus https://www.techinsights.com/blog/wd-licenses-risc-v-cpus This last article says, "Since the storage company isn’t a traditional IP vendor, it has worked with Codasip to support its CPU licensees. Including [WD's] Swerv cores and other open-source designs, Codasip has helped customers ship two billion RISC-V chips over the past few years." (Emphasis mine.) But I think instead of "an entity like Google or Apple", or even WD, you should be thinking "an entity like Baidu, Huawei, or AliBaba". The strongest RISC-V story is a Chinese national security thing, and it works like this. — ⁂ — Most computer hardware has been designed and assembled in the PRC for several years now. In 02019 the USG imposed heavy sanctions on a number of PRC hardware companies, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei, the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world and since 02020 the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. These sanctions deprived Huawei of access to chips from TSMC in Taiwan, even though Taiwan is nominally not under US jurisdiction. Computer hardware relies heavily on trade with Taiwan and other countries, including, in particular, MCUs and CPUs fabricated at TSMC in Taiwan using designs licensed from ARM. ARM China, a former ARM subsidiary, has the legal right to license ARM designs for use within China but not overseas. Using a component makes you vulnerable to backdoors inserted by the component's manufacturer or, if you do not understand its design, its designer. Such backdoors are known to have been a major instrument of US foreign policy in the past (the Crypto AG affair) and presumably still are. The Huawei sanctions were justified by allegations that the PRC is doing the same thing. There are rumors that some manufacturers in the PRC are experiencing a new "onshore mandate" that prohibits foreign-sourced components, at least in some products; quoting https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/22/10-cents-ch32v003-risc-v-mcu-offers-2kb-sram-16kb-flash-in-sop8-to-qfn20-packages/#comment-599328 https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/22/10-cents-ch32v003-ri...: > [the WCH CH32V003 is] quite timely as we were forced by HQ last Friday to revise all product line designs to comply with 100% Chinese domestic semiconductors & passive components by latest Q4 end. All western sourced/accounts and parts are now forbidden, apart from those sourced by HQ’s registered jurisdiction. > Worth adding to the list, we’ve also signed accounts with GigaDevice and Expressif Shanghai in the MCU and connectivity range. — ⁂ — So that's the problem to solve. RISC-V already offers PRC manufacturers a path to building ARM-competitive MCUs and low-end CPUs which can be legally sold overseas and which comply with this onshore mandate. As a bonus, they can be sold at prices several times cheaper than any ARM alternative; WCH's CH32V003 is reputedly 10¢, though LCSC doesn't seem to have them in stock yet. Presumably, until SMIC (or another domestic alternative) can move up to more modern process nodes, fully-sanctions-proof versions of these chips will be larger, more expensive, and more power-hungry than TSMC-manufactured chips. But for many applications this doesn't matter. The Allwinner D1, using a RISC-V design from the Honey Badger open-source hardware subsidiary of AliBaba, is already performance-competitive with early Raspberry Pis, though I think that performance relies on TSMC. In 3–5 years RISC-V might be able to move up to today's desktop or laptop CPUs, and SMIC might be able to fabricate things at early Raspberry Pi performance levels (22 nm? Something past the end of Dennard scaling, anyway). — ⁂ — Also, though, you shouldn't totally dismiss the FPGA cores. FPGAs are a lot cheaper than they used to be, thanks to Lattice. It's true that an ASIC MCU will always be faster than an FPGA fabbed in the same process running a softcore, but it may not have the peripherals you need, and there are a lot of applications where we run an MCU at a 32768 Hz clock to save power, so clock speed isn't everything. Olof Kindgren's bit-serial RISC-V core SeRV https://github.com/olofk/serv https://github.com/olofk/serv reputedly fits into 200 4-LUTs like those in the Lattice iCE40LP384, which would cost US$1.82–2.15 at Digi-Key if they had any: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/lattice-semiconductor-corporation/ICE40LP384-SG32/3974680 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/lattice-semicondu... and that would leave you another 184 LUTs for peripherals. You can get MCUs a lot cheaper than US$2 but US$2 is still within the budget for a lot of projects. Every year there are more and more custom ASICs from more and more companies, and a lot of them include some kind of microcontroller core to orchestrate their activities. Historically this has often been something like an 8051 or Z80, but switching it to RISC-V seems likely to lower development costs significantly, especially if a tiny RV32I core like SeRV or the smaller configurations of PicoRV32 would be adequate.
BirAdam 4y ago
This is going to seriously slow adoption of ARM. Right as ARM is becoming truly competitive against x86, ARM appears to have lost their minds. By shrinking the number of implementers, ARM is going to lose serious market share, and while NVIDIA and Apple won’t immediately be affected, they’ll likely start pursuing RISC-V. I know Apple already uses RISC-V in non-consumer facing parts of their machines… but we may see yet another transition within 10 years if ARM don’t change their tune.
- bionade24 4y ago
  Nvidia does already use RISC-V in their GPUs, too. Those small controller chips aren't comparable with CPUs.
pabs3 4y ago
I note that ARM disputes these claims: https://www.fierceelectronics.com/sensors/arm-qualcomm-legal-battle-suggests-oems-need-arm-ip-licenses-not-chip-firms https://www.fierceelectronics.com/sensors/arm-qualcomm-legal...
- UltraViolence 4y ago
  That sounds like Russia denying they were about to invade Ukraine until they did.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    It sounds more like Qualcomm making preposterous claims to avoid having people looking closely as what’s happening with the Nuvia IP. It seems to be working. That would be classic Qualcomm. As a rule, when Qualcomm disagree with another company, you can assume they are in the wrong.
    - klelatti 4y ago
      It's interesting that apparently Qualcomm didn't inform Arm of the Nuvia purchase even though there was a change of control clause in Nuvia's license. Also IIRC they had 30+ comments from other firms endorsing the purchase ready in advance so basically told everyone but Arm. Make of that what you will!
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  Have any other SoC vendors come forward on either side of the matter? I don't put it past a pre-IPO ARM to do something like this to make their numbers look better. But I also don't trust Qualcomm to be entirely truthful.
tyingq 4y ago
No sources, posted on a blog that's using an AMD trademark in the (2 month old) domain. I think I'll wait for a better source.
- Dah00n 4y ago
  https://www.semianalysis.com/p/arm-changes-business-model-oem-partners https://www.semianalysis.com/p/arm-changes-business-model-oe...
  - tyingq 4y ago
    Much better, though most of it is Qualcomm paraphrasing what they say ARM said, and ARM is disputing the paraphrasing.
sylware 4y ago
Isn't that partly related to some SOCs combining some existing arm blocks with new risc-v blocks? With the US admnistration cracking down on China chip manufacturing, I wonder if we still will be able to find cheap risc-v boards.
dis-sys 4y ago
this is a sad news. adoption of ARM just started to pick up in server & laptop market, it could be a nice alternative to x86, yet short sighted decisions like this from ARM is going to cause huge uncertainties. RISC-V is great, I am all for it, but let's be realistic, many people including myself have been waiting for 2 decades to see the current upward trend of ARM in servers & laptops, how many extra years we will have to wait for RISC-V to catch up and get to ARM's current position? An extra 5-10 years? Intel must be laughing! As an ex-ARM & ex-Qualcomm employee - middle finger for both companies, you greedy licensing bitch.
- alexlesuper 4y ago
  5-10 years isn't that long. I guess it depends on the management philosophy, but if someone told me I would my company would be losing a large market share in 5-10 years I would be panicking.
- snvzz 4y ago
  >RISC-V is great, I am all for it, but let's be realistic ARM was starting to pick up, but that's not happening anymore. It is a good thing, as we can skip ARM and go straight to RISC-V.
MarkusWandel 4y ago
So does that mean no more Raspi, i.e. ARM CPU and 3rd party GPU on the same silicon?
klelatti 4y ago
The title should really be 'Qualcomm claims ARM to prohibit proximity of CPU w 3rd-party modules in one chip'. As others have pointed out Arm disputes these claims. As to the wider dispute Nuvia developed technology using Arm IP under one license and then Qualcomm want to sell that technology under a different - and presumably more favourable and lower cost - license. The big risk for Arm was always that a big architecture licensee becomes dominant and damages sales of Arm's own cores. That would not only be bad for Arm but bad for customers who use Arm's cores. Whatever you think of the tactics I think this is what Arm is trying to stop Qualcomm doing here.
- liotier 4y ago
  Qualcomm accusing someone of greedy anti-competitive use of intellectual property is quite amusing !
  - brookst 4y ago
    It’s very annoying when someone steals your business model!
    - FpUser 4y ago
      Every business model was "stolen" at some point.
      - TOMDM 4y ago
        Mostly just the successful ones
      - brookst 4y ago
        Yes, of course. But humans are territorial and possessive, and it aggravates us when someone “steals” our ideas. The iterative and derivative nature of those ideas notwithstanding.
        stoplying1 4y ago
hulitu 4y ago
ARM is the Nokia of CPU architecture. Every ARM CPU has a different instruction set.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Good that RISC-V keeps the tradition with all those extensions to chose from.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    >templated extensions FUD You might have missed the recent news on Profiles[0]. Oh, and there's already some designs[1] announced that are RVA22 +V compliant. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33347653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33347653 1. https://www.sifive.com/press/sifives-new-high-performance-processors-offer-a-significant https://www.sifive.com/press/sifives-new-high-performance-pr...
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Profiles are orthogonal to the OEM freedom to extend RISC-V with proprietary features.
      - snvzz 4y ago
        By using encoding space reserved for that purpose, and without interference with compatibility with RVA22+V code.
kyaghmour 4y ago
ARM is likely well geared for managing and collecting royalties from chip vendors (hundreds?). It seems to me that setting up an organization to collect from actual device manufacturers (~10^6-10^7 or more?) is a completely different scalability scope and, therefore, a completely different business. Maybe this is rather a targeted game of chicken tailor made against a specific licensee? Also, re RISC-V. I'm all for that. But an ISA does not make a chip. There is far more to what ARM offers than just its ISA: production-grade cores and surrounding blocks on bleeding edge nodes, etc. They could, theoretically, start selling a RISC-V fetch and decode unit (think of it as a Unix API on top of Windows) and still come out on top.
- UltraViolence 4y ago
  If ARM starts licensing according to the client's wallet size we'll all be witness to the wisdom of Apple designing their own ARM cores from scratch. Apart from the fact that Apple's a founding member of ARM and probably doesn't pay a dime and has the freedom to do with the ARM ISA as they see fit.
- usrusr 4y ago
  Collecting from actual device manufacturers would be beyond crazy, fully agree about that. But it would be almost trivial to do for some core classes, at the upper end, if they really wanted to. Certainly even that would still be hurting themselves more than others.
UltraViolence 4y ago
The only thing this will result in is the speedup of the move over to RISC-V. Because of this spat I predict RISC-V will be dominant within a decade and large inroads in 5 years or less in the mobile and embedded space. I even predict we'll see large numbers of vendors who'll make RISC-V server and desktop CPU's.
beebeepka 4y ago
This is what, I believe, Nvidia wanted to do. It may be a dick move but they want to make a ton of money, damn it. Even if it drives many of their customers to risc-v
ZiiS 4y ago
Better headline would be "ARM to force adoption of RISC-V"
- zerohp 4y ago
  Even better would be “Qualcomm lies”
  - snvzz 4y ago
    Do you have access to information we don't?
newhere101 4y ago
There is a lot of misinformation being spread out. Arm changed the business model from requiring the SoC vendor to license every single piece of IP individually up-front (one license for CPU, one license for GPU, one license for interconnect, etc) to a "all you can eat model" and "pay only once you shipped the product": https://www.arm.com/products/flexible-access https://www.arm.com/products/flexible-access This is very positive because it simplifies the legal paperwork for licensing IP (one license gives you access to an entire portfolio of IP instead of just one) and lowers the bar for prototyping because you won't be required to pay full cost for a license you don't you if you will use. Qualcomm is heavily misrepresenting this to their light. Arm preventing customers from mixing Arm IP with other IPs is just straight up lie. You can take Mobileye as an example, they just licensed an Arm GPU with a RISC-V CPU: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17165/mobileye-announces-eyeq-ultra-l4-auto-soc https://www.anandtech.com/show/17165/mobileye-announces-eyeq...
- adrian_b 4y ago
  Nobody has said that Arm is preventing customers from mixing Arm IP with other IPs now, so nobody lied about this. Qualcomm has said that this is what Arm intends to do in a couple of years from now. Whether this is true or false, it remains to be seen.
  - dagmx 4y ago
    oh come on, the majority of people in this HN post are taking it as the state of things now. Very few posts are even mentioning that it’s Qualcomm claiming it. This is a classic misinformation tactic. To present one sides claim as fact and then by the time the truth comes out one way or another, it doesn’t matter because the sensationalist reporting is what people remember.
    - zerohp 4y ago
      HN comments are so full of misinformation when it comes to hardware design that it’s not even worth fighting anymore. This place is lost.
hansvm 4y ago
Assuming for the moment this is real, could somebody ELI5 how this would work in practice in the face of the first sale doctrine? (1) Chip manufacturers can't use ARM IP without appropriate permission/licensing in the first place, so they would _still_ need some ARM contract to even make the things, right? (2) The first-sale doctrine doesn't grant unlimited rights -- OEMs can't reverse engineer and clone a chip -- but certainly they can attach it unadultered to other components so long as there aren't separate patent issues for that particular combination of underlying technologies? Does ARM perhaps have a patent on stuff that looks like "ARM Core" + "Neural Accelerator" or something like that? (3) Assuming there aren't any loopholes out of first-sale, is the play that in the contract in (1) ARM prohibits direct sale and requires chip manufacturers to profit via some contract that includes language about OEMs having to pay ARM? Is that sort of law-skirting anti-competitiveness actually allowed here or in other domains?
dboreham 4y ago
Is the article title supposed to be English? I think it means something like: "ARM to prohibit 3rd-party modules on the same chip as its CPU designs".
thesnide 4y ago
how does that impact MCU which are an ARM core plus peripherals inside the same die?
Varloom 4y ago
We are in a transitory period with ARM till RiSC-V takeover and free the market from their stringent behaviors. Might take few years, but we are on the right track to get there.
Kukumber 4y ago
This website looks AI generated
antman 4y ago
At this point it appears as if ARM is run by former Nokia Kodak and Yahoo executives. For similarly innovative tech strategies I suggest the book “In search of stupidity” by Merrill Chapman
zackmorris 4y ago
As selfish as this is (if it plays out the way the article suggests), it just further reinforces the pattern we see over and over: every spec, every standard, every intellectual property has a poison pill that prevents us from progressing. I just keep wondering how we can all come together and pull the plug on this stuff. I want a computer built of at least 1000 (RISC-V, MIPS, I would have said ARM before this announcement) chiplets to process the workloads I've explained in my comments since I joined this site. The future of computing is humans cultivating algorithms rather than writing them directly. That looks like genetic algorithms and simulating as many permutations as possible so we can pick and choose the ones that work. And better testing paradigms and formal verification. No more getting lost in the weeds having to learn yet another 3D rendering library or AI runtime. Although the computer I'm talking about can certainly simulate that stuff. I got my computer engineering degree in 1999 so I could do something like the above paragraph, only to see every attempt to do so be stifled by the main players every step of the way for the last 20+ years. Nobody gets it. They're never gonna get it. They're gonna proprietarize and cripple and dilute every last magical idea until some Evil Corp somewhere can make a dime on it. Upon rereading the comments, I realized that it might still allow a chip with an array of the same core like I'm suggesting, which would fit with the architecture I've been proposing. Even if that's the case, I'm still against ARM's position. They're basically trying to control how we use their core in something we own, which is the hardware equivalent of DRM.
lonelyasacloud 4y ago
Probably a more reliable source on the story https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/14/qualcomm_arm_lawsuit_nuvia/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/14/qualcomm_arm_lawsuit_...

242 points by mpweiher 4y ago

Can we interpret that as good news for opensource drivers?

stevefan1999 4y ago

Full text: The litigation between Arm and Qualcomm has taken an unexpected turn. The British developer of processor architectures decided to radically change its business model: first, license fees will have to be paid by manufacturers of end devices, including smartphones and tablets; second, third-party components, including GPUs, NPUs and ISPs, will be prohibited in chips with Arm processors. In late August Arm filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm. Qualcomm absorbed server processor developer NUVIA and, according to Arm, had to update its license agreement because it deemed all previous agreements with the company invalid after it bought it. Qualcomm filed a countersuit against the British developer, and new documentation on the case contains crucial details. Qualcomm's updated lawsuit says that after 2024, Arm will stop licensing its processor architecture to semiconductor component manufacturers - payments will be charged to end-device manufacturers. Arm, according to the U.S. company, has already told OEMs that soon the only way for them to get Arm-based chips will be through direct license fees, and they'll have to accept these rules of the game. But that's not all. The British company has also decided to tighten its policy with respect to chip developers like Qualcomm: they will not be able to use third-party components in single-chip platforms with Arm processors if Arm offers their analogs as a licensed product. This will affect graphics and network processors, as well as image processors. In other words, Arm will prohibit the creation of duos like Samsung and AMD chips, as well as MediaTek and Imagination - both pairs of companies cooperate in the field of mobile graphics. And Qualcomm itself does not use GPUs from Arm, but its own. Such an initiative Arm has clear signs of anti-competitive behavior, notes the resource SemiAnalysis, and it is possible that these steps will accelerate the companies' efforts to develop chips based on open architecture RISC-V. However, some of the British company's partners may not be affected by the new rules. For example, NVIDIA has a 20-year license for the development of components with Arm-architecture. Apple was at the origins of Arm, so it is unlikely that this tandem can be destroyed so easily. There is also a version that a mutually beneficial cooperation binds Arm with Broadcom. Thus, the dispute between Arm and Qualcomm in just over two years threatens to affect the interests of many smaller players.

stevefan1999 4y ago
tl;dr summary: 1. Arm will stop licensing its processor architecture to semiconductor component manufacturers by charging payments to end-device manufacturers. 2. Only way for OEMs to get Arm-based chips will be through direct license fees 3. Third-party components such are custom GPUs and NPUs are no longer directly incorporable with Arm processors. This would probably mean they need to operate as a coprocessor of some kind that would not be tightly integrated. 3.1 This means Samsung's Exynos, AMD's PSP and Imagination's PowerVR are probably *fucked* Conclusion: ARM is really fed up with Qualcomm and is wishing to step up the game by hurting itself. But that said, it's more like "Friendship ended with Qualcomm, Samsung and AMD (but it's more like a frenemy), now Apple and NVIDIA are my homies"
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > ARM is really fed up with Qualcomm Everyone is fed up with Qualcomm at that point.
- speed_spread 4y ago
  > Imagination's PowerVR are probably fucked I would have no issue paying for a RISC-V + licensed PowerVR core that's well supported in Wayland and Mesa.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    Good news, the StarFive JH7110 in the upcoming VisionFive 2 and Pine64's Star64 should fit that bill.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  Your post is missing a big "according to Qualcomm, a company known for stretching the rules and truth to favour itself and currently being sued for its misuse of ARM intellectual property following the Nuvia acquisition" disclaimer at the beginning. I would need at least some OEMs confirmation and a statement for Samsung before I believe it.

rwmj 4y ago

Good news for RISC-V. As Arm tightens licensing conditions, the "permissionless" and cost-free model of RISC-V looks better and better.

colonwqbang 4y ago
Eh. The ISA of RISC-V is free and open. Actual implementations of RISC-V are not, in general. The point of RISC-V is that you may have the option to switch implementations if you become fed up with your current supplier, without having to switch ISA.
- oytis 4y ago
  As far as I understand in Qualcomm case it is exactly a third-party implementation of licensed ARM ISA. So looks like an ideal case for switching to RISC-V.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    As far as I understand, Arm ISA is a lot stricter, whereas RISC-V implementations can have more variations. So it's 'easier' to switch to a different implementation of Arm as you'll be more sure that the processor works the same way. At least, that's the idea.
- UltraViolence 4y ago
  First of all: the licensing of RISC-V is much cheaper than ARM. I've seen Chinese RISC-V MCU's that only cost a dime or less. And these aren't itty-bitty 4-bit parts mind you, but comparable to ARM M0 or M4. Secondly, there are numerous open-source RISC-V designs out there to give any company a head start and the freedom to modify it as they see fit.
  - delfinom 4y ago
    Those OSS RISCV designs are academic largely. True performance RISCV designs are going to be people's money maker and never open sourced. A head start is great but that still costs expensive skilled engineering time to actually make a worthwhile product. And due to licensing of OSS, it may be a bad thing for a company to build their multi-billion dollar business on something they need to open source for someone to immediately knock them off and kill their business. In the hardware world, we live and die by our design secrets. If someone can simply copy you exactly, they can completely undercut you and basically put you out of business. A bit different than the software world.

aix1 4y ago

Could someone explain the implications?

meltyness 4y ago
Arm had a good idea to drive up sales of their non-core IP, didn't realize how much device manufacturers really like device specialization for sub-ms asynchronous time warp, low power hot-word detection, not needing to get directly involved in fab, nor did they realize how much this looks like an antitrust case since "i wannabe the sole chip manufacturer on the board" isn't that subtle, "chips per board" is actually a reported metric in quarterlies for public chip companies.

farseer 4y ago

Proximity means in a single ic package? Does that mean no vector processors coupled with ARM chips if ARM offers its own vector processors/DSP/tpus?

jagged-chisel 4y ago

Anti-competitive. That’s all I can see here. What other possible benefit could there be for this?

meltyness 4y ago
Recovering losses from wework if Softbank can get away with this?
Varloom 4y ago
Stifling innovation like no tomorrow to maintain market domino. Luckily we have something called RISC-V ready to takeover.

greatgib 4y ago

How can this even be legal? Wouldn't this be against anti trust laws? It is like Intel saying that it is forbidden to have an Nvidia GPU in their laptop if an Intel CPU is used.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
outsomnia 4y ago
Aren't they saying it has to be on a different chiplet? It's not like they can't have them "on the same laptop", AFAIk they're on separate chiplets or even chips today.
Zandikar 4y ago
Not quite. This is more like saying what Intel has done from day 1, where a 3rd party can't take an intel CPU, add their own GPU (or whatever accelerator/silicon of choice) into the chip in place of Intel's own iGPU, and then release it, at least not without getting intel's blessing and paying a licensing fee. you can still add a 3rd party modem or gpu to an arm device, it just can't be on the same ARM SoC. Unlike intel, ARM seems at least open to the idea to licensing such packages somewhat (see Nvidia, Apple) whereas Intel traditionally hasn't been too interested in letting 3rd parties fiddle under the lid of their silicon. It's a regression of how things used to be with ARM, but it's not saying you can't connect 3rd party accelerators to an ARM SoC fullstop, just that it has to be seperate dies/chiplet/SoC. Your example of adding an Nvidia GPU into an intel system is still fine, so long as they are separate components. So no, this is not antitrust worthy in the slightest.
- blackoil 4y ago
  Unlike Intel, ARM is not in business of selling chips. They license ISA so the treatment will be different.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    How is that relevant? Is there a law that says you’re allowed to do that except if you have the wrong business model? Licensing the ISA does not mean that they abandon their IP or anything. They still have the exact same rights as Intel, give or take the license agreements they have in place, things like FRAND commitments, and antitrust issues. If there is any reason to treat them differently, that would be the weight they have in the mobile CPU market, not the fact that they decided to sell licenses.

rowanG077 4y ago

That seems no SoC FPGAs anymore I guess. Those were kinda neat and fulfilling a unique need.

DoingIsLearning 4y ago
Wait how does that follow from this news? Unless your design is implementing a neural network, image processing, or a GPU there is no 'competition' with ARM's IP offer? Right?
- rowanG077 4y ago
  You are right! I missed the part where it said this only applies to IP ARM offers as well.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

I didn't realise Arm were such big fans of RISC-V. This will really drive adoption.

commoner 4y ago

This is a poorly rewritten version of the original SemiAnalysis article: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/arm-changes-business-model-oem-partners https://www.semianalysis.com/p/arm-changes-business-model-oe... HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371725

SSLy 4y ago
@dang, we need a URL change or merge.
dagmx 4y ago
I’d also add that SemiAnalysis posts a lot of conjecture as fact and loves sensationalism. In this case it’s taking Qualcomms word for it and not representing Arms own dispute of the claim. So the original source for all of these articles is flawed to begin with as well. I would describe SemiAnalysis as a technical tabloid. Like The Daily Mail, there’s some small truth to the claims but the rest is just made up for clicks.
dang 4y ago
Ok, we've switched to that from https://www.ryzencpu.com/2022/10/arm-will-prohibit-proximity-of-its-cpu.html https://www.ryzencpu.com/2022/10/arm-will-prohibit-proximity.... Thanks!

londons_explore 4y ago

I forsee RISC-V ports of Android rapidly gathering speed... Ports of Android 12 are already running on dev boards. Most of the work was done by Alibaba, and Google has just agreed to merge it into AOSP, making RISC-V a supported Android platform. If they do, all that's needed is a good compat layer that can emulate ARM for app compatibility, and the app ecosystem to be updated to compile all the native code to RISC-V for new apps too. Intel tried and mostly failed at this step, with Googles help, so it's a tough task.

londons_explore 4y ago
Remember most native libraries are native libraries because they do some compute-heavy task. They probably involve lots of hand crafted SIMD ARM assembly. Porting that to RISC-V isn't trivial, and most app developers can't be bothered for the tiny number of low-end RISC-V users. Instead, those users end up using the ARM apps via an emulator, and that makes them even slower on an already slow cheap phone. End result: RISC-V gets a reputation as a very slow and very crap CPU architecture. Just like MIPS and x86 on mobile got.
- Varloom 4y ago
  Apple transitioned from x86 to ARM in less than a year. It can be done, using mix of native applications and emulation. And as long the emulation speed is indistinguishable from native (Like Rosetta 2), end users won't notice it and won't complain. Google & Meta can team up to transition all their apps to RISC-V and that would be 70% of the most used daily apps, other will follow the lead.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    > in less than a year. I think they'd been working on it for many years beforehand. Getting the software stack ready for a new architecture, especially one where there is a lot of 3rd party code you can't touch, is a lot of work. After all, step one was porting their darwin kernel in 2007. Then the 'Unified Platform' work of 2017 made the userspace work on ARM... Then 2020 they released an ARM desktop product... So it was a lot of years!!

BluSyn 4y ago

I think ARM is upset their NVidia buy-out was cancelled. This essentially forces someone else to purchase the company, as the total license fees for a company like Google/Apple could outstrip the straight acquisition cost. It's the only plausible explanation I have, as this is basically a giant foot-gun set on destroying the ARM ecosystem right as it's becoming ubiquitous. Either that or the MBA's have taken over, the engineers have left the building, and there's no innovation left in their product roadmap. If there's no future in their IP then ARM is just a glorified patent troll; in which case I'll gladly watch them burn down as RISC-V takes over.

jacooper 4y ago
RISC-V is looking pretty good right now.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  Is there a good overview somewhere of what the realistic path to market is for it? I don't mean this as sass— I'm genuinely curious. As far as I'm aware there are only a handful of real chips/devkits available at this point; mostly it's still people synthesizing cores on FPGAs. Basically the whole story looks pretty experimental. I know "can I buy it on Digi-Key" is irrelevant to an entity like Google or Apple, but I feel like hobbyist accessibility is at least something of a proxy for general readiness.
  - zi0 4y ago
    In August, Intel announced Intel® PathFinder to bootstrap (thanks to the pre-silicon development environment) the adoption of RISC-V, FYI. FPGAs everywhere https://riscv.org/blog/2022/08/risc-v-international-and-intel-team-up-to-accelerate-risc-v-adoption-introducing-intel-pathfinder-for-risc-v-intel-corporation/ https://riscv.org/blog/2022/08/risc-v-international-and-inte...
  - kragen 4y ago
    I think Western Digital has been shipping disk drives driven by RISC-V microcontrollers in volume for years. I think they won't sell you the microcontrollers, but they definitely aren't the only company doing this, just the loudest. They do offer their designs as free IP cores https://www.westerndigital.com/en-us/company/innovation/open-source/risc-v https://www.westerndigital.com/en-us/company/innovation/open... and apparently run Linux on some of them: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/wd-licenses-risc-v-cpus https://www.techinsights.com/blog/wd-licenses-risc-v-cpus This last article says, "Since the storage company isn’t a traditional IP vendor, it has worked with Codasip to support its CPU licensees. Including [WD's] Swerv cores and other open-source designs, Codasip has helped customers ship two billion RISC-V chips over the past few years." (Emphasis mine.) But I think instead of "an entity like Google or Apple", or even WD, you should be thinking "an entity like Baidu, Huawei, or AliBaba". The strongest RISC-V story is a Chinese national security thing, and it works like this. — ⁂ — Most computer hardware has been designed and assembled in the PRC for several years now. In 02019 the USG imposed heavy sanctions on a number of PRC hardware companies, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei, the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world and since 02020 the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. These sanctions deprived Huawei of access to chips from TSMC in Taiwan, even though Taiwan is nominally not under US jurisdiction. Computer hardware relies heavily on trade with Taiwan and other countries, including, in particular, MCUs and CPUs fabricated at TSMC in Taiwan using designs licensed from ARM. ARM China, a former ARM subsidiary, has the legal right to license ARM designs for use within China but not overseas. Using a component makes you vulnerable to backdoors inserted by the component's manufacturer or, if you do not understand its design, its designer. Such backdoors are known to have been a major instrument of US foreign policy in the past (the Crypto AG affair) and presumably still are. The Huawei sanctions were justified by allegations that the PRC is doing the same thing. There are rumors that some manufacturers in the PRC are experiencing a new "onshore mandate" that prohibits foreign-sourced components, at least in some products; quoting https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/22/10-cents-ch32v003-risc-v-mcu-offers-2kb-sram-16kb-flash-in-sop8-to-qfn20-packages/#comment-599328 https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/22/10-cents-ch32v003-ri...: > [the WCH CH32V003 is] quite timely as we were forced by HQ last Friday to revise all product line designs to comply with 100% Chinese domestic semiconductors & passive components by latest Q4 end. All western sourced/accounts and parts are now forbidden, apart from those sourced by HQ’s registered jurisdiction. > Worth adding to the list, we’ve also signed accounts with GigaDevice and Expressif Shanghai in the MCU and connectivity range. — ⁂ — So that's the problem to solve. RISC-V already offers PRC manufacturers a path to building ARM-competitive MCUs and low-end CPUs which can be legally sold overseas and which comply with this onshore mandate. As a bonus, they can be sold at prices several times cheaper than any ARM alternative; WCH's CH32V003 is reputedly 10¢, though LCSC doesn't seem to have them in stock yet. Presumably, until SMIC (or another domestic alternative) can move up to more modern process nodes, fully-sanctions-proof versions of these chips will be larger, more expensive, and more power-hungry than TSMC-manufactured chips. But for many applications this doesn't matter. The Allwinner D1, using a RISC-V design from the Honey Badger open-source hardware subsidiary of AliBaba, is already performance-competitive with early Raspberry Pis, though I think that performance relies on TSMC. In 3–5 years RISC-V might be able to move up to today's desktop or laptop CPUs, and SMIC might be able to fabricate things at early Raspberry Pi performance levels (22 nm? Something past the end of Dennard scaling, anyway). — ⁂ — Also, though, you shouldn't totally dismiss the FPGA cores. FPGAs are a lot cheaper than they used to be, thanks to Lattice. It's true that an ASIC MCU will always be faster than an FPGA fabbed in the same process running a softcore, but it may not have the peripherals you need, and there are a lot of applications where we run an MCU at a 32768 Hz clock to save power, so clock speed isn't everything. Olof Kindgren's bit-serial RISC-V core SeRV https://github.com/olofk/serv https://github.com/olofk/serv reputedly fits into 200 4-LUTs like those in the Lattice iCE40LP384, which would cost US$1.82–2.15 at Digi-Key if they had any: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/lattice-semiconductor-corporation/ICE40LP384-SG32/3974680 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/lattice-semicondu... and that would leave you another 184 LUTs for peripherals. You can get MCUs a lot cheaper than US$2 but US$2 is still within the budget for a lot of projects. Every year there are more and more custom ASICs from more and more companies, and a lot of them include some kind of microcontroller core to orchestrate their activities. Historically this has often been something like an 8051 or Z80, but switching it to RISC-V seems likely to lower development costs significantly, especially if a tiny RV32I core like SeRV or the smaller configurations of PicoRV32 would be adequate.

BirAdam 4y ago

This is going to seriously slow adoption of ARM. Right as ARM is becoming truly competitive against x86, ARM appears to have lost their minds. By shrinking the number of implementers, ARM is going to lose serious market share, and while NVIDIA and Apple won’t immediately be affected, they’ll likely start pursuing RISC-V. I know Apple already uses RISC-V in non-consumer facing parts of their machines… but we may see yet another transition within 10 years if ARM don’t change their tune.

bionade24 4y ago
Nvidia does already use RISC-V in their GPUs, too. Those small controller chips aren't comparable with CPUs.

pabs3 4y ago

I note that ARM disputes these claims: https://www.fierceelectronics.com/sensors/arm-qualcomm-legal-battle-suggests-oems-need-arm-ip-licenses-not-chip-firms https://www.fierceelectronics.com/sensors/arm-qualcomm-legal...

UltraViolence 4y ago
That sounds like Russia denying they were about to invade Ukraine until they did.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  It sounds more like Qualcomm making preposterous claims to avoid having people looking closely as what’s happening with the Nuvia IP. It seems to be working. That would be classic Qualcomm. As a rule, when Qualcomm disagree with another company, you can assume they are in the wrong.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    It's interesting that apparently Qualcomm didn't inform Arm of the Nuvia purchase even though there was a change of control clause in Nuvia's license. Also IIRC they had 30+ comments from other firms endorsing the purchase ready in advance so basically told everyone but Arm. Make of that what you will!
CameronNemo 4y ago
Have any other SoC vendors come forward on either side of the matter? I don't put it past a pre-IPO ARM to do something like this to make their numbers look better. But I also don't trust Qualcomm to be entirely truthful.

tyingq 4y ago

No sources, posted on a blog that's using an AMD trademark in the (2 month old) domain. I think I'll wait for a better source.

Dah00n 4y ago
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/arm-changes-business-model-oem-partners https://www.semianalysis.com/p/arm-changes-business-model-oe...
- tyingq 4y ago
  Much better, though most of it is Qualcomm paraphrasing what they say ARM said, and ARM is disputing the paraphrasing.

sylware 4y ago

Isn't that partly related to some SOCs combining some existing arm blocks with new risc-v blocks? With the US admnistration cracking down on China chip manufacturing, I wonder if we still will be able to find cheap risc-v boards.

dis-sys 4y ago

this is a sad news. adoption of ARM just started to pick up in server & laptop market, it could be a nice alternative to x86, yet short sighted decisions like this from ARM is going to cause huge uncertainties. RISC-V is great, I am all for it, but let's be realistic, many people including myself have been waiting for 2 decades to see the current upward trend of ARM in servers & laptops, how many extra years we will have to wait for RISC-V to catch up and get to ARM's current position? An extra 5-10 years? Intel must be laughing! As an ex-ARM & ex-Qualcomm employee - middle finger for both companies, you greedy licensing bitch.

alexlesuper 4y ago
5-10 years isn't that long. I guess it depends on the management philosophy, but if someone told me I would my company would be losing a large market share in 5-10 years I would be panicking.
snvzz 4y ago
>RISC-V is great, I am all for it, but let's be realistic ARM was starting to pick up, but that's not happening anymore. It is a good thing, as we can skip ARM and go straight to RISC-V.

MarkusWandel 4y ago

So does that mean no more Raspi, i.e. ARM CPU and 3rd party GPU on the same silicon?

klelatti 4y ago

The title should really be 'Qualcomm claims ARM to prohibit proximity of CPU w 3rd-party modules in one chip'. As others have pointed out Arm disputes these claims. As to the wider dispute Nuvia developed technology using Arm IP under one license and then Qualcomm want to sell that technology under a different - and presumably more favourable and lower cost - license. The big risk for Arm was always that a big architecture licensee becomes dominant and damages sales of Arm's own cores. That would not only be bad for Arm but bad for customers who use Arm's cores. Whatever you think of the tactics I think this is what Arm is trying to stop Qualcomm doing here.

liotier 4y ago
Qualcomm accusing someone of greedy anti-competitive use of intellectual property is quite amusing !
- brookst 4y ago
  It’s very annoying when someone steals your business model!
  - FpUser 4y ago
    Every business model was "stolen" at some point.
    - TOMDM 4y ago
      Mostly just the successful ones
    - brookst 4y ago
      Yes, of course. But humans are territorial and possessive, and it aggravates us when someone “steals” our ideas. The iterative and derivative nature of those ideas notwithstanding.
      - stoplying1 4y ago

hulitu 4y ago

ARM is the Nokia of CPU architecture. Every ARM CPU has a different instruction set.

pjmlp 4y ago
Good that RISC-V keeps the tradition with all those extensions to chose from.
- snvzz 4y ago
  >templated extensions FUD You might have missed the recent news on Profiles[0]. Oh, and there's already some designs[1] announced that are RVA22 +V compliant. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33347653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33347653 1. https://www.sifive.com/press/sifives-new-high-performance-processors-offer-a-significant https://www.sifive.com/press/sifives-new-high-performance-pr...
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Profiles are orthogonal to the OEM freedom to extend RISC-V with proprietary features.
    - snvzz 4y ago
      By using encoding space reserved for that purpose, and without interference with compatibility with RVA22+V code.

kyaghmour 4y ago

ARM is likely well geared for managing and collecting royalties from chip vendors (hundreds?). It seems to me that setting up an organization to collect from actual device manufacturers (~10^6-10^7 or more?) is a completely different scalability scope and, therefore, a completely different business. Maybe this is rather a targeted game of chicken tailor made against a specific licensee? Also, re RISC-V. I'm all for that. But an ISA does not make a chip. There is far more to what ARM offers than just its ISA: production-grade cores and surrounding blocks on bleeding edge nodes, etc. They could, theoretically, start selling a RISC-V fetch and decode unit (think of it as a Unix API on top of Windows) and still come out on top.

UltraViolence 4y ago
If ARM starts licensing according to the client's wallet size we'll all be witness to the wisdom of Apple designing their own ARM cores from scratch. Apart from the fact that Apple's a founding member of ARM and probably doesn't pay a dime and has the freedom to do with the ARM ISA as they see fit.
usrusr 4y ago
Collecting from actual device manufacturers would be beyond crazy, fully agree about that. But it would be almost trivial to do for some core classes, at the upper end, if they really wanted to. Certainly even that would still be hurting themselves more than others.

UltraViolence 4y ago

The only thing this will result in is the speedup of the move over to RISC-V. Because of this spat I predict RISC-V will be dominant within a decade and large inroads in 5 years or less in the mobile and embedded space. I even predict we'll see large numbers of vendors who'll make RISC-V server and desktop CPU's.

beebeepka 4y ago

This is what, I believe, Nvidia wanted to do. It may be a dick move but they want to make a ton of money, damn it. Even if it drives many of their customers to risc-v

ZiiS 4y ago

Better headline would be "ARM to force adoption of RISC-V"

zerohp 4y ago
Even better would be “Qualcomm lies”
- snvzz 4y ago
  Do you have access to information we don't?

newhere101 4y ago

There is a lot of misinformation being spread out. Arm changed the business model from requiring the SoC vendor to license every single piece of IP individually up-front (one license for CPU, one license for GPU, one license for interconnect, etc) to a "all you can eat model" and "pay only once you shipped the product": https://www.arm.com/products/flexible-access https://www.arm.com/products/flexible-access This is very positive because it simplifies the legal paperwork for licensing IP (one license gives you access to an entire portfolio of IP instead of just one) and lowers the bar for prototyping because you won't be required to pay full cost for a license you don't you if you will use. Qualcomm is heavily misrepresenting this to their light. Arm preventing customers from mixing Arm IP with other IPs is just straight up lie. You can take Mobileye as an example, they just licensed an Arm GPU with a RISC-V CPU: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17165/mobileye-announces-eyeq-ultra-l4-auto-soc https://www.anandtech.com/show/17165/mobileye-announces-eyeq...

adrian_b 4y ago
Nobody has said that Arm is preventing customers from mixing Arm IP with other IPs now, so nobody lied about this. Qualcomm has said that this is what Arm intends to do in a couple of years from now. Whether this is true or false, it remains to be seen.
- dagmx 4y ago
  oh come on, the majority of people in this HN post are taking it as the state of things now. Very few posts are even mentioning that it’s Qualcomm claiming it. This is a classic misinformation tactic. To present one sides claim as fact and then by the time the truth comes out one way or another, it doesn’t matter because the sensationalist reporting is what people remember.
  - zerohp 4y ago
    HN comments are so full of misinformation when it comes to hardware design that it’s not even worth fighting anymore. This place is lost.

hansvm 4y ago

Assuming for the moment this is real, could somebody ELI5 how this would work in practice in the face of the first sale doctrine? (1) Chip manufacturers can't use ARM IP without appropriate permission/licensing in the first place, so they would _still_ need some ARM contract to even make the things, right? (2) The first-sale doctrine doesn't grant unlimited rights -- OEMs can't reverse engineer and clone a chip -- but certainly they can attach it unadultered to other components so long as there aren't separate patent issues for that particular combination of underlying technologies? Does ARM perhaps have a patent on stuff that looks like "ARM Core" + "Neural Accelerator" or something like that? (3) Assuming there aren't any loopholes out of first-sale, is the play that in the contract in (1) ARM prohibits direct sale and requires chip manufacturers to profit via some contract that includes language about OEMs having to pay ARM? Is that sort of law-skirting anti-competitiveness actually allowed here or in other domains?

dboreham 4y ago

Is the article title supposed to be English? I think it means something like: "ARM to prohibit 3rd-party modules on the same chip as its CPU designs".

thesnide 4y ago

how does that impact MCU which are an ARM core plus peripherals inside the same die?

Varloom 4y ago

We are in a transitory period with ARM till RiSC-V takeover and free the market from their stringent behaviors. Might take few years, but we are on the right track to get there.

Kukumber 4y ago

This website looks AI generated

antman 4y ago

At this point it appears as if ARM is run by former Nokia Kodak and Yahoo executives. For similarly innovative tech strategies I suggest the book “In search of stupidity” by Merrill Chapman

zackmorris 4y ago

As selfish as this is (if it plays out the way the article suggests), it just further reinforces the pattern we see over and over: every spec, every standard, every intellectual property has a poison pill that prevents us from progressing. I just keep wondering how we can all come together and pull the plug on this stuff. I want a computer built of at least 1000 (RISC-V, MIPS, I would have said ARM before this announcement) chiplets to process the workloads I've explained in my comments since I joined this site. The future of computing is humans cultivating algorithms rather than writing them directly. That looks like genetic algorithms and simulating as many permutations as possible so we can pick and choose the ones that work. And better testing paradigms and formal verification. No more getting lost in the weeds having to learn yet another 3D rendering library or AI runtime. Although the computer I'm talking about can certainly simulate that stuff. I got my computer engineering degree in 1999 so I could do something like the above paragraph, only to see every attempt to do so be stifled by the main players every step of the way for the last 20+ years. Nobody gets it. They're never gonna get it. They're gonna proprietarize and cripple and dilute every last magical idea until some Evil Corp somewhere can make a dime on it. Upon rereading the comments, I realized that it might still allow a chip with an array of the same core like I'm suggesting, which would fit with the architecture I've been proposing. Even if that's the case, I'm still against ARM's position. They're basically trying to control how we use their core in something we own, which is the hardware equivalent of DRM.

lonelyasacloud 4y ago

Probably a more reliable source on the story https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/14/qualcomm_arm_lawsuit_nuvia/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/14/qualcomm_arm_lawsuit_...