5 ms·

It doesn’t matter which party is correct, its now added risk that ARM could be the bad actor

klelatti 4y ago
Why if Arm is correct does that add a risk that it's the bad actor? Most firms will have legal departments can look at this case on its merits and decide whether or not Arm is acting in bad faith. If I'm another Arm customer I definitely don't want a competitor playing fast and loose with its Arm contract.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > Why if Arm is correct does that add a risk that it's the bad actor? Because nobody wants to fight over the licensing of a product they're shackled to. If you could buy a RISC-V board with software support similar to a Raspberry Pi, ARM's goose would be cooked. Every enthusiast would ditch ARM in a heartbeat for a more open ISA, and ARM licensees would see it as an opportunity to finally wiggle free of ARM's insane license restrictions. All we need is the software support, which should be pretty forthcoming since most projects have already been optimized for RISC. ARM could unseat x86 because both ISAs were encumbered with licenses at the time. Now, ARM is competing with much less restrictive architectures, and all it would take is a FOSS RISC instruction set to ruin their value prop.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    > Because nobody wants to fight over the licensing of a product they're shackled to. So when a firm licenses a RISC-V core from SiFive they should be free do whatever they want with that core irrespective of the license terms?
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      No, but they have the freedom to design their own core if SiFive threatens them in the way ARM does.
      - klelatti 4y ago
        So you believe that firms should abide by contracts but that firms shouldn’t try to enforce the terms of those contracts. I find it odd how Qualcomm is portrayed as though they were innocently minding their own business when they suddenly got sued. They bought Nuvia knowing what was in the two sets of contracts. Also Qualcomm had and still has the ability to design their own Arm cores.
        smoldesu 4y ago
        I'm not talking about Qualcomm, really. I'm talking about companies like Apple, who really only have a cursory attachment to ARM as an ISA. Then there's the hundreds of smaller manufacturers who have zero attachment to ARM and would much rather build hardware on their own terms. Those are ARM's moneymakers, and those are the companies that frankly have the most to gain from using RISC-V. If Qualcomm is a relevant topic regarding ARM's success, then they've arguably already failed.
        klelatti 4y ago
        > would much rather build hardware on their own terms Most of these firms are licensing a core from a third party. There is no such thing as ‘on their own terms’.
        smoldesu 4y ago
        Not Apple or many of the smaller manufacturers. Even still, the ones who do want to license core designs still have the option to do so with RISC-V.
        error503 4y ago
        Does Apple pay anything meaningful to ARM? They're a founding member with (I believe still) a significant stake. I find it doubtful they didn't secure themselves a perpetual license when they founded the company, and that seems to be what the Internet believes to be true. I'm not so sure it's the expensive large chips, made in relatively small quantities, that make ARM the most money, do you have a source? I'd have guessed they actually make more on the billions of small ARM cores that ship every year that end up by multiples in pretty much every device with a battery or power cord. And these, I think, are at the biggest risk of leaving ARM. RISC-V development is mature enough at this end of the market that it's relatively easy for users to transition, there are multiple competitive cores on the market, and there's no concern here about backwards compatibility because these are embedded systems where there's usually not an expectation of having to run user code at all. It will be much harder for the likes of Qualcomm where there's a huge ecosystem built around their ARM processors - but as a share of cost-per-processor, they probably stand to gain the most. Qualcomm is a founding member of the RISC-V foundation after all.
  - qwytw 4y ago
    > of ARM's insane license restrictions You're assuming high end RISC cores will be available for free and or under much more favorable licensing than ARM cores. Which seems unlikely, why would someone sell their cores to a competitor for less than a company whose only business is designing them?
    - monocasa 4y ago
      Same reason why people would contribute to an open source compiler and toolchain and distribute for less than the cost of the old school paid compiler vendors like Borland. These contributors aren't really in the business of selling compilers and simply have strategic reasons to drop the floor of that market as much as possible. The same applies to RISC-V cores, with probably the most prominent example being Alibaba/T-Head and their open source cores.
      - qwytw 4y ago
        Sound more like another "this is the year of Linux".. Also hardware is pretty different than software. Hardware design (and obviously manufacturing) requires much more significant investment. > These contributors aren't really in the business of selling compilers and simply That's the thing. Apple was/is not in the business of selling compilers, nor are the people/companies who contributed to gcc and most other open-source projects. They have basically nothing to lose and a lot to gain from contributing to open-source software. It's not obvious to me CPU design could work that way. For starters everyone who could develop advanced RISC-V cores is unlikely to give them anyway to their competitors since they would be in the business of selling CPUs. i.e. do you really think Qualcomm, Apple etc. would make their designs free? Why? > Alibaba/T-Head and their open source cores Because at this point they have more to gain than by keeping them proprietary. RISC-V is not yet overall competitive with ARM. So it's not like these RISC-V cores could be commercialized that successfully. Keeping them open probably makes further development faster.
        monocasa 4y ago
        > Because at this point they have more to gain than by keeping them proprietary. RISC-V is not yet overall competitive with ARM. So it's not like these RISC-V cores could be commercialized that successfully. Keeping them open probably makes further development faster. This open source core is about equivalent to a Cortex-X1. https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan A collab between Alibaba, Tencent, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Why if Arm is correct does that add a risk that it's the bad actor? Most firms will have legal departments can look at this case on its merits and decide whether or not Arm is acting in bad faith. If I'm another Arm customer I definitely don't want a competitor playing fast and loose with its Arm contract.

smoldesu 4y ago
> Why if Arm is correct does that add a risk that it's the bad actor? Because nobody wants to fight over the licensing of a product they're shackled to. If you could buy a RISC-V board with software support similar to a Raspberry Pi, ARM's goose would be cooked. Every enthusiast would ditch ARM in a heartbeat for a more open ISA, and ARM licensees would see it as an opportunity to finally wiggle free of ARM's insane license restrictions. All we need is the software support, which should be pretty forthcoming since most projects have already been optimized for RISC. ARM could unseat x86 because both ISAs were encumbered with licenses at the time. Now, ARM is competing with much less restrictive architectures, and all it would take is a FOSS RISC instruction set to ruin their value prop.
- klelatti 4y ago
  > Because nobody wants to fight over the licensing of a product they're shackled to. So when a firm licenses a RISC-V core from SiFive they should be free do whatever they want with that core irrespective of the license terms?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    No, but they have the freedom to design their own core if SiFive threatens them in the way ARM does.
    - klelatti 4y ago
      So you believe that firms should abide by contracts but that firms shouldn’t try to enforce the terms of those contracts. I find it odd how Qualcomm is portrayed as though they were innocently minding their own business when they suddenly got sued. They bought Nuvia knowing what was in the two sets of contracts. Also Qualcomm had and still has the ability to design their own Arm cores.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        I'm not talking about Qualcomm, really. I'm talking about companies like Apple, who really only have a cursory attachment to ARM as an ISA. Then there's the hundreds of smaller manufacturers who have zero attachment to ARM and would much rather build hardware on their own terms. Those are ARM's moneymakers, and those are the companies that frankly have the most to gain from using RISC-V. If Qualcomm is a relevant topic regarding ARM's success, then they've arguably already failed.
        klelatti 4y ago
        > would much rather build hardware on their own terms Most of these firms are licensing a core from a third party. There is no such thing as ‘on their own terms’.
        smoldesu 4y ago
        Not Apple or many of the smaller manufacturers. Even still, the ones who do want to license core designs still have the option to do so with RISC-V.
        error503 4y ago
        Does Apple pay anything meaningful to ARM? They're a founding member with (I believe still) a significant stake. I find it doubtful they didn't secure themselves a perpetual license when they founded the company, and that seems to be what the Internet believes to be true. I'm not so sure it's the expensive large chips, made in relatively small quantities, that make ARM the most money, do you have a source? I'd have guessed they actually make more on the billions of small ARM cores that ship every year that end up by multiples in pretty much every device with a battery or power cord. And these, I think, are at the biggest risk of leaving ARM. RISC-V development is mature enough at this end of the market that it's relatively easy for users to transition, there are multiple competitive cores on the market, and there's no concern here about backwards compatibility because these are embedded systems where there's usually not an expectation of having to run user code at all. It will be much harder for the likes of Qualcomm where there's a huge ecosystem built around their ARM processors - but as a share of cost-per-processor, they probably stand to gain the most. Qualcomm is a founding member of the RISC-V foundation after all.
- qwytw 4y ago
  > of ARM's insane license restrictions You're assuming high end RISC cores will be available for free and or under much more favorable licensing than ARM cores. Which seems unlikely, why would someone sell their cores to a competitor for less than a company whose only business is designing them?
  - monocasa 4y ago
    Same reason why people would contribute to an open source compiler and toolchain and distribute for less than the cost of the old school paid compiler vendors like Borland. These contributors aren't really in the business of selling compilers and simply have strategic reasons to drop the floor of that market as much as possible. The same applies to RISC-V cores, with probably the most prominent example being Alibaba/T-Head and their open source cores.
    - qwytw 4y ago
      Sound more like another "this is the year of Linux".. Also hardware is pretty different than software. Hardware design (and obviously manufacturing) requires much more significant investment. > These contributors aren't really in the business of selling compilers and simply That's the thing. Apple was/is not in the business of selling compilers, nor are the people/companies who contributed to gcc and most other open-source projects. They have basically nothing to lose and a lot to gain from contributing to open-source software. It's not obvious to me CPU design could work that way. For starters everyone who could develop advanced RISC-V cores is unlikely to give them anyway to their competitors since they would be in the business of selling CPUs. i.e. do you really think Qualcomm, Apple etc. would make their designs free? Why? > Alibaba/T-Head and their open source cores Because at this point they have more to gain than by keeping them proprietary. RISC-V is not yet overall competitive with ARM. So it's not like these RISC-V cores could be commercialized that successfully. Keeping them open probably makes further development faster.
      - monocasa 4y ago
        > Because at this point they have more to gain than by keeping them proprietary. RISC-V is not yet overall competitive with ARM. So it's not like these RISC-V cores could be commercialized that successfully. Keeping them open probably makes further development faster. This open source core is about equivalent to a Cortex-X1. https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan A collab between Alibaba, Tencent, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.