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ARM is proprietary

by MikusR 3y ago

ARM is proprietary

vetinari 3y ago
That's the point. If developing high-performance ARM cores are considered risky, maybe the vendors could switch to an ISA without these risks.
- soapdog 3y ago
  Not gonna happen for anything big enough like a server or laptop class of computers. There is too much gap in terms of software to justify adopting a new ISA. Also, designing those high-performance ISAs cost a lot of money, both in terms of professionals involved but also resources. Any company attempting that will need to make sure there is software to run on it and that they can make money. That is beyond the reach of a lot of companies.
- aseipp 3y ago
  There's nothing risky about developing ARM cores. Well, other than the fact that doing it wrong is very costly. Millions of them ship every year, and there have been many third-party designs, shipped in millions of units, by many different companies, for years and years and years at this point; it was actually the primary way they (ARM) did business for a long time, until ARM realized that focusing on designing better cores than their customers was a great way to make money, as increasing design complexity put them in an overall better position to do it versus third parties. The Qualcomm/ARM dispute at its core has nothing to do with the ISA, it's fundamentally an IP dispute, concerning an existing agreement after a buyout and market pivot. These kinds of disputes aren't new. The risky thing is "violating license agreements." Licensing a RISC-V core from a company under specific terms, getting bought out, and then changing trajectory of your product with that IP in a way that might violate the terms could result in the company coming after you. Put more simply, "violating the terms of a license agreement means you could get sued." This isn't strange. It's a complete non-story. The other real risk is one that exists in any processor design, that it costs tens of millions of dollars to develop validated, high-end, high-performance and energy efficient processors, no matter the ISA, and tooling them is an entirely different matter. These risks mean the vast majority of Production-Ready designs come from corporations that need to ship high volume, high margin products, based on projected returns. There's relatively little actually "open" about the processors from SiFive, Ventana, Rivos, etc, other than the fact they adhere to a specific version of a ratified software standard, a PDF you can download. If you come at it from a software point of view, all of the "ingredients" are basically proprietary. You aren't getting masks, RTL files, DV tools, bringup tools, or any capability to validate any of those are what you expect. You cannot reasonably modify and reproduce them -- a single wafer on a modern process can take months to actually pattern before the packaging process even begins. And they aren't going to give it to you, because that's their competitive advantage and the reason you buy their cores, instead of their competitors cores. The whole bellowing about "proprietary ISAs" or "ARM vs RISC-V" on places like this is mostly totally misinformed upvote farming, and has no bearing on how reality actually works.
  - hmottestad 3y ago
    I thought it was a licensing issue. ARM is arguing that the license that Nuvia used to develop their chip isn’t transferable to Qualcomm. Qualcomm has a license from ARM but it’s not as free as the Nuvia one, or something like that. Or have I misunderstood something?

ARM is proprietary

by MikusR 3y ago

ARM is proprietary

That's the point. If developing high-performance ARM cores are considered risky, maybe the vendors could switch to an ISA without these risks.

soapdog 3y ago
Not gonna happen for anything big enough like a server or laptop class of computers. There is too much gap in terms of software to justify adopting a new ISA. Also, designing those high-performance ISAs cost a lot of money, both in terms of professionals involved but also resources. Any company attempting that will need to make sure there is software to run on it and that they can make money. That is beyond the reach of a lot of companies.
aseipp 3y ago
There's nothing risky about developing ARM cores. Well, other than the fact that doing it wrong is very costly. Millions of them ship every year, and there have been many third-party designs, shipped in millions of units, by many different companies, for years and years and years at this point; it was actually the primary way they (ARM) did business for a long time, until ARM realized that focusing on designing better cores than their customers was a great way to make money, as increasing design complexity put them in an overall better position to do it versus third parties. The Qualcomm/ARM dispute at its core has nothing to do with the ISA, it's fundamentally an IP dispute, concerning an existing agreement after a buyout and market pivot. These kinds of disputes aren't new. The risky thing is "violating license agreements." Licensing a RISC-V core from a company under specific terms, getting bought out, and then changing trajectory of your product with that IP in a way that might violate the terms could result in the company coming after you. Put more simply, "violating the terms of a license agreement means you could get sued." This isn't strange. It's a complete non-story. The other real risk is one that exists in any processor design, that it costs tens of millions of dollars to develop validated, high-end, high-performance and energy efficient processors, no matter the ISA, and tooling them is an entirely different matter. These risks mean the vast majority of Production-Ready designs come from corporations that need to ship high volume, high margin products, based on projected returns. There's relatively little actually "open" about the processors from SiFive, Ventana, Rivos, etc, other than the fact they adhere to a specific version of a ratified software standard, a PDF you can download. If you come at it from a software point of view, all of the "ingredients" are basically proprietary. You aren't getting masks, RTL files, DV tools, bringup tools, or any capability to validate any of those are what you expect. You cannot reasonably modify and reproduce them -- a single wafer on a modern process can take months to actually pattern before the packaging process even begins. And they aren't going to give it to you, because that's their competitive advantage and the reason you buy their cores, instead of their competitors cores. The whole bellowing about "proprietary ISAs" or "ARM vs RISC-V" on places like this is mostly totally misinformed upvote farming, and has no bearing on how reality actually works.
- hmottestad 3y ago
  I thought it was a licensing issue. ARM is arguing that the license that Nuvia used to develop their chip isn’t transferable to Qualcomm. Qualcomm has a license from ARM but it’s not as free as the Nuvia one, or something like that. Or have I misunderstood something?