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Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license
- talldayo 2y agoCould be the best thing that's ever happened for RISC-V!
- dietr1ch 2y agoI think it's already a great thing for RISC-V, imagine things somehow go well for Qualcomm, do you really think they wouldn't prepare a plan B given ARM tried to get them out of the market?
- nahnahno 2y agoI don’t think they have a plan B. Architectures take half a decade of work. Porting from risc-v to arm is not a matter of a backup plan, it’s that of a very costly pivot.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoNo kidding; and while RISC-V is a massive improvement, I hate to be the wet blanket, but RISC-V will not change signed boot, bootloader restrictions, messy or closed source drivers, carrier requirements, DRM implementation, or other painful day to day paper cuts. Open source architecture != Open source software and certainly != Open source hardware; no matter what the YouTubers think.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Atotalnoob 2y agoUntil arm or risc-v fix standardize the bootloader, it’s always going to be a big deal for each arm/risc device added anywhere…
- snvzz 2y agoRelevant RISC-V specs were released years ago and implementations follow them. I know of no boards that have application processors and yet not implement SBI. Furthermore, everybody seems to be using the opensbi implementation. ARM and RISC-V are not the same.
- betaby 2y agoI suppose Google ( + Samsung ) can bear that cost in the context of Android Arm -> Android RISC-V.
- snvzz 2y agoQualcomm's been involved with RISC-V for several years now. If anything, ARM is the plan B that they'll likely end up abandoning.
- dagmx 2y agoIt’s a bit much to say their primary product that they’ve done for decades is a plan B. By definition it cannot be a plan B if it’s executed first and is successful. I think a lot of RISC-V advocates are perhaps a little too over eager in their perception of the landscape.
- snvzz 2y agoTypo. Meant to write "ARM is the plan A that they'll likely end up abandoning".
- mkl 2y agoQualcomm has been working on RISC-V for a while, at outwardly-small scale. It's probably intended as a long-term alternative rather than a ready-to-go plan B. From a year ago: "The most exciting part for us at Qualcomm Technologies is the ability to start with an open instruction set. We have the internal capabilities to create our own cores — we have a best-in-class custom central processing unit (CPU) team, and with RISC-V, we can develop, customize and scale easily." -- https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2023/09/what-is-risc-v-and-why-were-unlocking-its-potential https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2023/09/what-is-risc-v-and..., more: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qualcomm+risc-v&t=fpas&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qualcomm+risc-v&t=fpas&ia=web
- hajile 2y agoQualcomm pitched a Znew extension for RISC-V that basically removes compressed (16-bit) instructions and adds more ARM64-like stuff. It felt very much like trying to make an easier plan B for if/when they need/want to transition from ARM to RISC-V. https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-profiles/attachment/332/0/code_size_extension_rvi_20231006.pdf https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-profiles/attachment/332/0/cod...
- brucehoult 2y agoQualcomm have a Plan B. This time last year they were all over the RISC-V mailing lists, trying to convince everyone to drop the "C" extension from RVA23 because (basically confirmed by their employees) it was not easy to retrofit mildly variable length RISC-V instructions (2 bytes and 4 bytes) to the Aarch64 core they acquired from Nuvia. At the same time, Qualcomm proposed a new RISC-V extension that was pretty much ARMv8-lite. The proposed extension was actually not bad, and could very reasonably be adopted. Dropping "C" overnight and thus making all existing Linux software incompatible is completely out of the question. RISC-V will eventually need a deprecation policy and procedure -- and the "C" extension could potentially be replaced by something else -- but you wouldn't find anyone who thinks the deprecated-but-supported period should be less than 10 years. So they'd have to support both "C" and its replacement anyway. Qualcomm tried to make a case that decoding two instruction widths is too hard to do in a very wide (e.g. 8) instruction decoder. Everyone else working on designs in that space ... SiFive, Rivos, Ventana, Tenstorrent ... said "nah, it didn't cause us any problems". Qualcomm jumped on a "we're listening, tell us more" from Rivos as being support for dropping "C" .. and were very firmly corrected on that.
- wmf 2y agoDropping "C" overnight and thus making all existing Linux software incompatible is completely out of the question. Android was never really Linux though.
- refulgentis 2y agoThis is officially too much quibbling, even if we settled philosophical questions like "Is Android Linux?" Then "If not, would dropping C make RISC nonviable", there isn't actually an Android version that'll do RISC anywhere near on the horizon. Support _reversed_ for it, got pulled 5 months ago
- snvzz 2y ago>Support _reversed_ for it, got pulled 5 months ago Cursory research will yield that this was a technicality with no weight in Google's strong commitment to RISC-V Android support.
- snvzz 2y agoIt would be naive to think that Qualcomm is only starting its RISC-V effort today and from scratch.
- bhouston 2y agoMost people do not realize how slow RISC-V is right now. Yes, it will definitely get better, but it will take some time given how far behind it is. Like 30x slower than a top of the line Apple Mx series CPU. Maybe there is a high performing RISC-V chip out there but I haven't yet run into one. RISC-V benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=RISC-V https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=RISC-V. Compare to an Apple M4 benchmark: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8224953 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8224953 That said, RISC-V is good for embedded applications where raw performance isn't a factor. I think no other markets are yet accessible to RISC-V chips until their performance massively improves.
- tightbookkeeper 2y agoIs it slower by design or just because it’s implementations have not been aggressively optimized?
- bhouston 2y agoI believe it is just lacking aggressive optimization. ARM is basically RISC as well, so it isn't an architectural limitation.
- tightbookkeeper 2y ago(Naive question) then is it really a big hurdle for a company who knows how to make arm chips to try making riscv chips?
- bhouston 2y agoI suspect not? I think the principles and methods of optimization are the same. But I say this as a software guy who doesn't actually know CPU design.
- 1123581321 2y agoIt’s not a big hurdle so long as they hire Jim Keller to rapidly improve yet another architecture. (Only half-joking.)
- dagmx 2y agoMaybe fine for Android but this will set their windows plans back another decade if it happens It has taken them that long to make arm be a thing on windows and that’s building on people porting stuff to arm for Mac to finally get momentum. RISC-V with windows will be an eternity to be feasible.
- snvzz 2y ago>RISC-V with windows will be an eternity to be feasible. Will it now? Microsoft was already deeply involved in 2021 as per that years' summit RISC-V Foundation's technical talks. Ztso was pushed by them.
- dagmx 2y agoWhether Microsoft has windows running on an architecture is a very different level from whether it’s feasible to use it as a daily driver on windows. The ecosystem is what matters for most people. Windows for arm hails back to 2011. They’re only just now getting native arm ports for several major packages. That’s ~13 years for a well established architecture that’s used much more universally than RISC-V. They don’t even have arm ports for lots of software that has arm ports on macOS. RISC-V will take an aeon longer to get a respectable amount of the windows ecosystem ported over.
- snvzz 2y ago>The ecosystem is what matters for most people. Absolutely agree. The key development Microsoft has demonstrated recently is the ability to run x86 Windows software in non-x86 Windows systems. Now that this is in place -and will only get better-, there is no longer a chicken and egg situation. Instead, what we have is a clearly defined path to migrate away from x86.
- Atotalnoob 2y agoArm on windows may date to 2011, but it was mostly a side project with 1-2 maintainers. With sufficient investment, it shouldn’t take 13 years to build up RISC-V support.
- wmf 2y agohttps://archive.ph/FcXRW https://archive.ph/FcXRW
- chriscappuccio 2y agohttps://archive.is/FcXRW https://archive.is/FcXRW
- wmf 2y agoThis "cancellation" is likely to be paused until the lawsuit is resolved so it's hard to say what this means. Presumably this is a part of the negotiations going on behind the scenes.
- MBCook 2y agoLet’s just assume this happens for a moment. What do Android OEMs do? They can’t use Apple chips, or now Qualcomm chips. Switching to another architecture is a big deal. Would this basically hand the Android market to Samsung and their Exynos chips? Or does another short term viable competitor exist?
- magnio 2y agoMediaTek is still available.
- mappu 2y agoWithout (complete) kernel sources, they're already e-waste.
- nolist_policy 2y agoNo problem, as they are used in chromebooks: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/kernel/+/refs/heads/factory-geralt-15840.B-chromeos-6.1 https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/ker... https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/kernel/+/refs/heads/factory-corsola-15196.B-chromeos-5.15 https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/ker...
- plussed_reader 2y agoI notice how 'viable' isn't an operative in your statement.
- Iwan-Zotow 2y agoDimensity 9400 looks good
- refulgentis 2y agoThey're pretty good. Just can't beat qualcomm / Apple flagship. So around Intel level ;)
- snvzz 2y agoBloomberg disappoints by failing to mention RISC-V at all in the entire article. They have to be doing this deliberately, as it's hard to explain otherwise.
- duxup 2y agoIf the comments in here are correct, RISC-V is really not an option at this time due to performance.
- snvzz 2y ago>due to performance That would require pretending Ventana Veyron V2, Tenstorrent Ascalon/Alastor, SiFive P870, Akeana 5000-series and others do not exist or do not yet have any customers. Pretending, because they actually exist, have customers, and are thus bound to show up in actual products anytime now.
- duxup 2y agoI don’t feel like you addressed the performance issue. I don’t think anyone said they don’t exist.
- bhouston 2y agoAnd Qualcomm is the only competitive ARM chip on the market besides Apple's. And now they are being taken out by ARM. Is it really that expensive to re-license things? This seems self-defeating.
- hajile 2y agoNow that the Nvidia deal has fallen through, SoftBank is trying to ramp up profitability while continuing to search for another buyer.
- UltraSane 2y agoAWS has the Graviton ARM CPU that is pretty competitive but you can only rent them.
- jsheard 2y agoAmpere has Graviton-like chips that you can actually buy, but neither Graviton or Ampere are really in the same market segment as Qualcomm and Apple.
- hedora 2y agoSystem76 recently released an ampere desktop. It starts at about half the price of a Mac Pro and seems to top out at many more cores. I’m not sure if the low end ampere is as slow as a high end mac though.
- bhouston 2y agoI believe Graviton is competitive in the server market yes, but not in mobile or laptops.
- hajile 2y agoGraviton4 is based on Neoverse V2 which is based on X3. Neoverse V3 was announced Feb of this year. It should have an 80-85% performance increase and should basically be based on something very close to x925.
- Joel_Mckay 2y agoNext week, Qualcomm will likely announce a 64 core RISC-V RVA23. ARM really shouldn't pursue an aggressive posture with lines outside iOS or Win11 ecosystems. The leverage won't hold a position already fractured off a legacy market. =3
- chx 2y ago1. I am fairly sure games and other performance sensitive apps are using the Android NDK which is not available for RISC-V. 2. I am fairly sure a competitive RISC-V CPU is not days or weeks but years away.
- svnt 2y ago> 2. I am fairly sure a competitive RISC-V CPU is not days or weeks but years away. And chasing a moving target fueled by the largest technology companies on the planet.
- Joel_Mckay 2y agoTying products to Googles ecosystem is usually financially risky. Not a good long-term strategy for startups. =3
- Joel_Mckay 2y agoI think it is more of a "chicken and egg" ordering problem. 1. The RISC-V design standard fragmentation issue has been addressed. 2. A reasonable mobile class level SoC will be available for integration after any large production run of the chips. If ARM forces #2 out of silliness, than it also accelerates #1 in the market. In general, there is plenty of use-cases even if a chip is not cutting edge. =3
- SG- 2y agoyou think they can just flip a RISC-V switch and keep all the performance instantly? I can't really understand the logic from some people here.
- mushufasa 2y agoQualcomm is known for having a particularly aggressive & hardball-style legal department to enforce its patents on core telecom IP. I believe the most likely outcome is they just settle the dispute here. Arm fighting hardball with hardball. Which would not really affect the ecosystem of phones using Qualcomm arm chips, it would just change the margins / market cap of Qualcomm. Yes, longterm Q might invest in their own RISC implementations, but I don't see a viable business case for Qualcomm to just stop ARM development for the foreseeable future.
- chasil 2y agoThe phones haven't been custom ARM chips since 32-bit Krait, IIRC. This is about Nuvia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krait_(processor) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krait_(processor)
- lizknope 2y agoSnapdragon 805 had a 32-bit Krait designed by Qualcomm https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartphones/snapdragon-8-series-mobile-platforms/snapdragon-processors-805 https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartpho... 810 had a 64-bit core designed by ARM https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartphones/snapdragon-8-series-mobile-platforms/snapdragon-processors-810 https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartpho... 820/821 had a 64-bit Kryo custom core designed by Qualcomm https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartphones/snapdragon-8-series-mobile-platforms/snapdragon-821-mobile-platform https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartpho... After that it was all cores from ARM. The custom CPU team worked on their server chip before getting cancelled and most of the team went to Microsoft
- chasil 2y agoI need to have a closer look. Thanks.
- haerwu 2y agoWhen you look at https://gpages.juszkiewicz.com.pl/arm-socs-table/arm-socs.html https://gpages.juszkiewicz.com.pl/arm-socs-table/arm-socs.ht... table then you can see that in Snapdragon 8xx series the first "ARM cores out of shelf" was 888 in 2020. 865 (2019) has Cortex-A77 + Kryo 4xx Silver 888 (2002) uses Cortex-X1 + Cortex-A78 + Cortex-A55 cores
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- SG- 2y agoI guess they'll have to give ARM all that money they got from Apple over their modem dispute.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fargle 2y ago> If Arm follows through with the license termination, Qualcomm would be prevented from doing its own designs using Arm’s instruction set i'm not sure this is true. certainly "chip" IP has been a real legal quagmire since, forever. but it was my understanding that you could neither patent nor copyright simply an "instruction set". presumably what you get from ARM with an architecture license would be patent licenses and the trademark. if so, what patents might be relevant or would be a problem if you were to make an "ARMv8-ish compatible" ISA/Architecture with a boring name? i haven't seen much about ARM that's architecturally particularly unique or new, even if specific implementation details may be patent-able. you could always implement those differently to the same spec. to further poke at the issue, if it's patents, then how does a RISC-V CPU or other ISA help you? simply because it's a different ISA, doesn't mean its implementation doesn't trample on some ARM patents either. if it's something to do with the ISA itself, how does that affect emulators? what's ARM's IP really consist of when you build your own non-ARM IP CPU from scratch? anyone have examples of show-stopper patents?
- wmf 2y agoYou can patent something like "any possible hardware circuit that implements [the functionality of some weird yet mandatory ARM instruction]". The patent doesn't cover emulators because they're not hardware. Way back in the day there were some MIPS patents that only covered a few instructions so people would build not-quite-MIPS clone CPUs without paying any royalties.
- fargle 2y agothanks for the hint. i found https://www.probell.com/lexra/ https://www.probell.com/lexra/ sheesh, patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US4814976A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US4814976A/en is a real "gem" but its probably a good example: faulty patent (later invalidated) to do something obvious MIPS sues a company that doesn't even implement the odd instructions because it traps them, allowing a possibility of emulation. there's literally no case here just to sue them into oblivion and squish them with superior cash resources. and then to get squished by ARM because they weren't paying attention. it's like a dark fairy tale. i hate corporate lawyers.
- ddingus 2y agoDamn! So what happens to the Raspberry Pi? Edit: OK, following the discussion now. Nothing in the short term, potentially longer term.
- lights0123 2y agoThe Raspberry Pi uses Broadcom, not Qualcomm chips. It also uses cores designed by Arm, which are not affected by today's news.
- ddingus 2y agoYeah this is a total botch for me. That is what I get for posting tired.
- Crosseye_Jack 2y agoBroadcom (The makers of the chips used on the pi) did have a bid to acquire Qualcomm back in 2017 [0] but the bid was withdrawn after Trump blocked the deal. So nothing will happen to the Pi (Arm also has a a minority stake in Raspberry Pi) [0] https://investors.broadcom.com/news-releases/news-release-details/broadcom-proposes-acquire-qualcomm-7000-share-cash-and-stock-0 https://investors.broadcom.com/news-releases/news-release-de...
- sn0n 2y agoWhat does all this have to do with Intel and AMD calling a truce?
- jocaal 2y agoSince Qualcomm is using these custom cores to launch into the pc market and directly competing with x86
- mschuster91 2y agoNot much I'd say. Intel has its own massive yield / fab issues to deal with, and AMD's GPU business is being eaten by NVIDIA while its CPU business never had much market share to begin with... it doesn't make sense for these two to fight each other, not when NVIDIA is knocking on both their doors.
- Night_Thastus 2y agoAMD and Intel aren't 'calling a truce'. They've always worked together on projects where the industry would benefit from standardization and having many experienced people put their 2c in. They still compete on products, just not standards - which is a good thing.
- szundi 2y agoOn mobile devices efficiency is so important, I don't see how Qualcomm would be able to live without ARM licences. RISC-V and other architectures like x86-64 are nice, actually I think the peripheral libraries, boot and stuff like that are bigger headache to replace for Qualcomm's clients given that they can just switch the gcc to a different arch - still if your code is 25% less efficient, that'll be quite noticable for the consumer - or in your battery and weight costs. What am I not seeing here? I think they'll just settle.
- notpushkin 2y agoYou're assuming there is something inherent to Arm specifically that makes it efficient. I'm not sure about that: it just evolved naturally as it was used in portable devices predominantly. Same thing can be done with RISC-V-based designs, but obviously it will take a lot of time.
- astrange 2y agoARMv8 is not an evolution of previous designs, it was created by and for Apple's phone SoCs. Whereas RISC-V was created by academics who mostly just claim it's the best because they invented it.
- snvzz 2y agoI suggest having a look into the actual pedigree of RISC-V, rather than making wild guesses. It might have been born in academia, but from those drafts until the first ratified spec there's a good decade of high quality input from distinguished industry veterans.
- SushiHippie 2y agoBecause of all the discussions in the comments about ARM and RISC-V, could someone explain to me the difficulties of designing a chip for a new ISA? I'm wondering because to me as a layman it sounds like it's 'only' a different language, so why is it not that easy to take already existing designs and modify them to 'speak' that language and that's it? Or is an ISA more than just a different 'language'? Or is hardware not really the biggest problem, but rather Software like compilers, kernels, etc.?
- creshal 2y ago> Or is an ISA more than just a different 'language'? It tends to be more like going from C89 to Haskell. You're not just switching the keywords around, but also fundamental architectural concepts. There's still some parts you can recycle and some skills that transfer, but less than you'd like. > Or is hardware not really the biggest problem, but rather Software like compilers, kernels, etc.? That's the next problem. Kernels, device drivers, support hardware, a lot of low level stuff needs to be adapted, and even a company the size of Qualcomm doesn't necessarily do everything inhouse, there will be lots of external IPs involved and all those partners need to also be willing to migrate over to a different ISA.
- dzaima 2y agoI'd perhaps put ARM vs RISC-V closer to like C# vs Java (or maybe JS vs Python) - on a high level rather similar, but a majority of the specifics don't really line up (especially at the uop level requiring dumping a bunch of previous optimized cases, and adding a bunch of new ones).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- t43562 2y agoYour view even of human languages is simplistic. Forgive me, I don't mean to be rude, I'm just trying to explain. You might think that languages are just have different words for the same things. In reality the problems are where the same things don't exist. People don't view the world the same way and don't have an equivalent word. In Turkish it's very important whether your aunt is on your mother's side or your father's side so there are different words for each....but there's no words for "he" or "she" as they don't bother with gender in sentences. So for example every conversation converted from Turkish to English loses an important bit of meaning about relationships and the sex of a person has to be inferred from context which is not easy to do automatically. Similarly computer software....and there's a lot of it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- daeros 2y agoI hope Qualcomm wins and wins its countersuits too.
- daeros 2y ago[flagged]
- f1shy 2y agoApple sheep?
- daeros 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly breaking HN's guidelines and ignoring our request to stop. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- PhilippGille 2y agoMost comments here seem to think that Qualcomm has to settle or switch to RISC-V. But from my understanding the article is only about their license to design custom chips with ARM IP, not about using ARM's designs. For example the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 uses 1 ARM Cortex-X2, 3 ARM Cortex-A710 and 4 ARM Cortex-A510, which are ARM designs. Their latest announced chip though, Snapdragon 8 Elite, uses 8 Oryon cores, which Qualcomm designed themselves (after acquiring Nuvia). So is Qualcomm not still able to create chips like the former, and just prevented from creating chips like the latter? Or does "putting a chip together" (surely there is a bit more going into it) like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 still count as custom design?
- dagmx 2y agoThey’re only losing their license to make custom cores. They’re still free to use ARMs own cores. The reason being that ARM gave Nuvia a license to design cores at a specific rate, then Qualcomm bought them to use those cores. ARM claims that the license to design cores does not have a transferable rate to it.
- adrian_b 2y agoNow Qualcomm does not want to continue to use any Arm cores, both because their own cores are better and because that would save them the cost for royalties. Obviously, Arm tries to prevent Qualcomm from using their own cores, because this time Arm would lose a major source of their revenue if Qualcomm stopped licensing cores. When Arm has given architectural licenses to Qualcomm and Nuvia, they were not worried about competition, because Qualcomm could not design good cores, while Nuvia had no perspective of selling so many cores for this to matter. The merging of Nuvia into Qualcomm has changed completely the possible effect of those architectural licenses, so Arm probably considers that giving them has been a big mistake and they now try to mend this by cancelling them, with the hope that they will convince justice that this is not illegal. For any non-Arm employee or shareholder, it is preferable for Arm to lose, unless the reduction in revenue for Arm would be so great as to affect their ability to continue to design improved cores for other companies and for other applications, but that is unlikely.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rickdeckard 2y agoWhat is often overlooked on this topic is, that ARM also has a duty to protect its ecosystem. By using its dominant position in Smartphone chipsets, Qualcomm is in progress to establish a custom ARM-architecture as the new standard for several industries, fragmenting the ARM-ecosystem. For decades, ARM is carefully avoiding this to happen, by allowing selected partners to "explore" evolutions of the IP in an industry but with rules and methods to make sure they can't diverge too much from ARM's instruction set. Qualcomm acquired Nuvia and now executes the plan of using their restricted IP in a unrestricted fashion for several industries ("powering flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, and digital cockpits, as well as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, extended reality and infrastructure networking solutions"). ARM has designed architectures which achieve comparable performance to Nuvia's IP (Blackhawk, Cortex-X), but Qualcomm's assumption is that they don't need it and that they can apply Nuvia's IP on top of their existing architecture without the need of licensing any new ARM design.
- neonsunset 2y agoLast time I checked, Qualcomm did not introduce any custom instructions into the ISA. What damage are you speaking of?
- rickdeckard 2y agoThe merge of the Qualcomm architecture with the Nuvia IP they acquired, which was created under a far-reaching license ARM granted to Nuvia. Combining both creates a custom architecture different from ARMs consolidated and harmonized designs offered to licensees (i.e. Blackhawk or Cortex-X). The IP of Nuvia was not supposed to be used in all the use-cases that Qualcomm intends to deploy it in (and moreover there is still the ongoing legal dispute that Qualcomm is actually not allowed to use it)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- delfinom 2y agoSo when is ARM going after Apple for their custom architecture? Afai, Q hasn't diverged from the standard instruction set at all in the Oryon snapdragons.
- aragilar 2y agoThere's a missing word here (which otherwise makes the sentence nonsensical): "He’s also expanding into new areas, most notably computing, where Arm is making its own push." I'm guessing cloud computing, but guess you could add any buzzword in...
- Terretta 2y agoAnother odd word choice early in the piece: > their so-called architectural license agreement Definition 2 is when this tends to be used: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so-called https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so-called
- lincpa 2y ago[dead]
- runjake 2y agoWasn't/isn't Arm for sale? Is this just a ploy to strongarm Qualcomm into buying Arm?
- tandr 2y agoI don't think that sale would be approved by any regulating body
- DidYaWipe 2y agoPaywalled.
- klelatti 2y agoWhat’s missing from most of these analyses is the perspective that Arm really doesn’t want Qualcomm to become a dominant - architecture license (ALA) based - vendor of Arm based SoCs. Bad for Arm and for Arm’s other customers and the ecosystem. Whilst Qualcomm has a wide ranging ALA that’s always a possibility. This might just be an opportunistic move to remove that threat to Arm’s business model.
- notpushkin 2y agoBad for Arm – sure. But that’s because Arm themselves want to be the dominant vendor. Arm’s other customers lose either way.
- klelatti 2y ago> Arm’s other customers lose either way. Sure Arm has done things - eg pricing v8 to v9 that customers hate. But do you really think Mediatek for example wants to compete with Qualcomm selling Nuvia based cores with a low ALA based royalty.
- Pet_Ant 2y agoSo previously ARM mainly just licensed the ISA or licensed already made cores for people who wanted to creating their own and now they want to shift the paradigm to mainly being that you buy cores from ARM and get them to customise them for you? They want to move up the food chain?
- initramfs 2y agoARM is owned by an investment bank, SoftBank. It operates kind of like Goldman Sachs. ARM is becoming a chipmaker, just like Intel. But Intels' CHIP grant is more similar to a pre-emptive 2008-era bailout of the banks (TARP), for being "too big to fail." (because it makes defense chips) https://irrationalanalysis.substack.com/p/arms-chernobyl-moment/comment/74000764 https://irrationalanalysis.substack.com/p/arms-chernobyl-mom...
- alephnerd 2y agoARM is not becoming a foundry. Almost no one wants to become a foundry because the margins are too low. This is why they are subsidized for tens of billions of dollars by countries all over the world.
- initramfs 2y agoI understand ARM is not becoming a foundry (at least anytime soon, which I will explain in a second). First, I said they are becoming a chipmaker like Intel because they have two of three things to make chips- an architecture, and physical core IP (POP) https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-physical/pop-ip https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-physical/pop-ip. They are making chips at all three foundries, but obviously don't own physical fabs. Softbank has 46 trillion in assets, with over 57.8 billion in operating income. What's stopping Softbank from making an offer to buy a majority stake in a Japanese foundry such as Rapidus (2nm) and other EUV equipment, such as Lasertec? https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/shared-pain-shared-gain-the-start-of-a-monopoly-in-leading-edge-logic-chip-manufacturing.20948/ https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/shared-pain-sha... Ultimately, one starts to question, whether Qualcomms's interest in producing more consumer laptop chips is really competitive with the offerings by AMD and Intel, and whether this is really the best use of foundry space when foundries producing chips could be one day used against an amphibious assault on Formosa. My point is that the commercial lawsuits between Qualcomm and ARM are just one part of a larger geopolitical issue- x86 lost the mobile market 20 years ago- the only reason Intel is surviving is national security- they could have been bankrupt had they not been propped up by a pre-emptive Defense Production Act. Consumers benefit because now they have the choice between more ARM software and x86 products, but I think that is just a short term benefit. Eventually the architecture cuts off support for old software, such as x86-32 bit, and now with X86S, they are only supporting 64 bit. So in the long term, it's better to have options. WINE was developed because of a fear of repeating the Irish Potato Famine ( a mono culture: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Importance-of-Wine https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Importance-of-Wi...), in economic terms. In other words, just because Intel might not want to sell 32 bit chips anymore, doesn't mean others might not want/need to use some application that only exists on one platform (and all the engineers retired- with lost code/unported code). There's an AI bubble: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ai-bubble-is-looking-worse-than-the-dot-com-bubble-heres-why-f688e11d https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ai-bubble-is-looking-w... When a number of companies get investments and start to produce chips that add little extra value- slightly faster chips in lower power with 10 different architectures than run windows 11, then there is less justification to continue investing in companies that do not produce interesting new hardware because the end result is that they are being shaped by windows 11, rather than a unique feature- automotive efficiency for in car apps, sure, but laptops that run Oryon that are hard to boot linux aren't any more interesting than an x86S processor that can only boot linux 6.8 etc.
- michaelt 2y agoAs I understand it [1] the context is: Qualcomm had one type of ARM license, granting them one type of IP at one royalty rate. A startup called "Nuvia" had a different type of ARM license, granting them more IP but at a higher royalty rate. Nuvia built their own cores based on the extra IP. Then Qualcomm brought Nuvia - and they think they should keep the IP from the Nuvia license, but keep paying the lower royalty rate from the Qualcomm license. ARM offer a dizzying array of licensing options. Tiny cores for cheap microcontrollers, high-end cores for flagship smartphones. Unmodifiable-but-fully-proven chip layouts, easily modifiable but expensive to work with verilog designs. Optional subsystems like GPUs where some chip vendors would rather bring their own. Sub-licensable soft cores for FPGAs. I've even heard of non-transferable licenses - such as discounts for startups, which only apply so long as they're a startup. If Nuvia had a startup discount that wasn't transferable when they were acquired, and Qualcomm has a license with a different royalty rate but covering slightly different IP, I can see how a disagreement could arise. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/31/arm_sues_qualcomm/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/31/arm_sues_qualcomm/
- ajross 2y agoThat's all routine though. This kind of license negotiation happens all the time, in every industry. Companies need to work together to sell their products. And almost always it ends up just being rolled into whatever the next contract they write is. Very occasionally, it ends up in court and one side settles once it's clear which direction the wind is blowing. But getting to the point where a supplier of critical infrastructure pulls a figurative knife on one of their biggest customers for no particularly obvious reason is just insane. ARM Ltd. absolutely loses here (Qualcomm does too, obviously), in pretty much any analysis. Their other licensees are watching carefully and thinking hard about future product directions.
- michaelt 2y agoSee, this is one of the downsides of running an IP based business. If you're selling physical chips and customer decides not to pay for their last shipment, you stop sending them chips. No need to get the courts involved; the customer can pay, negotiate, or do without. But when you're selling IP and a customer decides not to pay? You can't stop them making chips using your IP, except by going through the courts. And when you do, people think you're "pulling a figurative knife on one of your biggest customers for no reason"
- blurbleblurble 2y agoMeanwhile RISC-V slowly but surely picks up momentum.
- orev 2y agoIt’s getting extremely tiresome to see RISC-V comments in every thread about this. It’s unnecessary and irrelevant.
- blurbleblurble 2y agoIt's arguably the most glaring element of background context I can imagine, there's a reason people are mentioning it. Just because it's not ready to compete right now, in the medium-long term it's looking like a flat out alternative to ARM. ARM wants their slice of the money now because this decade could easily end up being peak ARM times. Sell high.