12 ms·

Qualcomm doesn't have nearly as much to lose as ARM does and they know it. Qualcomm is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer. If ARM loses, Qualcomm doesn't

by hajile 2y ago

Qualcomm doesn't have nearly as much to lose as ARM does and they know it. Qualcomm is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer. If ARM loses, Qualcomm doesn't have to pay out. If ARM wins, Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM loses even harder in the long-term. The most likely outcome is that Qualcomm agrees to pay a slight bit more than they are currently paying, but nowhere near what ARM is demanding and in the meantime, Qualcomm continues having a team work on a RISC-V frontend for Oryon.

svnt 2y ago
You’re suggesting that Snapdragon processors would switch to RISC-V and that would be no big deal? Presumably Qualcomm is committed to numerous multi-year supplier agreements for the arm chipsets.
- monocasa 2y ago
  This affects their custom Nuvia derived cores. I'm sure Qualcomm will be able to keep using ARM designed cores to cover themselves while they ween off ARM in favor of RISC-V if they need to.
- hajile 2y ago
  Qualcomm pitched Znew quite a while ago. It mostly ditched 16-bit instructions and added a bunch of instructions that were basically ripped straight from ARM64. The idea was obviously an attempt at making it as easy as possible to replace ARM with RISC-V without having to rework much of the core. 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...
  - snvzz 2y ago
    An attempt that failed miserably. (it was formally rejected a year ago) But, by now, it is expected that Qualcomm's RISC-V designs have been re-aligned to match the reality that Qualcomm does not control the standard.
  - dwaite 2y ago
    Actually, it was an attempt to reuse as much of the ARM design they got when they bought Nuvia moving to a different CPU architecture. They were worried about ASIC design not software code.
nemothekid 2y ago
>Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM loses even harder in the long-term. I think long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. How long until: 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM 2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V Unless you are Apple I see such a transition taking a decade easily.
- andyferris 2y ago
  Keep in mind, Apple _did_ actually take a good decade from starting with ARM to leaving x86.
  - fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
    With 100% control of the stack and an insanely good emulator in Rosetta.
    - speed_spread 2y ago
      Qualcomm's migration would be much easier than Apple's. Most of the Android ecosystem already runs on a VM, Dalvik or whatever it's called now. I'm sure Android RISC-V already runs somewhere and I don't see why it would run any worse than on ARM as long as CPUs have equal horsepower.
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        NDK exists.
        darksaints 2y ago
        The companies with large relevant apps running on the NDK are well staffed and funded enough to recompile.
        immibis 2y ago
a-dub 2y ago
is risc-v anywhere near the same efficiency ballpark?
- monocasa 2y ago
  RISC-V is very competitive with ARM when comparing similar PPA niches.
  - msh 2y ago
    High performance and low power laptop and phone SoC’s, no way. There exists no competitive risc-v chip.
    - wmf 2y ago
      We're all assuming that Oryon-V is already being developed.
      - Mindwipe 2y ago
        "Developed" and "successfully shipped" are two enormously different things.
starspangled 2y ago
Just the impact of making this move will have a chilling effect, regardless of the long term outome. ARM Ltd wants to position itself as the ISA. It is highly proprietary of course, but the impression they want to give is that it is "open" and freely available, no lock-in, etc. This really brings the reality back into focus that ARM controls it with an iron fist, and they're not above playing political games and siding against you if you annoy their favored customers. Really horrible optics for them.
- t43562 2y ago
  Qualcomm is slightly bigger than ARM so it seems like a fair fight to me. Does Qualcomm police it's IP at all?
  - starspangled 2y ago
    > Qualcomm is slightly bigger than ARM so it seems like a fair fight to me. I'm not really sure what you're responding to. It's got nothing to do with size whether or not something is fair, it's what is in the contract. None of us know exactly what's there so if it becomes disputed then a court is going to have to decide what is fair. But that was entirely not the point of my comment though. I'm talking about how corporations looking to make chips or get into the ecosystem view ARM and its behavior with its architecture and licensing. ARM Ltd might well be in the right here by the letter of their contracts, but that canceling their customer's license (ostensibly if not actually siding with another customer who is in competition with the first) is just not a good look for positioning they are going for.
    - t43562 2y ago
      You might be right, but they do perhaps also have to establish that their contracts are going to be defended/enforced. Otherwise they have nothing.
      - starspangled 2y ago
        Big middle ground before nuclear option of canceling license entirely though. It's a bad look too because Nuvia/QC has bad blood with Apple, and Apple is suspected to be a very favored client for ARM, so ARM has this problem of potentially appearing to be taking Apple's side against Qualcomm. I'm not saying that's what happened or that ARM did not try to negotiate and QC was being unreasonable and the whole thing has nothing at all to do with Apple, or that ARM had any better options available to them. Could be they were backed into a corner and couldn't do anything else. I don't know. That doesn't mean it's not bad optics for them though.
gonzo 2y ago
> Qualcomm is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer. You think Qualcomm is larger than Apple?
- javawizard 2y ago
  Apple has (to a first approximation) a royalty-free license to ARM IP by virtue of the fact that they co-founded ARM - so yes, Qualcomm is most likely paying ARM more than Apple is.
  - happymellon 2y ago
    Just to clarify for those that don't know ARMs history, Acorn were building computers and designing CPUs before they spun out the CPU design portion. Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture, that was a decade of design and manufacturing already, they VC'ed the independence of the CPU. The staffing and knowledge came from Acorn.
    - billti 2y ago
      > Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture I believe they had a big hand in ARM64. Though best reference I can find right now is this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368489
      - happymellon 2y ago
        Oh, I was just wanting to clarify the "Apple co-founded". They had the Newton project, found ARM did a better job than the other options, but there were a few missing pieces. They funded the spun out project so they could throw ARM a few new requirements for the CPU design. As a "cofounder" of ARM, they didn't contribute technical experience and the architecture did already exist.
        steeeeeve 2y ago
        Sigh. Newton. So far ahead of it's time.
yalogin 2y ago
Moving to a whole new architecture is really really hard, no? The operating systems and applications all need to be ported. Just because Qualcomm cannot be friends with arm, every single Qualcomm customer from google to some custom device manufacturer needs to invest years and millions to move to a new architecture? Unless I am fundamentally misunderstanding this, it seems like something they won’t be able to achieve.
- dvdkon 2y ago
  Android already supports RISC-V, so while migrating an SOC to it is not painless (third-party binaries, device-specific drivers...), the hard work of porting the operating system itself to the ISA is done.
f1shy 2y ago
>>Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM That is a HUGE cost!
m463 2y ago
> Qualcomm doesn't have nearly as much to lose as ARM does and they know it. question: isn't arm somewhat apple? ...Advanced RISC Machines Limited and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI Technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Founding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Founding
- objclxt 2y ago
  > question: isn't arm somewhat apple? Not for decades. Apple sold its stake in ARM when Steve Jobs came back, they needed the money to keep the company going.
biosboiii 2y ago
Thing is businesses don't work like side-projects do. Qualcomm is more or less a research company, the main cost of their business is paying engineers to build their modems/SoCs/processors/whatever. They have been working with ARM for the last, I dont know, 20 years? Even if they manage to switch to RISC-V, and each employee has negative performance impact of like 15% for 2-3 years this ends up in billions of dollars, because you have to hire more people or lose speed. If corporate would force me to work with idk Golang instead of TypeScript I could certainly manage to do so, but I would be slower for a while, and if you extrapolate that on an entire company this is big $$.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > because you have to hire more people or lose speed Yes and 9 women can make a baby in 1 month :)
  - asgeir 2y ago
    In Norse mythology, Heimdallr was born of nine sisters. I'm not sure that it took any less time than usual, but I enjoy the story all the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Mothers_of_Heimdallr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Mothers_of_Heimdallr
    - type0 2y ago
      and Norse mythology has 9 world dimensions, so maybe it worked for them
  - vollbrecht 2y ago
    It's called pipelining, and the concept works well in all modern processors. Can also work with people, you only have a initial setup delay :)
  - tsunamifury 2y ago
    No but 9 women can have 9 babies in 9 months. Which is a 9x output. Production and development requires multiple parties. This mythical man month stuff is often poorly applied. Many parts of research and development need to be done in parallel.
mytailorisrich 2y ago
On modem side they can move to whatever they want without impacts. But on the apps side they need to run Linux/Android/Windows/etc so are dependent on Arm.
tails4e 2y ago
The transition to RISC-V depends entirely on how much of the cpu core susbstem is from ARM. The ISA itself is one part, there are branch predictors, l1,l2 and 3 caches, MMUs, virtualization, vector extensions, the pipeline architecture, etc etc. So moving away from ARM means they need performant replacements for all that. I'm sure there are folks like SiFive that have much of this, but how is it competitively I don't know, and how the next snapdragon would compete if even one of those areas is lacking... Interesting times.
torginus 2y ago
This is a bit off topic, but has anyone demonstrated it's possible to design a big RISC-V core, that's performance competitive with the fastest x86 and ARM designs?
- shash 2y ago
  Well, Tenstorrent, Andes and others have their respective designs... On the in-order side, I can see on-par performance with the ARM A5x series quite easily.
  - torginus 2y ago
    After a bit of digging, I found that the SiFive P670 has performance equivalent to the Galaxy S21, or the desktop Ryzen 7 2700, which is not too bad and definitely usable in a smartphone/laptop form, so competitive with the 2021 era designs. Definitely usable. It's not clear what's the power level is.
    - shash 2y ago
      The P670 is a core, not a chip, so you can't really get to power numbers (or indeed, raw performance as opposed to performance / watt or performance / GHz) without actually making a practical chip out of it in some given process node. You're better off comparing it to a core, such as the ARM Cortex series, rather than the S21. SiFive claims a SPECint2006 score of > 12/GHz, meaning that it'll get a performance of about 24 at 2 GHz or ~31 at 2.6 GHz, making it on par with an A76 in terms of raw performance.
tsunamifury 2y ago
Qualcomm’s business strategy has become hold everyone at gun point then act surprised when everyone looks for alternative customers/partners/suppliers.
- throw16180339 2y ago
  They're the Oracle of hardware.
Const-me 2y ago
> If ARM wins, Qualcomm moves to RISC-V Around 30-40% of Android apps published on play store include native binaries. Such apps need to be recompiled for RISC-V otherwise they won’t run. Neither Qualcomm nor Google can do that because they don’t have source codes for these apps. It’s technically possible to emulate ARMv8 on top of RISC-V, however doing so while keeping the performance overhead reasonable is going to be insanely expensive in R&D costs.
- B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
  Binary-only translators exist, for instance Apple has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)
  - Const-me 2y ago
    Apple gross revenue is 10x the Qualcomm, and the difference in net income is even larger. Apple could easily afford these R&D costs. Another obstacle, even if Qualcomm develops an awesome emulator / JIT compiler / translation layer, I’m not sure the company is in the position to ship that thing to market. Unlike Apple, Qualcomm doesn’t own the OS. Such emulator would require extensive support in the Android OS. I’m not sure Google will be happy supporting huge piece of complicated third-party software as a part of their OS. P.S. And also there’re phone vendors who actually buy chips from Qualcomm. They don’t want end users to complain that their favorite “The Legendary Cabbage: Ultimate Loot Garden Saga” is lagging on their phone, while working great on a similar ARM-based Samsung.
    - iggldiggl 2y ago
      > I’m not sure Google will be happy supporting huge piece of complicated third-party software as a part of their OS. Yeah, for the upcoming/already happening 64-bit-only transition (now that Qualcomm is dropping 32-bit support from their latest CPU generations), Google has decided to go for a hard cut-off, i.e. old apps that are still 32-bit-only simply won't run anymore. Though from what I've heard, some third party OEMs (I think Xiaomi at least?) still have elected to ship a translation layer for their phones at the moment.
kernal 2y ago
>Qualcomm doesn't have nearly as much to lose as ARM does and they know it. Not even close. Android OEM's can easily switch to the MediaTek 9400 that delivers the same performance as the Qualcomm high-end mobile chip at a significantly reduced price or even the Samsung Exynos. Qualcomm, on the other hand, has everything to lose as most of their profits rely on the sales of high-end Snapdragon chips to Android OEM's. Qualcomm thought they were smart by trying to use the Nuvia ARM design license, which was not transferable, as part of their acquisition instead of doing the proper thing and negotiating a design license with ARM. Qualcomm is at the mercy of ARM as ARM has very many revenue streams and Qualcomm does not. It's only a matter of time before Qualcomm capitulates and does the right thing.
jjtheblunt 2y ago
> Qualcomm is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer what about Apple?
ywvcbk 2y ago
> If ARM wins Qualcomm pays them. > Qualcomm moves to RISC-V That’s like chopping your foot off to save on shoes… It would take years for Qualcomm to develop a competitive RISC-V chip. Just look at how long it took them to design a competitive ARM core… Of course they could use this this threat (even if it’s far-fetched) to negotiate a somewhat more favorable settlement.

by hajile 2y ago

svnt 2y ago

You’re suggesting that Snapdragon processors would switch to RISC-V and that would be no big deal? Presumably Qualcomm is committed to numerous multi-year supplier agreements for the arm chipsets.

monocasa 2y ago
This affects their custom Nuvia derived cores. I'm sure Qualcomm will be able to keep using ARM designed cores to cover themselves while they ween off ARM in favor of RISC-V if they need to.
hajile 2y ago
Qualcomm pitched Znew quite a while ago. It mostly ditched 16-bit instructions and added a bunch of instructions that were basically ripped straight from ARM64. The idea was obviously an attempt at making it as easy as possible to replace ARM with RISC-V without having to rework much of the core. 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...
- snvzz 2y ago
  An attempt that failed miserably. (it was formally rejected a year ago) But, by now, it is expected that Qualcomm's RISC-V designs have been re-aligned to match the reality that Qualcomm does not control the standard.
- dwaite 2y ago
  Actually, it was an attempt to reuse as much of the ARM design they got when they bought Nuvia moving to a different CPU architecture. They were worried about ASIC design not software code.

nemothekid 2y ago

>Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM loses even harder in the long-term. I think long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. How long until: 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM 2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V Unless you are Apple I see such a transition taking a decade easily.

andyferris 2y ago
Keep in mind, Apple _did_ actually take a good decade from starting with ARM to leaving x86.
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
  With 100% control of the stack and an insanely good emulator in Rosetta.
  - speed_spread 2y ago
    Qualcomm's migration would be much easier than Apple's. Most of the Android ecosystem already runs on a VM, Dalvik or whatever it's called now. I'm sure Android RISC-V already runs somewhere and I don't see why it would run any worse than on ARM as long as CPUs have equal horsepower.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      NDK exists.
      - darksaints 2y ago
        The companies with large relevant apps running on the NDK are well staffed and funded enough to recompile.
        immibis 2y ago

a-dub 2y ago

is risc-v anywhere near the same efficiency ballpark?

monocasa 2y ago
RISC-V is very competitive with ARM when comparing similar PPA niches.
- msh 2y ago
  High performance and low power laptop and phone SoC’s, no way. There exists no competitive risc-v chip.
  - wmf 2y ago
    We're all assuming that Oryon-V is already being developed.
    - Mindwipe 2y ago
      "Developed" and "successfully shipped" are two enormously different things.

starspangled 2y ago

Just the impact of making this move will have a chilling effect, regardless of the long term outome. ARM Ltd wants to position itself as the ISA. It is highly proprietary of course, but the impression they want to give is that it is "open" and freely available, no lock-in, etc. This really brings the reality back into focus that ARM controls it with an iron fist, and they're not above playing political games and siding against you if you annoy their favored customers. Really horrible optics for them.

t43562 2y ago
Qualcomm is slightly bigger than ARM so it seems like a fair fight to me. Does Qualcomm police it's IP at all?
- starspangled 2y ago
  > Qualcomm is slightly bigger than ARM so it seems like a fair fight to me. I'm not really sure what you're responding to. It's got nothing to do with size whether or not something is fair, it's what is in the contract. None of us know exactly what's there so if it becomes disputed then a court is going to have to decide what is fair. But that was entirely not the point of my comment though. I'm talking about how corporations looking to make chips or get into the ecosystem view ARM and its behavior with its architecture and licensing. ARM Ltd might well be in the right here by the letter of their contracts, but that canceling their customer's license (ostensibly if not actually siding with another customer who is in competition with the first) is just not a good look for positioning they are going for.
  - t43562 2y ago
    You might be right, but they do perhaps also have to establish that their contracts are going to be defended/enforced. Otherwise they have nothing.
    - starspangled 2y ago
      Big middle ground before nuclear option of canceling license entirely though. It's a bad look too because Nuvia/QC has bad blood with Apple, and Apple is suspected to be a very favored client for ARM, so ARM has this problem of potentially appearing to be taking Apple's side against Qualcomm. I'm not saying that's what happened or that ARM did not try to negotiate and QC was being unreasonable and the whole thing has nothing at all to do with Apple, or that ARM had any better options available to them. Could be they were backed into a corner and couldn't do anything else. I don't know. That doesn't mean it's not bad optics for them though.

gonzo 2y ago

> Qualcomm is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer. You think Qualcomm is larger than Apple?

javawizard 2y ago
Apple has (to a first approximation) a royalty-free license to ARM IP by virtue of the fact that they co-founded ARM - so yes, Qualcomm is most likely paying ARM more than Apple is.
- happymellon 2y ago
  Just to clarify for those that don't know ARMs history, Acorn were building computers and designing CPUs before they spun out the CPU design portion. Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture, that was a decade of design and manufacturing already, they VC'ed the independence of the CPU. The staffing and knowledge came from Acorn.
  - billti 2y ago
    > Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture I believe they had a big hand in ARM64. Though best reference I can find right now is this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368489
    - happymellon 2y ago
      Oh, I was just wanting to clarify the "Apple co-founded". They had the Newton project, found ARM did a better job than the other options, but there were a few missing pieces. They funded the spun out project so they could throw ARM a few new requirements for the CPU design. As a "cofounder" of ARM, they didn't contribute technical experience and the architecture did already exist.
      - steeeeeve 2y ago
        Sigh. Newton. So far ahead of it's time.

yalogin 2y ago

Moving to a whole new architecture is really really hard, no? The operating systems and applications all need to be ported. Just because Qualcomm cannot be friends with arm, every single Qualcomm customer from google to some custom device manufacturer needs to invest years and millions to move to a new architecture? Unless I am fundamentally misunderstanding this, it seems like something they won’t be able to achieve.

dvdkon 2y ago
Android already supports RISC-V, so while migrating an SOC to it is not painless (third-party binaries, device-specific drivers...), the hard work of porting the operating system itself to the ISA is done.

f1shy 2y ago

>>Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM That is a HUGE cost!

m463 2y ago

> Qualcomm doesn't have nearly as much to lose as ARM does and they know it. question: isn't arm somewhat apple? ...Advanced RISC Machines Limited and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI Technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Founding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Founding

objclxt 2y ago
> question: isn't arm somewhat apple? Not for decades. Apple sold its stake in ARM when Steve Jobs came back, they needed the money to keep the company going.

biosboiii 2y ago

Thing is businesses don't work like side-projects do. Qualcomm is more or less a research company, the main cost of their business is paying engineers to build their modems/SoCs/processors/whatever. They have been working with ARM for the last, I dont know, 20 years? Even if they manage to switch to RISC-V, and each employee has negative performance impact of like 15% for 2-3 years this ends up in billions of dollars, because you have to hire more people or lose speed. If corporate would force me to work with idk Golang instead of TypeScript I could certainly manage to do so, but I would be slower for a while, and if you extrapolate that on an entire company this is big $$.

nottorp 2y ago
> because you have to hire more people or lose speed Yes and 9 women can make a baby in 1 month :)
- asgeir 2y ago
  In Norse mythology, Heimdallr was born of nine sisters. I'm not sure that it took any less time than usual, but I enjoy the story all the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Mothers_of_Heimdallr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Mothers_of_Heimdallr
  - type0 2y ago
    and Norse mythology has 9 world dimensions, so maybe it worked for them
- vollbrecht 2y ago
  It's called pipelining, and the concept works well in all modern processors. Can also work with people, you only have a initial setup delay :)
- tsunamifury 2y ago
  No but 9 women can have 9 babies in 9 months. Which is a 9x output. Production and development requires multiple parties. This mythical man month stuff is often poorly applied. Many parts of research and development need to be done in parallel.

mytailorisrich 2y ago

On modem side they can move to whatever they want without impacts. But on the apps side they need to run Linux/Android/Windows/etc so are dependent on Arm.

tails4e 2y ago

The transition to RISC-V depends entirely on how much of the cpu core susbstem is from ARM. The ISA itself is one part, there are branch predictors, l1,l2 and 3 caches, MMUs, virtualization, vector extensions, the pipeline architecture, etc etc. So moving away from ARM means they need performant replacements for all that. I'm sure there are folks like SiFive that have much of this, but how is it competitively I don't know, and how the next snapdragon would compete if even one of those areas is lacking... Interesting times.

torginus 2y ago

This is a bit off topic, but has anyone demonstrated it's possible to design a big RISC-V core, that's performance competitive with the fastest x86 and ARM designs?

shash 2y ago
Well, Tenstorrent, Andes and others have their respective designs... On the in-order side, I can see on-par performance with the ARM A5x series quite easily.
- torginus 2y ago
  After a bit of digging, I found that the SiFive P670 has performance equivalent to the Galaxy S21, or the desktop Ryzen 7 2700, which is not too bad and definitely usable in a smartphone/laptop form, so competitive with the 2021 era designs. Definitely usable. It's not clear what's the power level is.
  - shash 2y ago
    The P670 is a core, not a chip, so you can't really get to power numbers (or indeed, raw performance as opposed to performance / watt or performance / GHz) without actually making a practical chip out of it in some given process node. You're better off comparing it to a core, such as the ARM Cortex series, rather than the S21. SiFive claims a SPECint2006 score of > 12/GHz, meaning that it'll get a performance of about 24 at 2 GHz or ~31 at 2.6 GHz, making it on par with an A76 in terms of raw performance.

tsunamifury 2y ago

Qualcomm’s business strategy has become hold everyone at gun point then act surprised when everyone looks for alternative customers/partners/suppliers.

throw16180339 2y ago
They're the Oracle of hardware.

Const-me 2y ago

> If ARM wins, Qualcomm moves to RISC-V Around 30-40% of Android apps published on play store include native binaries. Such apps need to be recompiled for RISC-V otherwise they won’t run. Neither Qualcomm nor Google can do that because they don’t have source codes for these apps. It’s technically possible to emulate ARMv8 on top of RISC-V, however doing so while keeping the performance overhead reasonable is going to be insanely expensive in R&D costs.

B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
Binary-only translators exist, for instance Apple has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)
- Const-me 2y ago
  Apple gross revenue is 10x the Qualcomm, and the difference in net income is even larger. Apple could easily afford these R&D costs. Another obstacle, even if Qualcomm develops an awesome emulator / JIT compiler / translation layer, I’m not sure the company is in the position to ship that thing to market. Unlike Apple, Qualcomm doesn’t own the OS. Such emulator would require extensive support in the Android OS. I’m not sure Google will be happy supporting huge piece of complicated third-party software as a part of their OS. P.S. And also there’re phone vendors who actually buy chips from Qualcomm. They don’t want end users to complain that their favorite “The Legendary Cabbage: Ultimate Loot Garden Saga” is lagging on their phone, while working great on a similar ARM-based Samsung.
  - iggldiggl 2y ago
    > I’m not sure Google will be happy supporting huge piece of complicated third-party software as a part of their OS. Yeah, for the upcoming/already happening 64-bit-only transition (now that Qualcomm is dropping 32-bit support from their latest CPU generations), Google has decided to go for a hard cut-off, i.e. old apps that are still 32-bit-only simply won't run anymore. Though from what I've heard, some third party OEMs (I think Xiaomi at least?) still have elected to ship a translation layer for their phones at the moment.

kernal 2y ago

>Qualcomm doesn't have nearly as much to lose as ARM does and they know it. Not even close. Android OEM's can easily switch to the MediaTek 9400 that delivers the same performance as the Qualcomm high-end mobile chip at a significantly reduced price or even the Samsung Exynos. Qualcomm, on the other hand, has everything to lose as most of their profits rely on the sales of high-end Snapdragon chips to Android OEM's. Qualcomm thought they were smart by trying to use the Nuvia ARM design license, which was not transferable, as part of their acquisition instead of doing the proper thing and negotiating a design license with ARM. Qualcomm is at the mercy of ARM as ARM has very many revenue streams and Qualcomm does not. It's only a matter of time before Qualcomm capitulates and does the right thing.

jjtheblunt 2y ago

> Qualcomm is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer what about Apple?

ywvcbk 2y ago

> If ARM wins Qualcomm pays them. > Qualcomm moves to RISC-V That’s like chopping your foot off to save on shoes… It would take years for Qualcomm to develop a competitive RISC-V chip. Just look at how long it took them to design a competitive ARM core… Of course they could use this this threat (even if it’s far-fetched) to negotiate a somewhat more favorable settlement.