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>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 deve
by 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 agoKeep in mind, Apple _did_ actually take a good decade from starting with ARM to leaving x86.
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y agoWith 100% control of the stack and an insanely good emulator in Rosetta.
- speed_spread 2y agoQualcomm'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 agoNDK exists.
- darksaints 2y agoThe companies with large relevant apps running on the NDK are well staffed and funded enough to recompile.
- immibis 2y agoit's not about that, it's about running the apps whose makers are out of business or just find it easier to tell their customers to buy different phones
- saagarjha 2y agoIt's not about whether they can, it's whether they will. History has proven that well-resourced teams don't like doing this very much and will drag their feet if given the chance.
- toasterlovin 2y agoYeah, but Qualcomm doesn’t control Android or any of the phone makers. It’s hard for large corps to achieve the internal coordination necessary for a successful ISA change (something literally only Apple has ever accomplished), but trying to coordinate with multiple other large corps? Seems insane. You’re betting your future on the fact that none of the careerists at Google or Samsung get cold feet and decide to just stick with what works.
- rangestransform 2y agoWouldn’t coordination to change ISA between multiple companies receive heavy scrutiny in the Lina Khan era?
- godzillabrennus 2y agoIs the transition fully over if the latest MacOS still runs an x86 emulator for old software?
- coder543 2y ago> 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM Virtually all high performance processors these days operate on their own internal “instructions”. The instruction decoder at the very front of the pipeline that actually sees ARM or RISC-V or whatever is a relatively small piece of logic. If Qualcomm were motivated, I believe they could swap ISAs relatively easily on their flagship processors, and the rest of the core would be the same level of performance that everyone is used to from Qualcomm. This isn’t the old days when the processor core was deeply tied to the ISA. Certainly, there are things you can optimize for the ISA to eke out a little better performance, but I don’t think this is some major obstacle like you indicate it is. > 2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V #2 is the only sticking point. That is ARM’s only moat as far as Qualcomm is concerned. Many Android apps don’t depend directly on “native” code, and those could potentially work on day 1. With an ARM emulation layer, those with a native dependency could likely start working too, although a native RISC-V port would improve performance. If Qualcomm stopped making ARM processors, what alternatives are you proposing? Everyone is switching to Samsung or MediaTek processors? If Qualcomm were switching to RISC-V, that would be a sea change that would actually move the needle. Samsung and MediaTek would probably be eager to sign on! I doubt they love paying ARM licensing fees either. But, all of this is a very big “if”. I think ARM is bluffing here. They need Qualcomm.
- x0x0 2y ago> Virtually all high performance processors these days operate on their own internal “instructions”. The instruction decoder at the very front of the pipeline that actually sees ARM or RISC-V or whatever is a relatively small piece of logic. If that's true, then what is arm licensing to Qualcomm? Just the instruction set or are they licensing full chips? Sorry for the dumb question / thanks in advance.
- coder543 2y agoQualcomm has historically licensed both the instruction set and off the shelf core designs from ARM. Obviously, there is no chance the license for the off the shelf core designs would ever allow Qualcomm to use that IP with a competing instruction set. In the past, Qualcomm designed their own CPU cores (called Kryo) for smartphone processors, and just made sure they were fully compliant with ARM’s instruction set, which requires an Architecture License, as opposed to the simpler Technology License for a predesigned off the shelf core. Over time, Kryo became “semi-custom”, where they borrowed from the off the shelf designs, and made their own changes, instead of being fully custom. These days, their smartphone processors have been entirely based on off the shelf designs from ARM, but their new Snapdragon X Elite processors for laptops include fully custom Oryon ARM cores, which is the flagship IP that I was originally referencing. In the past day or two, they announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which will bring Oryon to smartphones.
- hajile 2y agoARM already did the hard work. Once you've ported your app to ARM, you've no doubt made sure all the ISA-specific bits are isolated while the rest is generic and portable. This means you already know where to go and what to change and hopefully already have testing in place to make sure your changes work correctly. Aside from the philosophy, lots of practical work has been done and is ongoing. On the systems level, there has already been massive ongoing work. Alibaba for example ported the entirety of Android to RISC-V then handed it off to Google. Lots of other big companies have tons of coders working on porting all kinds of libraries to RISC-V and progress has been quite rapid. And of course, it is worth pointing out that an overwhelming majority of day-to-day software is written in managed languages on runtimes that have already been ported to RISC-V.
- phkahler 2y ago>> 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM Done. Qualcomm is currently gunning for Intel. 2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V Android phones use a virtual machine which is largely ported already. Linux software is largely already ported.
- djbusby 2y agoAnd with VM tech, and the power of modern devices even some emulator/thunking layer is not too crazy for apps that (somehow) couldn't cross compile.
- IshKebab 2y ago2. Except games... But ARM and RISC-V are relatively similar and it's easy to add custom instructions to RISC-V to make them even more similar if you want so you could definitely do something like Rosetta.
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y agoI think windows-on-arm is fairly instructive as to how likely RISC-V would go.
- philistine 2y agoThat's what's magical about Apple. It was a decade-long transition. All the 32-bit code that was removed from macOS back in 2017 was all in preparation for the move in 2019.
- MBCook 2y agoApple has done it multiple times now and has it down to a science. 68k -> PPC -> x86 -> ARM, with the 64 bit transition you mixed in there for good measure (twice!). Has any other consumer company pulled a full architecture switch off? Companies pulled off leaving Alpha and Sparc but that was servers which has a different software landscape.
- hajile 2y agoI don't believe any major company has done it. Even Intel failed numerous times to move away from x86 with iAPX432, i960, i860, and Itanium all failing to gain traction.
- MBCook 2y agoFor Apple it was do or die the first few times. Until x86, if they didn’t move they’d just be left in the dust and their market would disappear. The ARM transition wasn’t strictly necessary like the last ones. It had huge benefits for them, so it makes sense, but they also knew what they were doing by then. In your examples (which are great) Intel wasn’t going to die. They had backups, and many of those seem guided more by business goals than a do-or-die situation. I wonder if that’s part of why they failed.
- hnaccount_rng 2y agoIn a way that's also true for the x86->ARM transition, isn't it? I had an MacbookAir 2018. And.. "it was crap" is putting it very, very mildly. Yes it was still better than any Windows laptop I got since and much less of a hassle than any Linux laptop that I'm aware of in my circle. But the gap was really, really small and it cost twice as much. But the most important part for the working of the transition is probably that, in any of theses cases, the typical final user didn't even notice. Yes a lot of Hackernews-like people noticed as they had to recompile some of their programs. But most people :tm: didn't. They either use AppStore apps, which were fixed ~immediately or Rosetta made everything runnable, even if performance suffered. But that's pretty much the requirement you have: You need to be handle to transition ~all users to the new platform with ~no user work and even without most vendors doing anything. Intel never could provide that, not even aim for it. So they basically have to either a) rip their market in pieces or b) support the "deprecated" ISA forever.
- snvzz 2y ago>2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V This would suggest that RISC-V is starting from scratch. Yet in reality it is well underway; RISC-V is rapidly growing the strongest ecosystem.
- saagarjha 2y ago> Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM That’s what Oryon is, in theory.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoSwitches like that are major, but get easier every year, and are easier today than they were yesterday, as everyones tools at all levels up and down both the hardware and software stacks get more powerful all the time. It's an investment with a cost and a payoff like any other investment.
- detourdog 2y agoI think it takes Apple at least 9 years to prepare and 1 year to implement.