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In a way, the legalese details are less relevant to the industry perception of ARM as the move is seen as lighting the house on fire in attempt to win an argume

In a way, the legalese details are less relevant to the industry perception of ARM as the move is seen as lighting the house on fire in attempt to win an argument. Qualcomm is the supplier of high-performance ARM-based SoCs in consumer segment, with the best performing core design. ARM is not doing damage to Qualcomm here but to ARMv8/9s long-term survival. I, for one, am greately unhappy about it because RISC-V is a disgusting design that happened to be in the right place at the right time, becoming yet another example of the industry pushing for abysmally inferior choice due to circumstantial factors. I sincerely hope it fails in all possible ways (especially the RVV extension) and a completely redone, better design that is very close to ARMv8-A takes its place. But, in the meantime, we have ARMv8/9-A, which is the best general-purpose ISA, even with the shortcomings of SVE/2, where AVX family, with especially AVX512VL extension, is just so much better.

camel-cdr 2y ago
Are there anything you think are missing in RVV? I'm trying to collect such things and create a list of instructions that could improve it.
rickdeckard 2y ago
The alternative for ARM is to accept that the supplier of high-performance ARM-based SoCs is taking control over the future roadmap of ARM architecture not just for the consumer segment, but a wide range of industries, just like they announced publicly. And they do that by taking the cash-cow of consumer products to push their custom architecture into those other industries. As of now, ARM is largely in control of the evolution of ARM architecture, because even by those with an ALA (like Qualcomm), ARM's CPU-designs are the reference for the evolution in the respective industries. Straying too much from those designs turned out to not be economically feasible for most players since the move to 64bit, which is a beneficial development for ARM as they can drive a harmonized ecosystem in different industries. Now ARM gave Nuvia a very permissive license to cooperate on the creation of ARM-based architecture, for a segment where ARM was very weak: server-architecture. With the licensing contract explicitly limiting Nuvia to use the resulting IP only for servers and only to Nuvia. Now regardless of the legal dispute, Qualcomm now plans to use this IP to create a design roadmap parallel to that of ARM, with a market-position in consumer smartphone SoC's funding a potential hostile takeover of several other industries where ARM carefully works to establish and maintain a competitive landscape. Qualcomm's plan is to achieve something similar to Apple, but with the plan to sell the resulting chipset. So while ARM is building and maintaining an ecosystem of ARM as a vendor-agnostic architecture-option in several industries, Qualcomm is on a trajectory to build up a consolidated dominant position in all those industries (which may end up forcing ARM to actually follow Qualcomm in order to preserve the ecosystem, with Qualcomm having little vested interest to support an ecosystem outside of Qualcomm).

camel-cdr 2y ago

Are there anything you think are missing in RVV? I'm trying to collect such things and create a list of instructions that could improve it.

rickdeckard 2y ago

The alternative for ARM is to accept that the supplier of high-performance ARM-based SoCs is taking control over the future roadmap of ARM architecture not just for the consumer segment, but a wide range of industries, just like they announced publicly. And they do that by taking the cash-cow of consumer products to push their custom architecture into those other industries. As of now, ARM is largely in control of the evolution of ARM architecture, because even by those with an ALA (like Qualcomm), ARM's CPU-designs are the reference for the evolution in the respective industries. Straying too much from those designs turned out to not be economically feasible for most players since the move to 64bit, which is a beneficial development for ARM as they can drive a harmonized ecosystem in different industries. Now ARM gave Nuvia a very permissive license to cooperate on the creation of ARM-based architecture, for a segment where ARM was very weak: server-architecture. With the licensing contract explicitly limiting Nuvia to use the resulting IP only for servers and only to Nuvia. Now regardless of the legal dispute, Qualcomm now plans to use this IP to create a design roadmap parallel to that of ARM, with a market-position in consumer smartphone SoC's funding a potential hostile takeover of several other industries where ARM carefully works to establish and maintain a competitive landscape. Qualcomm's plan is to achieve something similar to Apple, but with the plan to sell the resulting chipset. So while ARM is building and maintaining an ecosystem of ARM as a vendor-agnostic architecture-option in several industries, Qualcomm is on a trajectory to build up a consolidated dominant position in all those industries (which may end up forcing ARM to actually follow Qualcomm in order to preserve the ecosystem, with Qualcomm having little vested interest to support an ecosystem outside of Qualcomm).