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Reminds me that's also many people's speculation on how Qualcomm builds their RISCV chips -- swap an ARM decoder for a RISCV one.
by mshockwave 2y ago
Reminds me that's also many people's speculation on how Qualcomm builds their RISCV chips -- swap an ARM decoder for a RISCV one.
- hajile 2y agoThat's not speculation. Qualcomm made a 216-page proposal for their Znew[0] "extension". It was basically "completely change RISC-V to do what Arm is doing". The only reason for this was that it would allow a super-fast transition from ARM to RISC-V. It was rejected HARD by all the other members. Qualcomm is still making large investments into RISC-V. I saw an article estimating that the real reason for the Qualcomm v Arm lawsuit is that Qualcomm's old royalties were 2.5-3% while the new royalties would be 4-5.5%. We're talking about billions of dollars and that's plenty of incentive for Qualcomm to switch ISAs. Why should they pay billions for the privilege of designing their own CPUs? [0] 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...