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Qualcomm could've become "the Intel of the ARM PC" if they wanted to, but I suspect they see no problem with (and perhaps have a vested interest in) proprietary

Qualcomm could've become "the Intel of the ARM PC" if they wanted to, but I suspect they see no problem with (and perhaps have a vested interest in) proprietary closed systems given how they've been doing with their smartphone SoCs. Unfortunately, even Intel is moving in that direction whenever they're trying to be "legacy free", but I wonder if that's also because they're trying to emulate the success of smartphone SoC vendors.

bigyabai 1y ago
I don't know if the prospect of being the "Intel of ARM" is very appealing when you can manufacture high-margin smartphone SOCs instead. The addressable market doesn't seem to be very large; any potential competition is stifled by licensing on both Microsoft and Softbank's side. The legend of Windows on ARM is decades old, and people have been seriously trying to make it happen for at least the past two decades. They're all bled dry. Apple is the only one who can turn a profit, courtesy of their sweetheart deal with Masayoshi Son.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  Well that would have an obvious solution. Go make RISC-V CPUs for phones etc. until you get good enough at it to be competitive in laptops, at which point Microsoft gets interested in supporting you and you get to be the Intel of RISC-V without dealing with Softbank.
pjmlp 1y ago
The extent PCs are open is an historical accident, that most OEMs would rather not repeat, as you can see everywhere from embedded all the way to cloud systems. If anything, Linux powered devices are a good example on how all of them end up with OEM-name Linux, with minimal contributions to upstream. If everyone would leave Windows in droves, expect regular people to be getting Dell and HP Linux at local PC store, with the same limitations as going outside their distros with binary blobs, and pre-installed stuff.
- summa_tech 1y ago
  I mean, part of that is the difference between how easy it is to build a platform in Linux vs how hard it is to get into the tree. This is actually, in my mind, a major change in the Linux development process. Nobody expected Intel to provide employees to write support for 80386 pagetables, or Philips to write and maintain support for the I2C bus. The PC keyboard driver was not sponsored and supported by IBM. Getting the code into Linux was really easy (and it shows in a lot of the older code; Linux kernel quality standards have been rising over time), because everyone was mostly cooperating on a cool open-source project. But at some point, this became apparently unsustainable, and the expectation is now that AMD will maintain their GPU drivers, and Qualcomm (or some other company with substantial resources) will contribute code and employees to deal with Adreno GPUs. This led to a shift in reviewer attitudes: constant back-and-forth about code or design quality is typical on the mailing lists now. This means contributing code to the kernel is a massive chore, which any person with interest in actually making things work should prefer to avoid. What's left is language lawyers, evangelists and people who get paid to sit straight and treat it as a 9-5 job.
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    The Asahi and pmOS folks have been quite successful in upstreaming drivers to the kernel (even for non-trivial devices like GPU's) as enthusiast contributors with no real company backing. The whole effort on including Rust in the Linux kernel is largely about making it even easier to write future drivers.
    - summa_tech 1y ago
      Agreed, and I'm fairly impressed by the GPU effort. That said, it did take a very long time, even with the demonstrably extreme amount of excitement from the Linux community (Linus himself was thrilled to use a Macbook). What do you do for parts that are useful but don't get people this excited? What really burned me on this kind of stuff was the disappearance of Xeon Phi drivers from the kernel. Intel backed it out after they discontinued the product line, and the kernel people gladly went with it ("who'll maintain this?"). Intel pulled a beautiful piece of process lawyership on it: apparently they could back it out without difficulty, because the product was never released! (Never mind it has been sold, retired and circulated in public.)

bigyabai 1y ago

I don't know if the prospect of being the "Intel of ARM" is very appealing when you can manufacture high-margin smartphone SOCs instead. The addressable market doesn't seem to be very large; any potential competition is stifled by licensing on both Microsoft and Softbank's side. The legend of Windows on ARM is decades old, and people have been seriously trying to make it happen for at least the past two decades. They're all bled dry. Apple is the only one who can turn a profit, courtesy of their sweetheart deal with Masayoshi Son.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
Well that would have an obvious solution. Go make RISC-V CPUs for phones etc. until you get good enough at it to be competitive in laptops, at which point Microsoft gets interested in supporting you and you get to be the Intel of RISC-V without dealing with Softbank.

pjmlp 1y ago

The extent PCs are open is an historical accident, that most OEMs would rather not repeat, as you can see everywhere from embedded all the way to cloud systems. If anything, Linux powered devices are a good example on how all of them end up with OEM-name Linux, with minimal contributions to upstream. If everyone would leave Windows in droves, expect regular people to be getting Dell and HP Linux at local PC store, with the same limitations as going outside their distros with binary blobs, and pre-installed stuff.

summa_tech 1y ago
I mean, part of that is the difference between how easy it is to build a platform in Linux vs how hard it is to get into the tree. This is actually, in my mind, a major change in the Linux development process. Nobody expected Intel to provide employees to write support for 80386 pagetables, or Philips to write and maintain support for the I2C bus. The PC keyboard driver was not sponsored and supported by IBM. Getting the code into Linux was really easy (and it shows in a lot of the older code; Linux kernel quality standards have been rising over time), because everyone was mostly cooperating on a cool open-source project. But at some point, this became apparently unsustainable, and the expectation is now that AMD will maintain their GPU drivers, and Qualcomm (or some other company with substantial resources) will contribute code and employees to deal with Adreno GPUs. This led to a shift in reviewer attitudes: constant back-and-forth about code or design quality is typical on the mailing lists now. This means contributing code to the kernel is a massive chore, which any person with interest in actually making things work should prefer to avoid. What's left is language lawyers, evangelists and people who get paid to sit straight and treat it as a 9-5 job.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  The Asahi and pmOS folks have been quite successful in upstreaming drivers to the kernel (even for non-trivial devices like GPU's) as enthusiast contributors with no real company backing. The whole effort on including Rust in the Linux kernel is largely about making it even easier to write future drivers.
  - summa_tech 1y ago
    Agreed, and I'm fairly impressed by the GPU effort. That said, it did take a very long time, even with the demonstrably extreme amount of excitement from the Linux community (Linus himself was thrilled to use a Macbook). What do you do for parts that are useful but don't get people this excited? What really burned me on this kind of stuff was the disappearance of Xeon Phi drivers from the kernel. Intel backed it out after they discontinued the product line, and the kernel people gladly went with it ("who'll maintain this?"). Intel pulled a beautiful piece of process lawyership on it: apparently they could back it out without difficulty, because the product was never released! (Never mind it has been sold, retired and circulated in public.)