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Qualcomm acquires RISC-V focused Ventana Micro Systems
- Pet_Ant 10mo agoWhy does Qualcomm need this? They don't need to license RISC-V. Is all the IP they acquired with Nuvia[1] tainted? Or were they just using ARM-derived internals? From my understanding, just slapping on a different instruction decoder isn't a big technical hurdle. Actually, I wonder if it would be possible to design a chip with both an ARM and a RISC-V decoder on the same die and just fuse-off the ARM die on select units to avoid any fees... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm#2015%E2%80%932024:_NXP,_Broadcom_and_Nuvia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm#2015%E2%80%932024:_NX...
- dismalaf 10mo agoAcquihire and hedging bets.
- jsheard 10mo ago> Actually, I wonder if it would be possible to design a chip with both an ARM and a RISC-V decoder on the same die and just fuse-off the ARM die on select units to avoid any fees... That's not quite what Raspberry Pi did with the RP2350 (the ARM and RV cores are wholly separate) but they did include the ability to fuse off one side or the other, so I wonder if they'll release a cheaper RV-only version at some point.
- MisterTea 10mo ago> They don't need to license RISC-V. Correct. However you need circuitry on silicon to implement said architecture which is the expensive and time consuming part.
- fork-bomber 10mo agoQC likely use a lot of Arm IP, Nuvia notwithstanding, and want a way out of the general Arm monopoly. Seems to be a growing trend. A dual ISA decoder with with fuse-off options will likely have unwelcome power-perf-area and yield consequences.
- Pet_Ant 10mo agoFused off silicon consumes power? I assumed it just went dark.
- fork-bomber 10mo agoYou’re right. But consider that in order to be useful when not fused off, the design would need to have a bunch of additional logic (interconnect ports, power control machinery etc) at the periphery of the to-eventually-be-fused-off area that would likely remain even when things were fused off. That may impact power. Apart from that there’s the other usual angles: The very fact that there’s additional logic in the compute path (eventually fused off) means additional design and verification complexity. The additional area, although dark, eats into the silicon yield at the fab. Not saying it’s not possible.
- tux3 10mo agoEating the competitor is one way to win. If you're scared of them, just buy them out.
- observationist 10mo agoDoesn't have to be fear, it can be simple greed, too. "Hey, look, .05% revenue boost, nomnomnom".
- NordSteve 10mo agoNo big company would bother with an acquisition if the top result is 0.05% increase in revenue.
- 6SixTy 10mo agoThey are basically acquiring talent and/or preexisting IP. RISC-V is free but implementations are the sole IP of the company. Implementing ARM and RISC-V decoders might depend on licensing fine print for each licensee
- Zhyl 10mo agoThis. SiFive, for example, is a proprietory core design based on the open source RISC V spec. Hazard3 [0] on the other hand, is an open source core design. [0] https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3 https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- tapoxi 10mo agoARM cancelled their architecture license and sued them, Qualcomm won, but with a threat like that to your core business it's best to have an escape hatch. They'll need to license future versions of the ARM ISA and now they know the licensor is hostile.
- Zigurd 10mo agoThere are a lot of little cores in phones doing little core things. Having a first rate design team experienced in an ISA that is royalty free probably makes sense. They'll be able to expand the use of RISCV up the value chain ver time. Buying a team that's already working on RISCV also reduces the chances of ARM lawyers getting involved.
- panick21_ 10mo agoWhy would you acquire massive out-of-order super fast CPU team if you wanted a bunch of small cores. There are much cheaper teams and cores you could use for that.
- Zigurd 10mo agoSome modems and radios need more than reference-implementation performance and everything in a phone benefits from power efficiency.
- panick21_ 10mo agoSure but there are teams that work on radios and modems that likely could be acquired and not sure Qualcomm needs that. RISC-V isn't so different that you need to acquire a team. Ventana is a company founded and build around a team to do massive ultra wide chips for data-center, and their focus was not efficiency primary. The kinds of chips they build are just not the right fit. Moving all that team over to something on the literal other end of the spectrum and dropping their existing products and costumers seems a bit silly.
- aseipp 10mo agoIt's probably just for IP and talent acquisition, if I had to guess. People who can design high performance server-class CPU microarchitectures are rare. Frankly, Ventana seemed like an interesting entry in the space, but I have no idea who would have actually bought their servers at the end of the day. They taped out multiple designs, but none actually seem to exist outside their labs. I don't really see any path to meaningful RISC-V server adoption for at least several more years and by that time Qualcomm could design something on their own, assuming they are serious about re-entering the market. Grabbing the talent and any useful IP/core design components makes the most sense to me, anyway.
- fidotron 10mo agohttps://patents.justia.com/assignee/ventana-micro-systems-inc https://patents.justia.com/assignee/ventana-micro-systems-in... RISC-V being freely available does not mean that implementations of it will not be patented from here to the Orion nebula and back.
- Farfignoggen 10mo agoBecause the ISA that a modern microprocessor is engineered to execute is different from the Micro-ops execution engine/Other(The Actual Hardware) that's a custom design that's the IP of the creator. And so Qualcomm wants that RISC-V running CPU core design IP that belongs to Ventana Micro Systems and the ISA on modern microprocessors is just a set of execution rules that the actual hardware(Micro-Ops execution engine and associated cache subsystems/other parts of the hardware and that IP that belongs to Ventana!) is engineered to execute. Qualcomm also wants the RISC-V engineers and their Knowledge and the Software Ecosystem and SDKs/Tools that Ventana has developed over the years to create CPU cores that execute that RISC-V ISA. And that includes all the design Verification tools/EDA tools that Ventana developed for their specific CPU core designs and all that non hardware stuff that takes a larger investment in dollars than just the hardware's development alone costs! So the RISC-V ISA is Royalty free but not anyone's actual RISV-V ISA executing CPU core designs that cost millions to create and are the proprietary part of the Acquisition that Qualcomm is after. I'd imagine that Qualcomm's Nuvia engineers could more rapidly swap out the ARM ISA Instruction Decoders on any Oyron cores with some RISC-V Decoders and use most of the same Oryon Micro-op engine design that's native to the current Oryan generation cores but maybe Ventana's micro-op execution engine has something that's valuable to Qualcomm as well. And so ISAs on modern microprocessors are abstracted away at the actual hardware level by the Micro-ops execution engine desogns that are proprietary to the ones that created them. And the reason that many license from ARM holdings is not just the ISA but the software/OS/Drover ecosystem that's built up over the decades for the ARM ISA ecosystem and that costs many times more than the hardware's costs to develop and maintain over the years. And so the ARM OS/Software/API and driver ecosystem is decades more mature than the RISC-V OS/Software/API and driver ecosystem, and that took years and 100s of billions in investments to get ARM where it is today! But since RISC-V is royalty free there are hundreds of companies using RISC-V, including Nvidia for it's FALCON(FAst Logic CONtrollers) that are used all over Nvidia's GPUs and other accelerators. And with RISC-V one is free to implement only a subset of the RISC-V ISA or create custom RISC-V ISA extensions unlike ARM holdings where licensees have to implement the entire ARM Licensed ISA regardless of if all the instructions are needed for the task and no ISA extensions allowed. So maybe Qualcomm is interested in the micro-controller market that's lower margin and that makes RISC-V's Royally Free more attractive! Or Qualcomm, like Nvidia, wants to develop some RISC-V Micro-Controllers for it's own in-house needs and not have to pay for ARM Holdings ISA based Micro-Controller designs. Look at Nvidia's dozens of on GPU die Controllers(Encoder/Decoder Logic,Etc) and because that's Nvidia FALCON RISC-V based that's quite a bit of savings in Royalty Payments and CPU core design payments to ARM Holdings or anyone else because FALCON is Nvidia's In-House IP and that RISC-V ISA is free to use for Nvidia or others to save billions that way.
- boredatoms 10mo agoI wonder why SiFive wasn't the acquisition target
- ch_123 10mo agoMight be worth more than Qualcomm is willing to spend and/or introduce antitrust concerns. This feels like a hedging of bets, no need for Qualcomm to buy the biggest name in the RISC-V space.
- rwmj 10mo agoSiFive have apparently been shopping themselves around for a while. But they've been around for a long time, taken loads of investment, had a huge number of employees at one point (not now), and don't have very competitive products. My speculation is they're just not a very attractive acquisition with a complex ownership structure, and are demanding too much money to compensate their earlier investors.
- tonetegeatinst 10mo agoDoes anyone know or have they leaked potential cost of acquisition?
- monocasa 10mo agoThe $2B deal with Intel fell through. Thought they were arguably worth more on paper then. My guess is that they're in a weird place where a fair offer at the moment is less than the investment they've gotten so far.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- phendrenad2 10mo agoNote that the $2 billion deal story was always "according to people with knowledge of the matter", and I wonder if it was nothing more than Intel taking a peek at Sifive's technology and books. https://archive.is/FVMLI#selection-3331.81-3331.129 https://archive.is/FVMLI#selection-3331.81-3331.129
- wslh 10mo ago2025 and counting. Apple launched the M1 in 2020. I am an Apple user but not a fanboy but everyday I wonder about the magic in Apple that is unique because even established competitors with virtually infinite money and incredible processes can't move forward. Another incredible aspect is the early addition of an NPU by Apple in a SoC. I would love to resurrect my XPS 13s with a durable battery and working in Linux without trigerring the fan. The same for my Lenovo Xs. In my imagination I am waiting for the billionaire geeks doing their part for fun (e.g. energy management in Linux).
- baq 10mo ago> Apple launched the M1 in 2020. which means the M1 was being worked on since at least 2018, I'd bet much earlier than that, for sure much earlier than that if you count silicon which never left the lab. reminder iphones run on apple silicon since 2010, which means they had to be working on it at least since 2008. they have a lot of experience in silicon design by now.
- wslh 10mo agoMy point holds even if they started earlier, companies such as Samsung has their own chips and they could also put notebooks on the market.
- bigyabai 10mo agoWhy would Samsung do that? They have no sweetheart ARM licensing deal, they make more money selling their fab space to other customers. Softbank could extend more generous architectural licenses to these businesses if they wanted to stimulate ARM PC sales. But they don't, so now we're here.
- verditelabs 10mo agoQualcomm has had DSPs in its chips for a long time, providing a lot of NPU-like functionality before the term NPU had been coined. What Qualcomm currently calls its NPUs are just Hexagon DSP cores with specific instructions and abilities for matrix math and common inferencing datatypes.
- Zhyl 10mo agoIt may be a while off yet, but it's pretty clear that companies, Qualcomm chief among them, are ready to replace arm as soon as possible.
- rwmj 10mo agoIf it happens, Arm will have only themselves to blame. Suing your own customers is not the smartest move.
- Moral_ 10mo agoNow they're getting counter sued by Qualcomm because it turns out they allegedly violated their own TLA (license to get off the shelf cores) and their ALA (architecture license). Qualcomm is claiming that Arm is refusing to license the v10 architecture to them and refused to license some other TLA cores requiring them to get the Nuvia Custom CPU team to build cores for those products instead. This explains their expansion into Risc-V it's a hedge against Arm interfering with QC's business.
- bitwize 10mo agoIt'll turn out OK. They'll just be acquired by Apple, who will continue putting out the most powerful CPUs on the market with AArch64 architecture.
- drtgh 10mo agoQualcomm acquired Nuvia in order to bypass the licence fees charged by ARM, with I can guess ARM tried to block in good terms first, and latter in bad terms without success as we saw. It may make sense now that ARM is refusing to license them the newer ones. Qualcomm may be solely to blame themselves, as they now has to invest in researching and developing an underdeveloped architecture, quickly, while their competitors -including Chinese ones- take advantage with newer ARM designs (and perhaps they could even develop their own alternatives peacefully in the meantime).
- brucehoult 10mo ago> Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in order to bypass the licence fees charged by ARM Both Nuvia and Qualcomm had Arm Architecture licenses that allowed them to develop and sell their own Arm-compatible CPUs. There was no bypassing of license fees. If Qualcomm had hired the Nuvia engineers before they developed their core at Nuvia, and they developed exactly the same core while employed at Qualcomm, then there would be no question that everyone was obeying the terms of their licenses. Arm's claim rests on it being ok for Nuvia to sell chips of their own design, but not to sell the design itself, and not to transfer the design as part of selling the company.
- nrclark 10mo agoMost SOCs on the market today have a mix of various CPU cores. It's common to see designs with a few big ARM Cortex-A cores running an OS like Linux or Android, and then some smaller Cortex-M microcontroller cores that do housekeeping things like security checks, power management, realtime features, peripheral management, etc. If I were to guess, Qualcomm wants to replace its various Cortex-M cores with RISC-V equivalents. This saves them money on licensing, reduces their dependency on ARM, and doesn't break customer-facing compatibility. Ventana is probably more of an aquihire to get their designer team. "We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile." -Qualcomm, probably
- Joel_Mckay 10mo agoCould be good if a large firm stabilized the RISC-V version fragmentation with a massive standard SoC product boost in the Android space. But more likely, the early product line will meet the same fate as the dog in "Old Yeller" (1957) in a market consolidation push. =3
- nrclark 10mo agoI'd be surprised if Qualcomm replaces their application processors (the cores that typically run Android/Linux or QNX) with RISC-V any time soon. Aarch64's ecosystem is huge, and Qualcomm would cut their customers off from it by moving fully to RISC-V. They're more likely to replace the smaller CPU cores imo.
- Joel_Mckay 10mo agoAgreed, at $5/pc for a ARM64 7/8/9 SoC that can run a real OS, the Aarch64 is likely the minimum now for most designs. =3
- brucehoult 10mo ago> Aarch64's ecosystem is huge ARMv8 hardware (other than Apple) only shipped 3-6 years before RV64GC/RVA20, and ARMv9 is only about two years before the equivalent RVA23 -- at least in SBCs/Laptops. Obviously ARMv8 hardware went into mobile devices a lot earlier, though it was often running 32 bit code for the first few years. It's nothing at all like the maturity lead x86 has over both.
- throwaway31131 10mo agoSo much for the $1.4B spent on NUVIA. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/startup-key-apple-google-chip-designers-catches-qualcomms-eye/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/startup-key-apple-goog...
- phendrenad2 10mo agoIs this just Qualcomm buying itself another vote on the RISC-V foundation board?
- thebeardisred 10mo agoNo, it's one company == one vote. There's a similar situation with IBM & Red Hat. Since IBM owns Red Hat, Red Hatters (like myself) may participate in meetings but where individuals from both companies are present "there can be only one."