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Ventana's cores were 15 instruction wide, massively out of order cores that on paper compete with the application cores in Apple's M series SoCs. They're a tot
by monocasa 11mo ago
Ventana's cores were 15 instruction wide, massively out of order cores that on paper compete with the application cores in Apple's M series SoCs.
They're a totally different gate count niche than a Cortex-M equivalent.
- nrclark 11mo agoFully agree - Ventana's cores are more like Cortex A76 kinds of things, and are on a completely different scale from typical Cortex-M cores. But switching to RISC-V would shut Qualcomm out from QNX and would limit its Android compatibility. And on the Qualcomm chips that I've seen so far, they're really bought in on both QNX and Android. That's why I think this is probably an aquihire more than a desire to ship Ventana's CPU cores.
- camel-cdr 11mo ago> Ventana's cores are more like Cortex A76 kinds of things More like Neoverse-V3: https://www.ventanamicro.com/technology/risc-v-cpu-ip/ https://www.ventanamicro.com/technology/risc-v-cpu-ip/ BTW: "Silicon platforms launching in early 2026." I wonder if this will be delayed due to the acquisition.
- snvzz 11mo agoDoubtful. To have silicon in early 2026 would mean tapeout happened months ago.
- wbl 11mo agoPorting QNX would be very possible.
- drob518 11mo agoYea, this to me signals that Qualcomm is starting to hedge its ARM bets. Given all the kerfuffle around licensing they have had with ARM already, I suspect that they are signaling to ARM that they have options and so ARM's leverage is a lot lower than it might be. That said, there are also huge switching costs to Qualcomm's customers, so this is not a move it takes lightly. In the mean time, I'm sure those Ventana engineers can also help them improve their ARM designs, too.
- monocasa 11mo agoMy guess is that this was mostly an acquihire. I had heard that Ventana had a lot of people that were laid off from Intel for instance.
- IshKebab 11mo agoI would guess the same. Although Android is adding support for RISC-V so I could potentially see them looking into RISC-V Android phones. Feels kind of unlikely though. Ventana probably ran out of money.
- nrclark 11mo agoMaybe Ventana's software engineers can also help Qualcomm fix its BSPs. . . . I can dream, right?