The free market is going very well here
thanks, proprietary licenses.
can we finally move to open standards now or will these fucks keep on losing money just to spite foss? are they that afraid we read some of their source code?
RiscV! RiscV!
I wonder if their recent bid to take over Intel, is related.
The irony would be very thik as Qualcomm played a big role in killing Intel’s 2010er efforts to enter the mobile sector.
Qualcomm is not trying to take over Intel.
Not only has it been denied by both parties, it would 100% not go ahead. Additionally, it would invalidate the x86 cross-licence that AMD and Intel have, meaning Intel would no longer be able to make modern x86 CPUs. Frankly it’s also somewhat doubtful Qualcomm wants to take Intel on.
The rumour was likely someone trying to pump up the stock and sell.
I’m just being a little pedantic. But I believe you meant x64?
x86_64
They did, AMD holds the x64 license, Intel holds the x86.
And we all wept.
And so the corporate wars have begun
I saw this documentary where taco bell won them.
Syndicate was fun but I didn’t want to LIVE inside of it…
Hopefully Qualcomm takes the hint and takes this opportunity to develop a high performance RISC V core. Don’t just give the extortionists more money, break free and use an open standard. Instruction sets shouldn’t even require licensing to begin with if APIs aren’t copyrightable. Why is it OK to make your own implentation of any software API (see Oracle vs. Google on the Java API, Wine implementing the Windows API, etc) but not OK to do the same thing with an instruction set (which is just a hardware API). Why is writing an ARM or x86 emulator fine but not making your own chip? Why are FPGA emulator systems legal if instruction sets are protected? It makes no sense.
The other acceptable outcome here is a Qualcomm vs. ARM lawsuit that sets a precedence that instruction sets are not protected. If they want to copyright their own cores and sell the core design fine, but Qualcomm is making their own in house designs here.
takes this opportunity to develop a high performance RISC V core
They might. This would never be open sourced though. Best case scenario is the boost they would provide to the ISA as a whole by having a company as big as Qualcomm backing it.
The RISCV instruction set IS open source. What they’d do to ratfuck it is lock the bootloader or something.
RISC V is just an open standard set of instructions and their encodings. It is not expected nor required for implementations of RISC V to be open sourced, but if they do make a RISC V chip they don’t have to pay anyone to have that privilege and the chip will be compatible with other RISC V chips because it is an open and standardized instruction set. That’s the point. Qualcomm pays ARM to make their own chip designs that implement the ARM instruction set, they aren’t paying for off the shelf ARM designs like most ARM chip companies do.
Simping for Qualcomm is definitely not a take i expected
In the mobile Linux scene, Qualcomm chips are some of the best supported ones. I don’t love everything Qualcomm does, but the Snapdragon 845 makes for a great Linux phone and has open source drivers for most of the stack (little thanks to Qualcomm themselves).
Don’t just give the extortionists more money
Or maybe they were just trying to pay a lot less money, and then they got caught at their little trick.
Do you know how much money you have to pay to make a RISC V chip? Even less than that, since it’s free
Development is never free, especially, if you have to build new knowhow and can not build upon the one they have built at development of ARM chips.
If it’s that’s easy / cheap then why have they not?
This is a big ol’ game of bluff from both sides. So, according to you, Qualcomm should call their bluff?
They would need a new core design
Wonder how long that’d take, hmm?
Folks, grab your popcorn.
First the .io death now this, I can’t wait to see the ramifications.
What’s the .io death? Looking this up is particularly frustrating.
They better stay away from .mom domains
This will get RISC-V probably a big boost. Maybe this was not the smartest move for ARMs long term future. But slapping Qualcomm is always a good idea, its just such a shitty company.
True, I just wished RISCV laptops were slightly more developed and available. As of now, the specs aren’t there yet in those devices that are available. (8core@2Ghz, but only 16GB Ram, too little for me)
Kind of a bummer, was coming up to a work laptop upgrade soon and was carefully watching the Linux support for Snapdragon X because I can’t bring myself to deal with Apple shenanigans, but like the idea of performance and efficiency. The caution with which I approached it stems from my “I don’t really believe a fucking thing Qualcomm Marketing says” mentality, and it seems holding off and watching was the right call. Oh well, x86 for another cycle, I guess.
I think, I would go for a ARM Tuxedo PC in your position.
Oh, still some time needed for that as well, but you can see the progress (a lot is working now at kernel 6.11)
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Where-are-we-with-our-TUXEDO-ARM-Notebook.tuxedo
You are overestimating RISC-V. It cannot save the planet alone.
ARM provides complete chip designs.
RISC-V is more like an API, and then you still need to design your chips behind it.
I could be wrong, but I think Qualcomm designs its own chips and only licenses the “API”, so it would be no difference for them.
If they use Cortex cores, they are ARM designs. Oryon cores are in house based on Nuvia designs, and I assume it would still require a complete chip redesign if they decide to switch to RISC-V.
From my understanding, most companies take the reference design from Arm and then alter it to fit their needs.
Of course i will still take RISC-V a long time to be even relevant. But in the future there could be multiple Companies that offer finished chip designs to use. As you said not every company wants and can create a design themself.
I’ll wait and see. RISC-V is a nice idea, but there are way too many different “standards” to make it a viable ecosystem.
What do you mean by standards?
With the understanding that both of these are publicly traded multi-billion-dollar corporations and therefore neither should be trusted (albeit Arm Holdings has about 1/10 of the net assets), I feel like I distrust Arm less on this one than whatever Qualcomm is doing on their coke-fueled race to capitalize on the AI bubble.
What does trust have to do with anything? I mean, they seem to be arguing because Qualcomm bought a separate licensor and ARM argues that requires a contract renegotiation. This is the least take sides-y legal dispute in the history of legal disputes.
What does trust have to do with anything?
The fact that I’m not a legal expert who’s read the relevant portion of the existing contract? Like what Arm says seems reasonable, but at the end of the day, I have nothing definitive to go on.
Oh, no, I agree, what I’m saying is you don’t need to trust anybody here. Not everything is a sport, you can see this happen and not root for anybody. It’s a complex legal problem that likely flies over everybody’s heads without reading all the relevant communications. It’s not a take sides, trust-based thing.
Is this somewhat related why qualcomm suddenly decided to bring oryon to smartphones?
Part of the reason why when people were saying they wanted competition to unseat x86, I didn’t want it to be ARM based, because I knew 100% that ARM would jump in and do some shit to rake in more profit and negate all the potential cost savings to the consumer. As long as theres a single(or in the case of x86, essentially (but technically not) duopoly) that controls all the options for one of the options, then it’s not a good form of competition.
ARM wants a sweeter deal.
Nailed it. They know they have a leading chip in these designs now, the market is expanding, and whatever licensing fee was negotiated in the past needs to be revisited.
“Economies of scale” 🤡
I liked the puntastic writing. Qualcomm smh