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Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

161 points by necubi 2 hours ago | 92 comments

mushufasa 1 hour ago

Qualcomm is known for having a particularly aggressive & hardball-style legal department to enforce its patents on core telecom IP. I believe the most likely outcome is they just settle the dispute here. Arm fighting hardball with hardball.

Which would not really affect the ecosystem of phones using Qualcomm arm chips, it would just change the margins / market cap of Qualcomm.

Yes, longterm Q might invest in their own RISC implementations, but I don't see a viable business case for Qualcomm to just stop ARM development for the foreseeable future.

hajile 1 hour ago

Qualcomm doesn't have nearly as much to lose as ARM does and they know it.

Qualcomm is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer. If ARM loses, Qualcomm doesn't have to pay out. If ARM wins, Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM loses even harder in the long-term.

The most likely outcome is that Qualcomm agrees to pay a slight bit more than they are currently paying, but nowhere near what ARM is demanding and in the meantime, Qualcomm continues having a team work on a RISC-V frontend for Oryon.

starspangled 5 minutes ago

Just the impact of making this move will have a chilling effect, regardless of the long term outome.

ARM Ltd wants to position itself as the ISA. It is highly proprietary of course, but the impression they want to give is that it is "open" and freely available, no lock-in, etc.

This really brings the reality back into focus that ARM controls it with an iron fist, and they're not above playing political games and siding against you if you annoy their favored customers. Really horrible optics for them.

nemothekid 55 minutes ago

>Qualcomm moves to RISC-V and ARM loses even harder in the long-term.

I think long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. How long until:

1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM

2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V

Unless you are Apple I see such a transition taking a decade easily.

phkahler 5 minutes ago

>> 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM

Done. Qualcomm is currently gunning for Intel.

2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V

Android phones use a virtual machine which is largely ported already. Linux software is largely already ported.

fhdsgbbcaA 2 minutes ago

I think windows-on-arm is fairly instructive as to how likely RISC-V would go.

coder543 38 minutes ago

> 1. Qualcomm develops a chip that competitive in performance to ARM

Virtually all high performance processors these days operate on their own internal “instructions”. The instruction decoder at the very front of the pipeline that actually sees ARM or RISC-V or whatever is a relatively small piece of logic.

If Qualcomm were motivated, I believe they could swap ISAs relatively easily on their flagship processors, and the rest of the core would be the same level of performance that everyone is used to from Qualcomm.

This isn’t the old days when the processor core was deeply tied to the ISA. Certainly, there are things you can optimize for the ISA to eke out a little better performance, but I don’t think this is some major obstacle like you indicate it is.

> 2. The entire software world is ready to recompile everything for RISC-V

#2 is the only sticking point. That is ARM’s only moat as far as Qualcomm is concerned.

Many Android apps don’t depend directly on “native” code, and those could potentially work on day 1. With an ARM emulation layer, those with a native dependency could likely start working too, although a native RISC-V port would improve performance.

If Qualcomm stopped making ARM processors, what alternatives are you proposing? Everyone is switching to Samsung or MediaTek processors?

If Qualcomm were switching to RISC-V, that would be a sea change that would actually move the needle. Samsung and MediaTek would probably be eager to sign on! I doubt they love paying ARM licensing fees either.

But, all of this is a very big “if”. I think ARM is bluffing here. They need Qualcomm.

hajile 34 minutes ago

ARM already did the hard work. Once you've ported your app to ARM, you've no doubt made sure all the ISA-specific bits are isolated while the rest is generic and portable. This means you already know where to go and what to change and hopefully already have testing in place to make sure your changes work correctly.

Aside from the philosophy, lots of practical work has been done and is ongoing. On the systems level, there has already been massive ongoing work. Alibaba for example ported the entirety of Android to RISC-V then handed it off to Google. Lots of other big companies have tons of coders working on porting all kinds of libraries to RISC-V and progress has been quite rapid.

And of course, it is worth pointing out that an overwhelming majority of day-to-day software is written in managed languages on runtimes that have already been ported to RISC-V.

NavinF 25 minutes ago

Interesting, does anyone know what percentage of top Android apps run on RISC-V? I'd expect a lot of apps like games to only have binaries for ARM

Pet_Ant 20 minutes ago

Aren’t Android binaries in Dalvik so you only need to port that to get it to run on RISC-V?

svnt 59 minutes ago

You’re suggesting that Snapdragon processors would switch to RISC-V and that would be no big deal? Presumably Qualcomm is committed to numerous multi-year supplier agreements for the arm chipsets.

hajile 57 minutes ago

Qualcomm pitched Znew quite a while ago. It mostly ditched 16-bit instructions and added a bunch of instructions that were basically ripped straight from ARM64.

The idea was obviously an attempt at making it as easy as possible to replace ARM with RISC-V without having to rework much of the core.

https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-profiles/attachment/332/0/cod...

monocasa 57 minutes ago

This affects their custom Nuvia derived cores. I'm sure Qualcomm will be able to keep using ARM designed cores to cover themselves while they ween off ARM in favor of RISC-V if they need to.

a-dub 23 minutes ago

is risc-v anywhere near the same efficiency ballpark?

chasil 1 hour ago

The phones haven't been custom ARM chips since 32-bit Krait, IIRC.

This is about Nuvia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krait_(processor)

lizknope 45 minutes ago

Snapdragon 805 had a 32-bit Krait designed by Qualcomm

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartpho...

810 had a 64-bit core designed by ARM

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartpho...

820/821 had a 64-bit Kryo custom core designed by Qualcomm

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartpho...

After that it was all cores from ARM. The custom CPU team worked on their server chip before getting cancelled and most of the team went to Microsoft

chris_wot 4 minutes ago

When do Qualcomm's patents run out?

shmerl 54 minutes ago

Not just telecom, they are just super aggressive in general as a bully with weapons pile. I remember they tried to threaten Opus codec with patents just becasue, when IETF proposed it for Internet standard. Luckily that failed, but it shows their nasty approach very clearly. So now they are getting the taste of their own medicine.

wmf 2 hours ago

This "cancellation" is likely to be paused until the lawsuit is resolved so it's hard to say what this means. Presumably this is a part of the negotiations going on behind the scenes.

wmf 2 hours ago

https://archive.ph/FcXRW

MBCook 2 hours ago

Let’s just assume this happens for a moment.

What do Android OEMs do? They can’t use Apple chips, or now Qualcomm chips. Switching to another architecture is a big deal.

Would this basically hand the Android market to Samsung and their Exynos chips? Or does another short term viable competitor exist?

jsheard 2 hours ago

This move doesn't stop Qualcomm from licensing ARMs reference cores, it only blocks them from designing their own in-house ARM cores like Apple does. The vast majority of Qualcomm chips currently on the market are built around reference cores, they only recently got back into the custom core game with their acquisition of Nuvia which also kicked off this dispute with ARM.

greesil 1 hour ago

Everyone's going to have to buy a Pixel phone, ahahahahaahahha.

gruez 1 hour ago

Samsung phones are presumably firm as well. They recently switched to snapdragon (qualcomm) chips but before they were using exynos (samsung) chips.

jsheard 59 minutes ago

Samsung phones use both, in a very literal sense. Their flagship devices usually have both Snapdragon and Exynos variants for different regions, and their lower end devices are mostly Exynos across the board.

The S23 line was an exception in using Snapdragon worldwide, but then the S24 line switched back to using Snapdragon in NA and Exynos everywhere else, except for the S24 Ultra which is still Snapdragon everywhere.

Yes it's a confusing mess, and it's arguably misleading when the predominantly NA-based tech reviewers and influencers get the usually superior QCOM variant, and promote it to a global audience who may get a completely different SOC when they buy the "same" device.

MBCook 10 minutes ago

Is the Qualcomm chip still considered significantly better than the Exynos? I remember that was the case a few years ago.

devsda 58 minutes ago

Samsung still uses qualcomm in US markets and exynos outside US even for their flagships.

dv_dt 1 hour ago

There are probably Risc-V companies eagerly anticipating an opportunity in that space, but I don't know if any are in the performance ballpark right now.

Narishma 1 hour ago

Qualcomm itself is one such company.

magnio 2 hours ago

MediaTek is still available.

plussed_reader 2 hours ago

I notice how 'viable' isn't an operative in your statement.

Iwan-Zotow 2 hours ago

Dimensity 9400 looks good

refulgentis 2 hours ago

They're pretty good. Just can't beat qualcomm / Apple flagship. So around Intel level ;)

mappu 1 hour ago

Without (complete) kernel sources, they're already e-waste.

NelsonMinar 1 hour ago

Don't know about cell phones but their Chromebooks are pretty good.