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Qualcomm—one of Arm’s biggest customers—starts a RISC-V joint venture (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

EEE or are my fears misplaced?

Qualcomm has single handedly held back mainstream ARM performance for a while now IMO, with pretty much all their chips being embarrassingly slow when compared to something like the M1... A bit like how Intel stagnated with core counts until Ryzen came along and broke open the floodgates

I'm concerned that by QC possibly adopting RISC, everyone else will be somewhat forced to adopt their flavor or whatever proprietary instruction set extensions they choose to implement as the potential market leader, and if they choose to patent those then we end up with another duopoly type situation

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Since Bosch is heavily involved, I am guessing many of these chips will be finding themselves into industrial robotics and automotive systems.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Arm is facing down its biggest competition ever, with the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture threatening to unseat it as the CPU at the center of almost every portable device.

Now, one of Arm's biggest customers is trying out RISC-V, as Qualcomm is getting involved in a joint venture dedicated to the architecture.

The joint venture doesn't have a name yet, but Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor, Bosch, and memory giant Infineon are all teaming up to form a new company that Qualcomm's press release says is "aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally by enabling next-generation hardware development."

At first, the group will be focused on automotive uses, with an "eventual expansion" to IoT and mobile, Qualcomm's biggest market.

The company says chips from Nuvia are expected to hit the market in 2024 for PCs, so Qualcomm will be sticking with Arm for a while longer.

Arm has now been telling customers to expect a "radical shake-up" of its business model, with the plan to charge "several times more" for chip licenses.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love the idea of taking on a monopoly, but I don’t like that, without regulation, it has a low chance of success, and the consumer gets to suffer as the monopoly fights back.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

What's your basis for presuming low odds? I'm miles away from IT, but my layman's understanding is that while Arm has terrific IP, Qualcomm isn't exactly pushing the envelope with their custom designs despite/because of a de facto monopoly on high-end Android chips. The consumer is suffering under the current regime, and if licensing is going to get far more expensive, phonemakers aren't going to just eat margin.

I'm not a fan of the corporate oligarchy we find ourselves in, but it's important to accept that sometimes big companies make decisions that are good for consumers — if only because it's also good for the bottom line. To my mind, this is one such example.