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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if they plan to build an ARM CPU or a RISC-V CPU.

https://riscv.org/membership/999/google/

No, they are working on their own SoC to launch it in the next Pixel phone or in the one after.

They want to become like Apple and control their entire ecosystem all the way from the hardware to the software in their premium phones. They are tired of the current mess with all smartphone makers polluting the market with Android phones that stop being supported after a couple of years. Their target to have a full premium Google phone is around 2019.

Source: wink wink

Seems a bit slow on the uptake. It was clear in 2013 from what Apple did with the 5S that in-house CPU was a big win.

Do they also plan to cater to the lower end.

The Apple A series processors are ARM based...

I think one of the confusing things is ARM holdings doesn't sell physical chips. They sell a spec (verlog code I believe) that can be turned into a chip. Add some usb, memory, video card, maybe wireless and you get a system on a chip.

In short - ARM licenses its architecture for which you pay a fee.

Except that it isn't short. ARM licenses their architecture which you can implement but that implementation also must pass a verification test and you can neither add anything nor leave anything out. ARM also licenses IP cores in its traditional fabless role.

There are about 15 architectural licensees. Apple and NVidia are architectural licensees.

https://semiaccurate.com/2013/08/07/a-long-look-at-how-arm-l...

Samsung, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments license cores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Licensees

ARM sells many things, that many different customers use.

One is a license run the ARM ISA, so you can design a chip from the ground up. Another is a license to produce a reference implementation of a single processor design. Others peripherals and options exist too.

So, in short, a microprocessor architect might be needed to build an ARM chip, depending on how one was going about it.

and to be clear, what Apple has is the ISA license. Apple's ARM CPUs are not just the reference design from ARM. I'm not enough of a hardware person to know if they are modifying the design or have implemented the ISA from scratch, but their chips seem to be significantly faster than anyone else's so they're clearly doing something smart :)

They've almost certainly designed their cores from scratch.

The funny thing is that when Acorn spun off ARM some 25 years ago, Apple owned a chunk of the new company, since they used ARM6 for the Newton. The new chip's MMU was actually designed by Bob Welland, one of the fathers of Newton OS, for which he concocted the whole protection domain feature.

It seem fairly unlikely that they'd try to come up with their own CPU architecture for this.

My Pixel XL is the first Android phone I could see lasting me long enough to get to 2019.

Same here with my pixel 2 XL .. I hope to keep it at least until 2020, maybe a bit more (with a battery replacement in the middle).

I would have said the same of my Nexus 6P .. but it has many hardware problems that manifest after a while. Fingers crossed to do not see the Pixel do the same.

Same with my Pixel 2 XL. So far the best smartphone I have owned. I now prefer Android over iOS and the Pixel 2 is as smooth as any Android phone I have ever used.

I hope you are right because I feel that the Android ecosystem is a quagmire.

Unlike my Google Moto G that was unsupported after 18 months?

The problem with the current phones is that they are dependent on the SoC's designer for update support. If Qualcomm decides to phase out support for one of their SoCs, there is nothing that Google can do about it.

This is the kind of situation that they are annoyed with.

I though this was no longer a problem with Project Treble?

Project Treble will improve the situation indeed but Google is still keen in having control of the ecosystem like Apple.

It gives the tool for new oreo phones to handle this correctly, but it is still up to the OEM to do it.

It’s not just the carriers and manufacturers, Google doesn’t even support their own phones beyond a few years (e.g. the Nexus 5).

3 years of OS and security updates is actually quite good for an Android phone relatively speaking. Qualcomm doesn't usually agree to support their SoC's for more than 2 years so getting an extra year out of Qualcomm must have been expensive. And therein lies the problem - Google has been beholden to Qualcomm to update their drivers for every major release of the OS. Perhaps this will change now that the Linux kernel has 6 years of LTS and Android 8 and onward now allow the OS to updated without modifying the kernel, but who knows.

One interesting note is the length of support Intel has provided to the Nexus Player. First released in 2014 on Android 5 it recently received Android 8 in 2017. It's too bad Intel is out of the mobile SoC market because their level of support has been unparalleled by any SoC manufacturer.

It has been a rumor for ages but so far we are still waiting for this SoC :/

I'd be worried about them doing to RISC-V what they did to Android: buy it, make it popular, add proprietary opcodes that substantially improve performance, get all major RISC-V chips in production using those opcodes, slowly change the spec and ecosystem over time to make the original open source project completely obsolete.

If you have a Pixel 2 XL, you can:

Download the source code for its Linux kernel: https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/msm.git/+/android-4....

Compile it:

  export ARCH=arm64
  export CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu-
  make wahoo_defconfig
  make -j$(nproc)

Build the userspace by looking up the correct source code : https://source.android.com/setup/build-numbers (e.g. branch android-8.1.0_r2):

  mkdir $AOSP_HOME
  cd $AOSP_HOME
  repo init -u https ://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest -b android-8.1.0_r2
  repo sync --jobs=$(nproc)
  source build/envsetup.sh
  lunch aosp_wahoo-userdebug
  make -j$(nproc)

And then flash your phone by doing fastboot -w flashall, you'll have root access and everything. (omitted downloading some kernel modules for the hardware)

This post is pure whitewash bullshit.

"omitted downloading some kernel modules for the hardware"

aka all the drivers, the actual things that make the hardware work, which are all closed source, and eventually will stop being updated (likely about 6 months from now) leaving you on a forever obsolete android release and kernel, full of exploitable holes.

Project Treble makes it so drivers do not get obsoleted

Not at all, Project Treble makes it so, assuming that OEMs upstream their drivers, but as usually happens in the whole fragmentation story Google is only advising OEMs to do it, not enforcing it.

People need to realize Project Treble will only improve Android, if Google has the guts to force OEMs to play ball, until then having a certified Treble device doesn't mean updates will be made available.

You can't say it won't happen until it actually doesn't happen.

And it appears to be happening: https://www.xda-developers.com/project-treble-aosp-android-o...

It only counts when random dude on the street is able to do it via then update OS menu option.

Being possible by people with technical skills to replace firmware doesn't count on my book.

I care about the regular dudes buying regular pre-pay phones that they can afford.

I was responding to the comment by tfha. The situation could be far worse.

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