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Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek all currently just use off the shelf A5x & A7x cores in their SoCs. Unless that part of the company is losing money I don't expect nVidia to cut that off. Especially since that's likely a key part of why nVidia acquired ARM in the first place - I can't imagine they care about the Mali team(s) or IP.

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What happens if/when Nvidia launches SoCs that compete with Qualcomm and MediaTek. Will it continue to offer the latest cores to competitors when it will make a lot more money on its own SoCs? This is the reason for the widepsread concern about Nvidia owning Arm.

I don't know if Nvidia is eager to re-enter the SoC market. It wouldn't be a clear path to more money, since they would need to then handle modem, wifi, ISP, display, etc... instead of just CPU & GPU. And they'd need to work with Android & its HALs. And all the dozens/hundreds of device OEMs.

They could, but that's more than just an easy money grab. Something Nvidia would already be familiar with from Tegra.

What seems more likely/risky would be nvidia starts charging a premium for a Mali replacement, or begins sandbagging Mali on the lower end of things. But Qualcomm already has Adreno to defend against that.

Looks like Nvidia never left the SoC market to begin with.

The latest Tegra SoC launched March of 2020.

They released a new SBC aimed at autonomous vehicles. They haven't had a mobile SoC since 2015's Tegra X1. Which only made it into the Pixel C tablet, Nintendo Shield, and Nvidia's Shield TV (including the 2019 refresh)

You're forgetting the TX2 as well as the Jetson Nano

Which ended up in what mobile products?

Mediatek are in the lower end market, something Nvidia's culture doesn't like competing in. Qualcomm holds the key to Modem. Which means Nvidia competing with Qualcomm wont work that well. Not to mention they have already tried that with Icera and generally speaking Mobile Phone SoC are low margin business. ( Comparatively Speaking )

Completely take your point on Qualcomm.

On mobile SoC margins I guess that margins are low because there is a lot of competition - start cutting off IP to the competition and margins will rise.

I suspect that their focus will be on the server / automotive to start off with but the very fact that they can to any of this is troubling for me.

Qualcomm used to design their own cores up until the last generation or two, but you're right they use the reference designs now.

EDIT: correction, make that the last generation or four (oops, time flies)

Qualcomm hasn't used an in-house core design since 2015 with the original Kryo. Everything Kryo 2xx and newer are based on Cortex.

That was a really sad time honestly. QCOMM went from leading the pack to basically using reference designs (which they still arrogantly brand as Kryo despite essentially being a tweak of a reference design.

It all happened because Apple came out with the first 64-bit design, and QCOMM wasn't ready. Rather than deliver 32-bit for 1 more year, they used an off the shelf ARM 64-bit design (A57) in their SoC called the Snapdragon 810, and boy was it terrible.

From what I gathered, they made at least _some_ risky architecture choices in their custom architecture that turned out not to be sustainable over the next generations. Also note that their Cortex core is indeed customized to a significant extent.

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