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Comment by stevefan1999 | Hacker News Reader

stevefan1999

tl;dr summary:

1. Arm will stop licensing its processor architecture to semiconductor component manufacturers by charging payments to end-device manufacturers.

2. Only way for OEMs to get Arm-based chips will be through direct license fees

3. Third-party components such are custom GPUs and NPUs are no longer directly incorporable with Arm processors. This would probably mean they need to operate as a coprocessor of some kind that would not be tightly integrated.

3.1 This means Samsung's Exynos, AMD's PSP and Imagination's PowerVR are probably *fucked*

Conclusion: ARM is really fed up with Qualcomm and is wishing to step up the game by hurting itself. But that said, it's more like "Friendship ended with Qualcomm, Samsung and AMD (but it's more like a frenemy), now Apple and NVIDIA are my homies"

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Your post is missing a big "according to Qualcomm, a company known for stretching the rules and truth to favour itself and currently being sued for its misuse of ARM intellectual property following the Nuvia acquisition" disclaimer at the beginning.

I would need at least some OEMs confirmation and a statement for Samsung before I believe it.

I'd normally agree with you, but there's some other data that ARM has been cracking down on third party IP vendors for years.

Imagination is almost dead not just because of Apple opening a chip dev branch basically across the street and offering Apple salaries to nearly anyone who wanted to jump ship, but also because of ARM licensing Mali + ARM CPUs for cheaper than ARM CPUs by themselves. It's why you see Mali in just about every Mediatek and Allwinner design. Even a free IMG GPU would be more expensive. It's why IMG went through that boondoggle buying MIPS in the first place.

So Qualcomm's complaint matches the current trajectory of ARM's corporate strategy.

It's possible that Samsung got a briefing on what's happening with ARM and Qualcomm and negotiated an extended reprieve from the new licensing scheme about a month ago when Masayoshi Son had a high profile meeting with the head of Samsung to discuss "a strategic alliance between Samsung and Arm."

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/SoftBank2/SoftBank-to-discu...

> Imagination's PowerVR are probably fucked

I would have no issue paying for a RISC-V + licensed PowerVR core that's well supported in Wayland and Mesa.

Good news, the StarFive JH7110 in the upcoming VisionFive 2 and Pine64's Star64 should fit that bill.

> ARM is really fed up with Qualcomm

Everyone is fed up with Qualcomm at that point.

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