Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

> Why if Arm is correct does that add a risk that it's the bad actor?

Because nobody wants to fight over the licensing of a product they're shackled to. If you could buy a RISC-V board with software support similar to a Raspberry Pi, ARM's goose would be cooked. Every enthusiast would ditch ARM in a heartbeat for a more open ISA, and ARM licensees would see it as an opportunity to finally wiggle free of ARM's insane license restrictions. All we need is the software support, which should be pretty forthcoming since most projects have already been optimized for RISC.

ARM could unseat x86 because both ISAs were encumbered with licenses at the time. Now, ARM is competing with much less restrictive architectures, and all it would take is a FOSS RISC instruction set to ruin their value prop.

View on HN

> of ARM's insane license restrictions

You're assuming high end RISC cores will be available for free and or under much more favorable licensing than ARM cores. Which seems unlikely, why would someone sell their cores to a competitor for less than a company whose only business is designing them?

Same reason why people would contribute to an open source compiler and toolchain and distribute for less than the cost of the old school paid compiler vendors like Borland. These contributors aren't really in the business of selling compilers and simply have strategic reasons to drop the floor of that market as much as possible. The same applies to RISC-V cores, with probably the most prominent example being Alibaba/T-Head and their open source cores.

Sound more like another "this is the year of Linux"..

Also hardware is pretty different than software. Hardware design (and obviously manufacturing) requires much more significant investment.

> These contributors aren't really in the business of selling compilers and simply

That's the thing. Apple was/is not in the business of selling compilers, nor are the people/companies who contributed to gcc and most other open-source projects. They have basically nothing to lose and a lot to gain from contributing to open-source software.

It's not obvious to me CPU design could work that way. For starters everyone who could develop advanced RISC-V cores is unlikely to give them anyway to their competitors since they would be in the business of selling CPUs. i.e. do you really think Qualcomm, Apple etc. would make their designs free? Why?

> Alibaba/T-Head and their open source cores

Because at this point they have more to gain than by keeping them proprietary. RISC-V is not yet overall competitive with ARM. So it's not like these RISC-V cores could be commercialized that successfully. Keeping them open probably makes further development faster.

> Because at this point they have more to gain than by keeping them proprietary. RISC-V is not yet overall competitive with ARM. So it's not like these RISC-V cores could be commercialized that successfully. Keeping them open probably makes further development faster.

This open source core is about equivalent to a Cortex-X1. https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan A collab between Alibaba, Tencent, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

And the kicker: It is open source.

> Because nobody wants to fight over the licensing of a product they're shackled to.

So when a firm licenses a RISC-V core from SiFive they should be free do whatever they want with that core irrespective of the license terms?

No, but they have the freedom to design their own core if SiFive threatens them in the way ARM does.

So you believe that firms should abide by contracts but that firms shouldn’t try to enforce the terms of those contracts.

I find it odd how Qualcomm is portrayed as though they were innocently minding their own business when they suddenly got sued. They bought Nuvia knowing what was in the two sets of contracts.

Also Qualcomm had and still has the ability to design their own Arm cores.

I'm not talking about Qualcomm, really. I'm talking about companies like Apple, who really only have a cursory attachment to ARM as an ISA. Then there's the hundreds of smaller manufacturers who have zero attachment to ARM and would much rather build hardware on their own terms. Those are ARM's moneymakers, and those are the companies that frankly have the most to gain from using RISC-V.

If Qualcomm is a relevant topic regarding ARM's success, then they've arguably already failed.

> would much rather build hardware on their own terms

Most of these firms are licensing a core from a third party. There is no such thing as ‘on their own terms’.

Not Apple or many of the smaller manufacturers. Even still, the ones who do want to license core designs still have the option to do so with RISC-V.

Does Apple pay anything meaningful to ARM? They're a founding member with (I believe still) a significant stake. I find it doubtful they didn't secure themselves a perpetual license when they founded the company, and that seems to be what the Internet believes to be true.

I'm not so sure it's the expensive large chips, made in relatively small quantities, that make ARM the most money, do you have a source? I'd have guessed they actually make more on the billions of small ARM cores that ship every year that end up by multiples in pretty much every device with a battery or power cord. And these, I think, are at the biggest risk of leaving ARM. RISC-V development is mature enough at this end of the market that it's relatively easy for users to transition, there are multiple competitive cores on the market, and there's no concern here about backwards compatibility because these are embedded systems where there's usually not an expectation of having to run user code at all. It will be much harder for the likes of Qualcomm where there's a huge ecosystem built around their ARM processors - but as a share of cost-per-processor, they probably stand to gain the most. Qualcomm is a founding member of the RISC-V foundation after all.

> They're a founding member with (I believe still) a significant stake

No, ARM is 100% owned by SoftBank. Apple sold their shares a while ago.

Overall ARM doesen't really make that much money, especially compared to some of their clients. It's not even obvious to me if would make sense financially even for Qualcomm to design their own RISC-V cores compared to licensing from ARM.

I mean they could and did design their own cores but they are still using ARM designed ones for their top-end chips.

> smaller manufacturers who have zero attachment to ARM and would much rather build hardware on their own terms

Or they believe that designing their own cores would be cost prohibitive and prefer licensing them from ARM.

It's also not obvious to me than licensing conditions for RISC-V could be more favorable than what ARM is offering. Why would you anyone even license competitive cores their competitors if they can make more money selling them themselves?

Completely agree with this and with your other comments in this thread.

There simply isn't that much money in designing cores. The money is in selling SoCs or devices. Arm at least has made increasingly high quality cores available at reasonable prices to all comers. A future where Arm's business is made unviable is not necessarily better for consumers.

You can license RISC-V cores from Si-Five today but they if reports are correct they were in discussions to sell to Intel. If that were to happen who knows what would happen to their offering. There will be others of course but as you say it's not obvious that what they offer will be any better that what Arm offers today.

And for the foreseeable future Arm is immune to takeover by any of its deep-pocketed customers.

I'm very happy that RISC-V exists from a number of perspectives but there needs to be a realistic assessment of its potential impact.

The Intel sale didn’t go through

You’re right but the point is that Intel was very interested. If you’re relying on cores from firms that are attractive to SoC / device makers then there is no guarantee those cores will continue to be available post acquisition.

> So you believe that firms should abide by contracts but that firms shouldn’t try to enforce the terms of those contracts.

No one is saying that they should or shouldn't (or at least I haven't seen anyone saying this).

But, when you exercise a right, there are social consequences. Freedom of speech is a right (in the US at least), but picketing funerals will still get you dis-invited from a lot of parties. Suing big customers (unless you're obviously in the right when viewed from the outside) will make at least some people more nervous to do business with you.

The truth is, it doesn't matter on HN.

Facebook, Oracle, and Qualcomm are all with Original Sin. You will hardly find any support regardless of its situation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com