Qualcomm announces first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC | Hacker News Reader

Qualcomm announces first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC

arstechnica.com

48 pointsrntn12 comments

ARM's stock price seems to be surprisingly uneffected:

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/ARM:NASDAQ?sa=X&ved=2ah...

I don't find the surprising. Unseating ARM will take more than just having an available RISC-V chip. It's similar to announcing a Linux OS and expecting Microsoft stock to be affected.

It requires manufacturing and adoption in the minimum 100,000s and more likely millions before ARM will probably be affected.

Also, everyone one is focusing on how ARM will adapt/capture part of the AI market.

In short, it is only a matter of time.

Depends on much one will be waiting for the equivalent of Year of Desktop RISC-V.

I don't find that very relevant to the investor context, nor the competing with ARM context.

It is relevant for the comparison with GNU/Linux being a matter of time.

ARM could consider to put a team on designing RISC-V chips.

Remember, ARM earns money by licensing IP. RV is an open architecture, but a specific implementation or SoC based on it can be licensed IP just the same (probably is - gpu's etc). And several companies are doing just that.

ARM has great expertise in this area. No reason it couldn't be a similar big player in RISC-V world (or at least, hedge their bets).

In ARM's shoes, what would you prefer: RISC-V eating your market share, or RISC-V cores designed & licensed by ARM doing so?

Not all silicon vendors design their own cores just because they can...

This is sensible, as demonstrated by MIPS.

But ARM hasn't shown signs of intelligence in the executive, for a long time now.

Thus, I wouldn't count on it.

> It doesn't have a name yet [...] it's developing a [...] chip in collaboration with Google [...] plans to commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US

Count the hedges:

- "It doesn't have a name yet". read: "it maybe might possibly consider happening, perhaps"

- "it's developing". read: "nowhere near ready, might never be"

- "chip in collaboration with Google". read: "LOL. No!. Go ask rockchip how that went for them, twice..."

- "plans to". read: "no promises"

- "wearables". read: "might sell a few thousand of these"

Arm stock would be more affected by my blog than by this non-announcement. My guess is that this is qualcomm's attempt to negotiate with ARM.

I would argue investors that bought ARM and haven't already sold just aren't the brightest.

Yet the market is wild, so who knows. Maybe I'll be proven wrong in my decision (informed by RISC-V) to not touch ARM with a 10ft pole.

Will this lead to better prices for Android devices?

ARM royalties are on the order of pennies per chip, so no, I wouldnt expect this to affect end-user prices.

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