It is interesting the world ( or may be RISC-V world ) seems to think any company can simply break the contract and agreement others signed, while pretending they are still righteous. At the same time thinking this wont happen to their IP.
Well I think we will all know soon.
And the treatment of the 'partner' upon whose IP the deal depends:
> Neither Qualcomm nor Nuvia provided prior notice of this transaction to Arm [2]
[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2021/01/qualcomm-acqu...
[2] From Arm's initial court submission.
Even granting that ARM is completely within their right, this is a pretty bug reminder of the dangers of building on sole-source licensed IP when there’s an open alternative. I have little doubt that ARM drove some number of startups into choosing RISC-V.
Which may or may not matter in the long run. But it is rolling the dice and by definition a short term maximization strategy.
However, the ‘dangers of building on sole-source’ licensed IP is true in general but a bit overdone in this case. Qualcomm had a large number of options using Arm IP including developing their own cores in house. However they chose to do something that was - on the face of it - in breach of license agreements that Nuvia had signed.
I believe ARM just revoked Qualcomm’s architecture license, so they no longer have that option if they want to run aarch64.
The architecture license predated the Nuvia acquisition, and was the license under which Qualcomm developed their most recent laptop core.
It is hard to believe that anyone would accept to sign an ALA that can easily be revoked, because whoever signs an ALA intends to invest a lot of money developing products based on it and there is no doubt that all the invested money can be lost if the ALA is revoked unilaterally.
It remains to be seen what will happen at the trial.
Both Qualcomm and Arm claim that they follow the requirements of the existing ALAs, while the other party has breached them.
Without access to the original texts, we cannot verify who tells the truth.
Even when a judge will give a decision for this conflict we will not be able to know who is right if the ALAs remain secret, because in recent years there have been plenty of absurd judicial decisions, where judges have been obviously wrong.
According to Qualcomm, they had no obligation to notify Arm about their business intentions. While I do not like Qualcomm for many reasons, for now there is no ground to believe more the claims of Arm than the claims of Qualcomm, so any of the two could be right about this.
Perhaps Arm is right and Qualcomm must pay the royalties specified in the Nuvia ALA instead of the royalties specified in the Qualcomm ALA, which is the main subject of this conflict, but if this is true then Nuvia has been conned by Arm into signing a really disadvantageous ALA, which is somewhat surprising, because among their business plan variants must have been one of being bought by some big company, in which case their target should have been to retain ownership of the IP developed by themselves.
There is no doubt that even if Qualcomm pays only the low royalties specified in the Qualcomm ALA, Arm will obtain a revenue orders of magnitude greater than any revenue that could have been obtained from Nuvia, had it not been bought by Qualcomm.
The reason why Arm does not like this increased revenue from the Nuvia work is that Qualcomm has decided to replace all the cores licensed from Arm in all of their products with cores developed by the Nuvia team.
Thus the loss of the royalties for the Arm-designed cores will be even greater than the increased revenue from the ALA royalties.
So Arm attempts to use or abuse whatever was written in their ALAs in order to prevent competition in the cores implementing the Arm architecture.
Even if Arm had been cunning enough to have included paragraphs in their ALAs that justify their current requests, there is no doubt that the real villain in this conflict is Arm, who fights for forcing the use of CPU cores that are weaker and more expensive than what is possible.
> So Arm attempts to use or abuse whatever was written in their ALAs
> Even if Arm had been cunning enough to have included paragraphs in their ALAs
Clauses requiring consent for transfer of IP rights (or on change of control) are standard everywhere and Nuvia would have been fully aware of this at the time of signing the ALA.
True. But if Qualcomm think they are not playing any tricks, playing by the rules clearly stated in the contract. You can bet they will appeal and fight on even if they lose.
A lot of juicy details will come out during the trial. Just like the Apple vs Qualcomm case ( Where Apple was clearly in the wrong ). We will all know soon and make up our own judgement.
I love this comment because it could apply to both sides of the case. However the dispute is a little more complex than most commentary implies.
The right question is how have things have moved on, then you can reevaluate the technical choices and understand why they are inappropriate.
The RISC-V community is dominated by a culture that is fighting the semiconductor war of 20 years ago. Consequently their core ideas are those that were in play then, and they remain steadfastly attached to them. In this case the sea of baby cores is actually an ideal application of RISC-V.
You cannot point out the core problem for a multitude of reasons, one of which is that if you did it would just turn to "prove it", and honestly another is that even though many of us would like an alternative ISA to succeed we do kind of enjoy watching people like SiFive spin round in circles. A strongly related problem is the likes of SiFive are promoting premature ossification before the thing has evolved to practical utility.
So please, actually say what you mean and explain what mistakes were made, how things would be different if not for those mistakes.
> SiFive
Semiconductor is an old industry and getting started in it was always hard. That not ever company that does something with RISC-V is 100% successful all the time isn't really surprising or relevant. And SiFive by itself also doesn't have the power to push things threw.
This is part of why RISC-V has a problem: your question, as with the others, is wrong.
Why do we assume the whole core philosophy is actually correct? Why do we think that we can solve mistakes or omissions with extensions?
The underlying reality is you can’t. As the debates over some extensions are showing not all ISAs are equal (a myth promoted by Intel at length) and once you accept that a lot of the rest falls apart.
This is especially true if there is a core insight which your main competition are not telling you regarding the rest.
SiFive does not need to push things through, they damage things by promoting inertia. They are so effective at it it would be tempting to say it is a conspiracy.
> The underlying reality is you can’t.
But the actual real reality is you can ... because it was done and it is working pretty well.
> As the debates over some extensions are showing not all ISAs are equal
I don't know what that means. And even if I knew, 'equal' is irrelevant. The B extension and the V extension don't have to be 'equal' in any sense of the word I can think of.
> This is especially true if there is a core insight which your main competition are not telling you regarding the rest.
Again, what are you even talking about. You are never actual concrete. Do you believe there is a magical 'core' insight that ARM and Intel have? And if so why do you think non of the countless people involved in RISC-V that have worked all all these companies for the last 30 years don't know about it?
> SiFive does not need to push things through, they damage things by promoting inertia. They are so effective at it it would be tempting to say it is a conspiracy.
SiFive isn't in control. RISC-V International is gigantic with lots of members that have input. What you call 'inertia' I would call 'lots of hard work by lots of people to get the best outcome' and most people are pretty happy with the results and the progress.
The only possible thing I can think of that you might reference is Qualcomm attempted to take over, something that was not opposed by SiFive, but by literally everybody else. If you think they were right you can just say so.
And if it turns out Qualcomm is so uniquely brilliant and insightful they can publish their own extensions and because its so superior, people will adopt it. The same goes for anybody else.
I see that. Sorry for wasting bandwidth hoping otherwise.
Seriously dude, is it so difficult to explain what you actually mean instead of talking around in circles?
> generals refighting their previous war
Here I think you are talking about the risc vs cisc debate. It is true that in modern OOO cores this is basically meaningless. I think the only truly relevant piece is fixed encoding widths, which make wider decoders feasible on a lower power budget.
On the other hand I think risc-v owes a lot of its popularity to how easy it is to understand and implement a bare bones core. Marketing will be a huge challenge for any newcomer, but risc-v is doing very well on that score.
The place I think risc-v has made really good innovations in ISA design is in the vector extension. It seems to me that it allows for code to be written for larger vectors and the machine can apply whatever vector width it has available. I believe this should allow new cores to improve the performance of old code in a way that more explicit designs like AVX have struggled with.
RISK-V C instructions are on the other hand are trivial. All compressed instructions are 1-1 translatable to uncompressed instructions. People have measured the cost of adding C extension decoding as being a few hundred GATES.
My understanding is that on x86 the complexity increases super linearly with decode width because of variable length instructions, while on fixed width architectures (or even a couple of sizes like arm thumb or risc-v compressed) it’s basically linear complexity.
This chips and cheese article seems to back this up. https://open.substack.com/pub/chipsandcheese/p/zen-5s-2-ahea...