With the understanding that both of these are publicly traded multi-billion-dollar corporations and therefore neither should be trusted (albeit Arm Holdings has about 1/10 of the net assets), I feel like I distrust Arm less on this one than whatever Qualcomm is doing on their coke-fueled race to capitalize on the AI bubble.
RiscV! RiscV!
The free market is going very well here
This is 100% capitalism. It’s not free market to have a goverment-enforced monopoly.
Good. Qualcomm refuses to make it easy to run linux on their hardware. Instead they try to hide basic information about their processors and chips in the name of selling a license for every little thing.
Part of the reason why when people were saying they wanted competition to unseat x86, I didn’t want it to be ARM based, because I knew 100% that ARM would jump in and do some shit to rake in more profit and negate all the potential cost savings to the consumer. As long as theres a single(or in the case of x86, essentially (but technically not) duopoly) that controls all the options for one of the options, then it’s not a good form of competition.
The amount of IP money grubbing in the IT industry is able to literally make millions out of sand, this is just more of it.
Hopefully Qualcomm takes the hint and takes this opportunity to develop a high performance RISC V core. Don’t just give the extortionists more money, break free and use an open standard. Instruction sets shouldn’t even require licensing to begin with if APIs aren’t copyrightable. Why is it OK to make your own implentation of any software API (see Oracle vs. Google on the Java API, Wine implementing the Windows API, etc) but not OK to do the same thing with an instruction set (which is just a hardware API). Why is writing an ARM or x86 emulator fine but not making your own chip? Why are FPGA emulator systems legal if instruction sets are protected? It makes no sense.
The other acceptable outcome here is a Qualcomm vs. ARM lawsuit that sets a precedence that instruction sets are not protected. If they want to copyright their own cores and sell the core design fine, but Qualcomm is making their own in house designs here.
Saying an ISA is just a hardware API vastly oversimplifies what an architecture is. There is way more to it than just the instruction set, because you can’t have an instruction set without also defining the numbers and types of registers, the mapping of memory and how the CPU interacts with it, the input/output model for the system, and a bunch of other features like virtual memory, addressing modes etc. Just to give an idea, the ARM reference is 850 pages long.
APIs can be complex too. Look at how much stuff the Win32 API provides from all the kernel calls, defined data structures/types, libraries, etc. I would venture a guess that if you documented the Win32 API including all the needed system libraries to make something like Wine, it would also be 850 pages long. The fact remains that a documented prototype for a software implementation is free to reimplement but a documented prototype for a hardware implementation requires a license. This makes no sense from a fairness perspective. I’m fine with ARM not giving away their fully developed IP cores which are actual implementations of the ARM instruction set, but locking third parties from making their own compatible designs without a license is horribly anticompetitive. I wish standards organizations still had power. Letting corporations own de-facto “standards” is awful for everyone.
takes this opportunity to develop a high performance RISC V core
They might. This would never be open sourced though. Best case scenario is the boost they would provide to the ISA as a whole by having a company as big as Qualcomm backing it.
The RISCV instruction set IS open source. What they’d do to ratfuck it is lock the bootloader or something.
BUT Imagine if it was open sourced. God, Gods, by the nine, would be heaven.
If Qualcomm released a FOSS RISC-V IP core that would’ve required spending multiple millions on hardware engineer salaries (no chance in hell), I would:
- Spontaneously ejaculate
- Pull out my FPGA
RISC V is just an open standard set of instructions and their encodings. It is not expected nor required for implementations of RISC V to be open sourced, but if they do make a RISC V chip they don’t have to pay anyone to have that privilege and the chip will be compatible with other RISC V chips because it is an open and standardized instruction set. That’s the point. Qualcomm pays ARM to make their own chip designs that implement the ARM instruction set, they aren’t paying for off the shelf ARM designs like most ARM chip companies do.
Don’t just give the extortionists more money
Or maybe they were just trying to pay a lot less money, and then they got caught at their little trick.
Do you know how much money you have to pay to make a RISC V chip? Even less than that, since it’s free
By that logic every company would just run on linux. Free to use ≠ free to implement and support.
Simping for Qualcomm is definitely not a take i expected
In the mobile Linux scene, Qualcomm chips are some of the best supported ones. I don’t love everything Qualcomm does, but the Snapdragon 845 makes for a great Linux phone and has open source drivers for most of the stack (little thanks to Qualcomm themselves).
Qualcomm is one of the worst monopolists in any industry though. They are widely known to have a stranglehold on all mobile device development
Tech patents are ridiculous. Let’s end them or reduce them to 1-3 years with no renewal. Then all that’s left is the specific copyright to the technology, not lingering webs of patents that don’t make any sense anyway to anyone with detailed knowledge of the tech. All they’re good for is big companies using legal methods to stop innovation and competition. Tech moves too fast for long patents and is too complex for patent examiners or courts to understand what is really patentable. So it comes down to who has the most money for lawyers.
Seeing things like “slide to unlock”, “rounded corners”, and “scroll bouncing” are all patentable is ridiculous.
Yeah, but another big issue is that big companies can afford to bribe or buy out the patent holders in the first place. Ideally, the patent holders would benefit the most from everyone making their tech, but instead they benefit the most from one company being the exclusive manufacturer and highest bidder.
The act of an agreement asking a patent holder not to sell to other manufacturers in itself should be illegal.
Yeah, making patents nontransferable would solve that. Ultimately, getting rid of most would be good, but if we have to keep them, then they should be dissolved if a company fails or is bought out because obviously the patent itself wasn’t enough to make a product that was viable. So everyone should get the chance to use the patent. The whole purpose of a patent vs keeping tech proprietary until the product is released was to benefit society once the patent expires. Otherwise, it makes more sense for companies to keep inventions secret if they aren’t just stockpiling them like they do now.
A risky move… Or should I say… A RISCV move…
This will get RISC-V probably a big boost. Maybe this was not the smartest move for ARMs long term future. But slapping Qualcomm is always a good idea, its just such a shitty company.
Go RISC-V phones please!! Omg. I really hope RISC-V goes mainstream because of this.
We shall break into the desktop and laptop market! Let’s start by severing ties with one of the most successful companies to do that so far.
And so the corporate wars have begun
I hope this isn’t a cartoony scheme driven by Apple honeydicking Arm with the M-series processors to tank PC and Android.
thanks, proprietary licenses.
can we finally move to open standards now or will these fucks keep on losing money just to spite foss? are they that afraid we read some of their source code?
