Qualcomm – one of Arm’s biggest customers – starts a RISC-V joint venture

Re:Qualcomm – one of Arm’s biggest customers – starts a RISC... by gchadwick on Sunday August 06, 2023 @10:17AM (#37022206)

Would be great if they actually provided some details of what this joint venture actually aims to do. Is it developing CPUs and other IP? Will it produce actual chips? Perhaps it's just a way for the various companies to pool money and resources to develop RISC-V standards and ecosystem things (like conformance test suites) and maybe bits of IP?

The current info:

> aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally by enabling next-generation hardware development.

Doesn't tell you much!

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Re:Qualcomm – one of Arm’s biggest customers – starts a RISC... by photonbeam on Sunday August 06, 2023 @11:18AM (#37022886)

I read this as “If you’re reading this ARM, stop raising prices or we’ll replace you”

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Re:Qualcomm – one of Arm’s biggest customers – starts a RISC... by jkestner on Sunday August 06, 2023 @11:26AM (#37022961)

It’s too late. ARM has shown that it’s no longer a stable partner. Even if it walks the pricing proposal back, everyone knows it’s on the table the next time ARM changes ownership or has to give shareholders a growth story.

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Re:Qualcomm – one of Arm’s biggest customers – starts a RISC... by RetroTechie on Sunday August 06, 2023 @12:26PM (#37023621)

Or as "hey ARM, we'll replace you anyway, but if you sweeten the deal we won't hurry"

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Re:Qualcomm – one of Arm’s biggest customers – starts a RISC... by hashtag-til on Sunday August 06, 2023 @01:23PM (#37024373)

Until same folks are confronted with the costs to validate their own custom chips and realize this is where the real cost is. It’s not on creating an ISA, as there are already many that are free.

If you’re in this market long enough, you know that apart from the current hype, RISC-V is not special.

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Re:Qualcomm – one of Arm’s biggest customers – starts a RISC... by panick21_ on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @03:02AM (#37045483)

> Until same folks are confronted with the costs to validate their own custom chips

Except that there are many suppliers who have verified chips that they are happy to sell you. And for some categories of chips, even open ones that are verified.

> It’s not on creating an ISA, as there are already many that are free.

There are not actually many that are free. And non that a are free and practical with lots of suppliers.

> If you’re in this market long enough, you know that apart from the current hype, RISC-V is not special.

Ah that is why RISC-V has a insane growth rate and it getting increasing adoption in lots of different market. Maybe somebody should have told all those people that its not actually special.

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Re:Qualcomm – one of Arm’s biggest customers – starts a RISC... by constantcrying on Sunday August 06, 2023 @02:43PM (#37025200)

I think you can tell a lot from the companies themselves.

It seems extremely likely that the goal is to create a RISC-V ecosystem, which ranges from design, to chips, to endproducts in automotive.

To rival ARM you need an actual competitive industrial product.

- You need to define use-cases "what chips does a car need?", specific technical requirements "what communication, what instruction sets, what speed, etc.?"

- Figure out how produce chips at scale

- Create suitable development environments, libraries and integration into other buisiness tools

-Use that tooling to create an embedded product

ARM has all of that in their ecosystem, RISC-V does not. None of the companies listed can do all of that on their own. If they want to compete with ARM they need to compete with the entire ARM ecosystem and it seems that is their goal.

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