Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by coder543 on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @11:52PM (#41921638)

Without any ARM specific optimizations, most apps wouldn’t even have to recompile and resubmit. Android apps are uploaded as bytecode, which is then AOT compiled by Google’s cloud service for the different architectures, from what I understand. Google would just have to decide to support another target, and Google has already signaled their intent to support RISC-V with Android.

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023/10/android-and-risc-v...

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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by vel0city on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @09:09AM (#41924702)

I remember when Intel was shipping x86 mobile CPUs for Android phones. I had one pretty soon after their release. The vast majority of Android apps I used at the time just worked without any issues. There were some apps that wouldn't appear in the store but the vast majority worked pretty much day one when those phones came out.

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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by iggldiggl on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @11:28AM (#41926037)

I'm not sure how well it fits the timeline (i.e. x86 images for the Android emulator becoming popular due to better performance than the ARM images vs. actual x86 devices being available), but at least these days a lot of apps shipping native code probably maintain an x86/x64 version purely for the emulator.

Maybe that was the case back then, too, and helped with software availability?

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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by coder543 on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @09:34AM (#41924927)

Yep! I had the Zenfone with an Intel processor in it, and it worked well!

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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by iggldiggl on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @11:39AM (#41926151)

> Android apps are uploaded as bytecode, which is then AOT compiled by Google’s cloud service for the different architectures, from what I understand.

No, Android apps ship the original bytecode which then gets compiled (if at all) on the local device. Though that doesn't change the result re compatibility.

However – a surprising number of apps do ship native code, too. Of course especially games, but also any other media-related app (video players, music players, photo editors, even my e-book reading app) and miscellaneous other apps, too. There, only the original app developer can recompile the native code to a new CPU architecture.

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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by coder543 on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @11:43AM (#41926214)

> No, Android apps ship the original bytecode which then gets compiled (if at all) on the local device.

Google Play Cloud Profiles is what I was thinking of, but I see it only starts “working” a few days after the app starts being distributed. And maybe this is merely a default PGO profile, and not a form of AOT in the cloud. The document isn’t clear to me.

https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/baselineprof...

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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by iggldiggl on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @12:14PM (#41926490)

Yup, it's just a PGO profile (alternatively, developers can also create their own profile and ship that for their app).

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