- cross-posted to:
- linustechtips@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- linustechtips@lemmit.online
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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
Development is never free, especially, if you have to build new knowhow and can not build upon the one they have built at development of ARM chips.
If it’s that’s easy / cheap then why have they not?
This is a big ol’ game of bluff from both sides. So, according to you, Qualcomm should call their bluff?
They would need a new core design
Wonder how long that’d take, hmm?
By that logic every company would just run on linux. Free to use ≠ free to implement and support.
You have not read the article.
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.
Folks, grab your popcorn.
God, I know exactly the sketch
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.
True, I just wished RISCV laptops were slightly more developed and available. As of now, the specs aren’t there yet in those devices that are available. (8core@2Ghz, but only 16GB Ram, too little for me)
Kind of a bummer, was coming up to a work laptop upgrade soon and was carefully watching the Linux support for Snapdragon X because I can’t bring myself to deal with Apple shenanigans, but like the idea of performance and efficiency. The caution with which I approached it stems from my “I don’t really believe a fucking thing Qualcomm Marketing says” mentality, and it seems holding off and watching was the right call. Oh well, x86 for another cycle, I guess.
I think, I would go for a ARM Tuxedo PC in your position.
Oh, still some time needed for that as well, but you can see the progress (a lot is working now at kernel 6.11)
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Where-are-we-with-our-TUXEDO-ARM-Notebook.tuxedo
ARM CPU prob means that at some point you’ll get stuck with a kernel limit.
But did you imply you would buy (now) a RISC-V laptop if it had more RAM & cores?
You are overestimating RISC-V. It cannot save the planet alone.
ARM provides complete chip designs.
RISC-V is more like an API, and then you still need to design your chips behind it.
I could be wrong, but I think Qualcomm designs its own chips and only licenses the “API”, so it would be no difference for them.
If they use Cortex cores, they are ARM designs. Oryon cores are in house based on Nuvia designs, and I assume it would still require a complete chip redesign if they decide to switch to RISC-V.
From my understanding, most companies take the reference design from Arm and then alter it to fit their needs.
That’s a big part of what’s going on. ARM is trying to move into Qualcomm’s traditional business while Qualcomm is trying to move in ARM’s traditional business.
"Under Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas, Arm has shifted to offering more complete designs — ones that companies can take directly to contract manufacturers. Haas believes that his company, still majority owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., should be rewarded more for the engineering work it does. That shift encroaches on the business of Arm’s traditional customers, like Qualcomm, who use Arm’s technology in their own final chip designs.
Meanwhile, under CEO Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm is moving away from using Arm designs and is prioritizing its own work, something that potentially makes it a less lucrative customer for Arm. He’s also expanding into new areas, most notably computing, where Arm is making its own push. But the two companies’ technologies remain intertwined, and Qualcomm isn’t yet in a position to make a clean break from Arm."
Interesting. So essentially Arm is butthurt that Qualcomm doesn’t want to send them a shitload of money and instead tries to do their own thing, so Arm is trying to force them into buying their product regardless?
Of course i will still take RISC-V a long time to be even relevant. But in the future there could be multiple Companies that offer finished chip designs to use. As you said not every company wants and can create a design themself.
I’ll wait and see. RISC-V is a nice idea, but there are way too many different “standards” to make it a viable ecosystem.
What do you mean by standards?
Several differing extensions of the RISC-V core machine instructions, for example. A pain in the rear for any compiler builder.
That’s a good thing, meaning you can design RISC-V CPUs without functionality you don’t need (like microcontrollers that only need basic operations). However, for those who want a complete CPU, there are RVA profiles (latest being RVA23), which are a list of extensions required to be an application-ready CPU. So there’s really just 1 “standard” for general purpose computing, everything else is for specialized products.
And it does not concern you that this RVA profile is version 23? Which means there are a number of CPUs based on lower versions, too, as they don’t just update on a whim? And they are incompatible, with version 23 because they lack instructions?
So a compiler would have to support at least a certain number of those profiles (usually, parts in the embedded world are supported for 10+ years!), and be capable of supporting the one or other non-RVA extension, too, to satisfy customer needs.
That is exactly what I meant with “too many standards”.
And it does not concern you that this RVA profile is version 23
Not sure where you got that information. There are only 5 RISC-V profiles.
And they are incompatible, with version 23 because they lack instructions?
Like all the x86 CPUs from a few years ago that don’t have all the new extensions? Not supporting new extensions doesn’t mean the CPU is useless, only that it’s worse than new ones, as things should be when there’s progress. Or I guess you throw out your x86 CPU every time Intel/AMD create a new instruction?
So a compiler would have to support at least a certain number of those profiles
Do you think compilers only target one x86 version with one set of instructions? For example in x86, there’s SIMD versions SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, compilers support all of them, and that’s literally just for the SIMD instructions. What’s new?
Yes, there are differences in certain x86 command sets. But they actually have a market. RISC-V is just a niche, and splintering in a small niche is making the support situation worse.
Yeah, in the current macro environment Qualcomm isn’t that tied down & can afford some changes (basically with a few of their biggest partners that can keep their profits up even in a few transitioning years). Not sure what prompted ARM to force such a deal instead of getting like a good compromise.
But also fuck Qualcomm & their closed-softwareness.
Im still hoping I can buy a RISC-V laptop (from Framework?) in 2 or 3 years & just run Linux normally.
And if that can happen & RISC-V still doesn’t overall prosper it’s bcs of some shitty greedy deals between megacorps.
A risky move… Or should I say… A RISCV move…
“risc architecture is gonna change everything”
Year of the riscv desktop
year of the linux riscv desktop
It’s a quote from a film
It really did.
FYI, ARM stands for Advanced RISC Machines.
And before that “Acorn RISC Machines”.
We had Acorn Archimedes systems at school that ran RISC OS.
It actually did, but not in a way people expected at the time that movie was made. It changed a lot underneath the hood.
Hack the planet!
For a firm that already have their own core designs that simply use the ARM instruction set, it might be easier to adapt to RISC-V. For a firm that licenses ARM cores on the other hand…
You should say that, yes, very hopefully much so.
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?
RiscV! RiscV!
I’m hoping for a nice warm x86_64 phone.
IA64 phones would have been pretty hot too!
The free market is going very well here
This is 100% capitalism. It’s not free market to have a goverment-enforced monopoly.
This is textbook late stage free market ideals at work. This is how the free market always ends.
X -
The system is broken.✅ - The system is working exactly as intended and must be destroyed.
Yeah the system that actually exists, capitalism.
Light switch rave!
The Cheat is grounded!
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Problem is that most people who say that, have nothing to replace that works better.
Liquid democratic socialism
When did it start?
Sorry have you been around to observe a lot of free markets ending?
Gestures wildly at current state of things
Yes but the statement was “this is how free markets always end”. And I’m just wondering if the commenter has actually been around to see “free markets ending.”
I think they were less talking about them ending as much as them tending towards the monopoly state over time.
Got it. Saying “this is how free markets always end” if they meant “free markets tends to move towards monopolies” confused me.
That’s a fair comment I guess…but it’s the reality of the game. The US was a free market through it’s early history and today is the result of that.
It’s just how the free market ends, always. It starts with a few winners consolidating, abusing their monopoly and buying their government protections, and poof…welcome to late stage capitalism.
“Free Market” people always disregard human nature at it’s worst. There will always be people and orgs that game the system. You simply can’t prevent that. The US is absolutely an end game free market.
There are lots of different kinds of markets, like phone market, grocery market, goldsmith market, etc.
The governments have to interfere in many markets all the time, that there aren’t monopolies forming or Price-fixing agreement be done, which would lead to prices go ridiculously high, or last companies in markets fucking up taking tons of knowhow with them.
You are correct. There would be no copyrights or patents in a free market.
Yeah, the huge companies would dominate over small companies even more than they already do.
Copyrights and patents are literally government enforced monopolies for huge companies. Without them, there would be a lot more competition.
Really? Calling it a government enforced monopoly seems very disingenuous.
Good luck trying to make a movie without Disney stealing it or making an invention with really effective solar panels or something without the biggest companies stealing it and bankrupt the original creator.
Copyright and patents protect everyone involved in creation and while there are a LOT of problems with the systems. Removing it entirely seems like the biggest overcorrection possible.
Companies such as Disney have armies of lawyers to enforce their monopolies. Copyright and patent laws are designed exclusively for the rich.
Disney can very well “steal” other people’s work and get away with it under this system. Without such laws, everyone else would be able to “steal” from Disney as well, which would level the playing field.
The playing field won’t be level without patents or copyright. Why would I an average idiot make or invent something if the exact second I show the world my invention someone takes it and mass-produces it within a week? I have no chance to raise capital to make the invention myself if you can already buy it in every store. The Chinese manufacturing industry essentially does this already but to a lesser degree. Imagine if every company did that. No small companies or individuals would stand a chance against Goliath.
And again the word monopoly is very misleading in this discussion, especially when it comes to copyright. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from making superhero movies just because Marvel/Disney owns a lot of superhero rights. You are just not allowed to make an exact copy of their movie but you are allowed to make similar movies all day long.
Another example is a professional photographer. Do you really think that they should be awarded no rights whatsoever to the photograph they took?
The same obviously applies to huge companies as well. Why make a movie if it’s available for free download literally everywhere.
How do you propose that the makers of content, inventions and products get paid? Donations? Get real, that won’t happen.
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Trade secrets don’t need to be enforced much by law. You can create an ad hoc trade secret regime by simply keeping your secret between a few key employees. As it happens, there are some laws that go beyond that to help companies keep the secret, but that only extends something that could happen naturally.
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Being free to innovate and keep your own ideas to yourself sounds like it should be part of the free market though.
Forcing people to disclose their (mental) secrets seems bizarre.
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To be fair, we absolutely should outlaw at least 99% of all currently practiced forms of advertising and make it so that new forms of advertising have to be whitelisted by a panel of psychiatrists, sociologists, environmentalists and urban planners before they’re allowed.
Are you telling me that the axioms behind the simplistic model are wrong??
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Wrong as in not sound. An argument can be valid assuming its assumptions are true. The argument is the model, which really is a set of arguments. Its assumptions which are taken axiomatically are as you say impossible, therefore they are not true (which I called wrong). So the argument is not sound. I’m not saying anything different than what you said really, just used informal language. ☺️
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What’s government enforced about it? Is ARM the only allowed chip designer for cellphones?
license enforcement is a thing because if someone bypasses it you can sue them, which is a government interaction. Technically, claiming X means nothing if there’s no one that enforces your claim.
Yes but that rule protects you the same as it does them. They can be a monopoly if nobody else can get their chips sold but they cannot be a government enforced monopoly unless nobody else is allowed to sell chips.
That’s your interpretation and that’s fine but I understand that they have a monopolies because their patent is broad enough to be hard to create alternatives, and the patent is government enforced. That’s how I understood it at least.
In any case, I don’t really mind if you want to keep using your interpretation, I was just trying to rationalise what the other commenter said and explain what I though was their point of view to say what they said.
Have a great day.
That’s not just my opinion. That’s the definition going straight back to Adam Smith.
Copyrights and patents
That’s not a government enforced monopoly. A government enforced monopoly means nobody else is allowed in the market. Like utility companies.
Lots of Utilities are consumer cooperatives which is funnily enough Socialist, but the people working there wouldn’t like to hear that.
Nobody else is allowed to sell these phones without licenses
But they can sell phones.
That’s called “monopolistic competition”. They can’t sell the same phone they were already making.
Lol copyrights and patents are capitalism
I agree
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.
What does trust have to do with anything? I mean, they seem to be arguing because Qualcomm bought a separate licensor and ARM argues that requires a contract renegotiation. This is the least take sides-y legal dispute in the history of legal disputes.
What does trust have to do with anything?
The fact that I’m not a legal expert who’s read the relevant portion of the existing contract? Like what Arm says seems reasonable, but at the end of the day, I have nothing definitive to go on.
Oh, no, I agree, what I’m saying is you don’t need to trust anybody here. Not everything is a sport, you can see this happen and not root for anybody. It’s a complex legal problem that likely flies over everybody’s heads without reading all the relevant communications. It’s not a take sides, trust-based thing.
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.
Oh no, not copilot!
Anyway…
This seems like a tactic that might win a battle but lose the war. Reminds me of Unity.
What happened with Unity in the end? Did they back down?
the fact that you know they fucked up but don’t know how they fixed it says it all.
even if they did “fix” it, public opinion has been settled and nobody will trust them for awhile.
Good. Godot exists. Or even that weird engine from Amazon (?) they open sourced. You could make a Unity competitor out of that. Just create an asset store for it and sell stuff, give other creators a decent cut and they will come.
Yeah, iirc, at first they tried to downplay the change, then they paused it, then they walked it back entirely. I think that last step happened relatively recently, even.
But IMO the damage was done from just trying to alter the deal like that.
And, for me personally, I (naively) thought that ARM was an open standard. I opposed the Nvidia purchase because I thought they would do their corporate bullshit to kill off competition or for greed and thought that it getting blocked meant it would be free of corporate bullshit. This action makes it clear that it’s already got some of that going on and ARM has been mentally re-filed to a spot beside x86 and its derivatives.
Though now I’m wondering if that’s the whole point. Do some shitty corporate stuff so that the next time someone wants to buy them out, there isn’t as much opposition and the current owners and C-suite can cash out.
And so the corporate wars have begun
I saw this documentary where taco bell won them.
KFC / Pizza Hut / Taco Bell – the only restaurant you need!
Only in the US. In Europe, Pizza Hut won.
Syndicate was fun but I didn’t want to LIVE inside of it…
Not enough miniguns yet.
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.
Not necessarily “out of sand”. IP is basically putting a price tag on a person for them to say “Yes, I consent”. In other words, technofeudalism.
I may be off base but I think that might be referencing what the computer chips are made of…
Think you’re right lol
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.
And so is Arm, especially their Mali drivers.
While some go “um, ackchually, you don’t need a GPU driver for your hobby project of using a cheap SBC to run emulators”, it does affect usability a lot. Yeah, Arm also pointing at the licensors and so are licensors to Arm in this case, but it’s still not good that the only SBCs with relatively good GPU drivers for Linux are made by Raspberry Pi, and in all other case, you either need to pirate the drivers (!), use the tool that allows regular Linux to use Android GPU drivers, or just use the framebuffer-only driver with heavy limitations.
I agree.
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.
