Why does Qualcomm need this? They don't need to license RISC-V.
Is all the IP they acquired with Nuvia[1] tainted? Or were they just using ARM-derived internals?
From my understanding, just slapping on a different instruction decoder isn't a big technical hurdle. Actually, I wonder if it would be possible to design a chip with both an ARM and a RISC-V decoder on the same die and just fuse-off the ARM die on select units to avoid any fees...
ARM cancelled their architecture license and sued them, Qualcomm won, but with a threat like that to your core business it's best to have an escape hatch.
They'll need to license future versions of the ARM ISA and now they know the licensor is hostile.
There are a lot of little cores in phones doing little core things. Having a first rate design team experienced in an ISA that is royalty free probably makes sense. They'll be able to expand the use of RISCV up the value chain ver time.
Buying a team that's already working on RISCV also reduces the chances of ARM lawyers getting involved.
It's probably just for IP and talent acquisition, if I had to guess. People who can design high performance server-class CPU microarchitectures are rare.
Frankly, Ventana seemed like an interesting entry in the space, but I have no idea who would have actually bought their servers at the end of the day. They taped out multiple designs, but none actually seem to exist outside their labs. I don't really see any path to meaningful RISC-V server adoption for at least several more years and by that time Qualcomm could design something on their own, assuming they are serious about re-entering the market. Grabbing the talent and any useful IP/core design components makes the most sense to me, anyway.
Because the ISA that a modern microprocessor is engineered to execute is different from the Micro-ops execution engine/Other(The Actual Hardware) that's a custom design that's the IP of the creator. And so Qualcomm wants that RISC-V running CPU core design IP that belongs to Ventana Micro Systems and the ISA on modern microprocessors is just a set of execution rules that the actual hardware(Micro-Ops execution engine and associated cache subsystems/other parts of the hardware and that IP that belongs to Ventana!) is engineered to execute.
Qualcomm also wants the RISC-V engineers and their Knowledge and the Software Ecosystem and SDKs/Tools that Ventana has developed over the years to create CPU cores that execute that RISC-V ISA. And that includes all the design Verification tools/EDA tools that Ventana developed for their specific CPU core designs and all that non hardware stuff that takes a larger investment in dollars than just the hardware's development alone costs!
So the RISC-V ISA is Royalty free but not anyone's actual RISV-V ISA executing CPU core designs that cost millions to create and are the proprietary part of the Acquisition that Qualcomm is after. I'd imagine that Qualcomm's Nuvia engineers could more rapidly swap out the ARM ISA Instruction Decoders on any Oyron cores with some RISC-V Decoders and use most of the same Oryon Micro-op engine design that's native to the current Oryan generation cores but maybe Ventana's micro-op execution engine has something that's valuable to Qualcomm as well.
And so ISAs on modern microprocessors are abstracted away at the actual hardware level by the Micro-ops execution engine desogns that are proprietary to the ones that created them. And the reason that many license from ARM holdings is not just the ISA but the software/OS/Drover ecosystem that's built up over the decades for the ARM ISA ecosystem and that costs many times more than the hardware's costs to develop and maintain over the years. And so the ARM OS/Software/API and driver ecosystem is decades more mature than the RISC-V OS/Software/API and driver ecosystem, and that took years and 100s of billions in investments to get ARM where it is today!
But since RISC-V is royalty free there are hundreds of companies using RISC-V, including Nvidia for it's FALCON(FAst Logic CONtrollers) that are used all over Nvidia's GPUs and other accelerators. And with RISC-V one is free to implement only a subset of the RISC-V ISA or create custom RISC-V ISA extensions unlike ARM holdings where licensees have to implement the entire ARM Licensed ISA regardless of if all the instructions are needed for the task and no ISA extensions allowed.
So maybe Qualcomm is interested in the micro-controller market that's lower margin and that makes RISC-V's Royally Free more attractive! Or Qualcomm, like Nvidia, wants to develop some RISC-V Micro-Controllers for it's own in-house needs and not have to pay for ARM Holdings ISA based Micro-Controller designs. Look at Nvidia's dozens of on GPU die Controllers(Encoder/Decoder Logic,Etc) and because that's Nvidia FALCON RISC-V based that's quite a bit of savings in Royalty Payments and CPU core design payments to ARM Holdings or anyone else because FALCON is Nvidia's In-House IP and that RISC-V ISA is free to use for Nvidia or others to save billions that way.
SiFive have apparently been shopping themselves around for a while. But they've been around for a long time, taken loads of investment, had a huge number of employees at one point (not now), and don't have very competitive products. My speculation is they're just not a very attractive acquisition with a complex ownership structure, and are demanding too much money to compensate their earlier investors.
SiFive have had a very long time to create competitive CPUs and they haven't really managed it. I dunno what's going on there but I'm not sure I'd buy them either.
2025 and counting. Apple launched the M1 in 2020. I am an Apple user but not a fanboy but everyday I wonder about the magic in Apple that is unique because even established competitors with virtually infinite money and incredible processes can't move forward. Another incredible aspect is the early addition of an NPU by Apple in a SoC.
I would love to resurrect my XPS 13s with a durable battery and working in Linux without trigerring the fan. The same for my Lenovo Xs.
In my imagination I am waiting for the billionaire geeks doing their part for fun (e.g. energy management in Linux).
Qualcomm has had DSPs in its chips for a long time, providing a lot of NPU-like functionality before the term NPU had been coined. What Qualcomm currently calls its NPUs are just Hexagon DSP cores with specific instructions and abilities for matrix math and common inferencing datatypes.
The original Apple M1's performance per Watt and physical battery size may have been special when it first came out, but nowadays there's nothing special about its hardware specs relative to a modern x86 laptop.
The difference you perceive is mostly software. Windows and Linux are really just designed for desktop machines first and foremost. MacOS was too, but when they transitioned to Apple Silicon, they replaced a lot of the internals with stuff taken from iOS, and iOS is designed with batter life first and foremost.
Getting the level of battery life out of non-apple laptops is just going to be a long, hard slog of going through the operating systems and auditing *everything* and every design decision for how it affects battery life and how much resources its using.
> Another incredible aspect is the early addition of an NPU by Apple in a SoC.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you've not used CUDA yet. NPUs are a lot of things, but "incredible" is the last word an engineer would use to describe them these days.
Most SOCs on the market today have a mix of various CPU cores. It's common to see designs with a few big ARM Cortex-A cores running an OS like Linux or Android, and then some smaller Cortex-M microcontroller cores that do housekeeping things like security checks, power management, realtime features, peripheral management, etc.
If I were to guess, Qualcomm wants to replace its various Cortex-M cores with RISC-V equivalents. This saves them money on licensing, reduces their dependency on ARM, and doesn't break customer-facing compatibility. Ventana is probably more of an aquihire to get their designer team.
"We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile." -Qualcomm, probably
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 83.7 ms ] threadIs all the IP they acquired with Nuvia[1] tainted? Or were they just using ARM-derived internals?
From my understanding, just slapping on a different instruction decoder isn't a big technical hurdle. Actually, I wonder if it would be possible to design a chip with both an ARM and a RISC-V decoder on the same die and just fuse-off the ARM die on select units to avoid any fees...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm#2015%E2%80%932024:_NX...
Implementing ARM and RISC-V decoders might depend on licensing fine print for each licensee
They'll need to license future versions of the ARM ISA and now they know the licensor is hostile.
Buying a team that's already working on RISCV also reduces the chances of ARM lawyers getting involved.
Frankly, Ventana seemed like an interesting entry in the space, but I have no idea who would have actually bought their servers at the end of the day. They taped out multiple designs, but none actually seem to exist outside their labs. I don't really see any path to meaningful RISC-V server adoption for at least several more years and by that time Qualcomm could design something on their own, assuming they are serious about re-entering the market. Grabbing the talent and any useful IP/core design components makes the most sense to me, anyway.
RISC-V being freely available does not mean that implementations of it will not be patented from here to the Orion nebula and back.
Qualcomm also wants the RISC-V engineers and their Knowledge and the Software Ecosystem and SDKs/Tools that Ventana has developed over the years to create CPU cores that execute that RISC-V ISA. And that includes all the design Verification tools/EDA tools that Ventana developed for their specific CPU core designs and all that non hardware stuff that takes a larger investment in dollars than just the hardware's development alone costs!
So the RISC-V ISA is Royalty free but not anyone's actual RISV-V ISA executing CPU core designs that cost millions to create and are the proprietary part of the Acquisition that Qualcomm is after. I'd imagine that Qualcomm's Nuvia engineers could more rapidly swap out the ARM ISA Instruction Decoders on any Oyron cores with some RISC-V Decoders and use most of the same Oryon Micro-op engine design that's native to the current Oryan generation cores but maybe Ventana's micro-op execution engine has something that's valuable to Qualcomm as well.
And so ISAs on modern microprocessors are abstracted away at the actual hardware level by the Micro-ops execution engine desogns that are proprietary to the ones that created them. And the reason that many license from ARM holdings is not just the ISA but the software/OS/Drover ecosystem that's built up over the decades for the ARM ISA ecosystem and that costs many times more than the hardware's costs to develop and maintain over the years. And so the ARM OS/Software/API and driver ecosystem is decades more mature than the RISC-V OS/Software/API and driver ecosystem, and that took years and 100s of billions in investments to get ARM where it is today!
But since RISC-V is royalty free there are hundreds of companies using RISC-V, including Nvidia for it's FALCON(FAst Logic CONtrollers) that are used all over Nvidia's GPUs and other accelerators. And with RISC-V one is free to implement only a subset of the RISC-V ISA or create custom RISC-V ISA extensions unlike ARM holdings where licensees have to implement the entire ARM Licensed ISA regardless of if all the instructions are needed for the task and no ISA extensions allowed.
So maybe Qualcomm is interested in the micro-controller market that's lower margin and that makes RISC-V's Royally Free more attractive! Or Qualcomm, like Nvidia, wants to develop some RISC-V Micro-Controllers for it's own in-house needs and not have to pay for ARM Holdings ISA based Micro-Controller designs. Look at Nvidia's dozens of on GPU die Controllers(Encoder/Decoder Logic,Etc) and because that's Nvidia FALCON RISC-V based that's quite a bit of savings in Royalty Payments and CPU core design payments to ARM Holdings or anyone else because FALCON is Nvidia's In-House IP and that RISC-V ISA is free to use for Nvidia or others to save billions that way.
I would love to resurrect my XPS 13s with a durable battery and working in Linux without trigerring the fan. The same for my Lenovo Xs.
In my imagination I am waiting for the billionaire geeks doing their part for fun (e.g. energy management in Linux).
The difference you perceive is mostly software. Windows and Linux are really just designed for desktop machines first and foremost. MacOS was too, but when they transitioned to Apple Silicon, they replaced a lot of the internals with stuff taken from iOS, and iOS is designed with batter life first and foremost.
Getting the level of battery life out of non-apple laptops is just going to be a long, hard slog of going through the operating systems and auditing *everything* and every design decision for how it affects battery life and how much resources its using.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you've not used CUDA yet. NPUs are a lot of things, but "incredible" is the last word an engineer would use to describe them these days.
If I were to guess, Qualcomm wants to replace its various Cortex-M cores with RISC-V equivalents. This saves them money on licensing, reduces their dependency on ARM, and doesn't break customer-facing compatibility. Ventana is probably more of an aquihire to get their designer team.
"We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile." -Qualcomm, probably
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/startup-key-apple-goog...