Posted by necubi 10/23/2024
MediaTek 9400 is literally the top-performing SoC on the market.
Samsung Exynos 2400, 2400e
MediaTek Dimensity 9400, 9300 Plus, 9300
The ordering in ranking is a little weird.
Would not be fair to compare a $20 toaster to a $50 toaster and say that the $20 toaster is slower.
I’m not sure if the low end ampere is as slow as a high end mac though.
Neoverse V3 was announced Feb of this year. It should have an 80-85% performance increase and should basically be based on something very close to x925.
When you're making ARM chips, you can either license the instruction set or you can license whole core designs. Most people license whole core designs. You build a chip using an ARM Cortex X4 core, 3 Cortex A720 cores, and 4 Cortex A520 cores and call it a day. But when you're using ARM's core designs, you have to pay them a lot to license those core designs. But when you're licensing the instruction set (and designing your own cores), you pay ARM a tiny licensing fee. This is what Apple does.
In this case, the story goes:
A startup called Nuvia wanted to create custom ARM cores for servers and negotiated a deal with ARM that was very favorable since ARM would like to grow its server marketshare. The agreement included a stipulation that they couldn't sell their IP to another company for that other company to build ARM cores built on Nuvia IP (according to ARM). Qualcomm argues that they have an instruction set license so they're allowed to build custom cores based off that license. ARM says that Nuvia's instruction set license means that Qualcomm can't.
I don't know what the cost difference is between core licenses and instruction licenses, but some places seem to think it's around 5x. Qualcomm has around 35% of the ARM chip market, but crucially a huge portion of the more expensive (and profitable for ARM) flagship cores. It's possible that Qualcomm is half of ARM's business (maybe more). If Qualcomm shifts to their own core designs and starts paying ARM 20% of what they're paying now, that could wipe out 40% of ARM's revenue.
If Qualcomm can shift from more expensive core licenses to cheaper instruction licenses, it would wipe out a huge portion of ARM's business. Worse, if those cores are better and become the de-facto flagship cores, it'd wipe out even more of ARM's business as companies like Samsung and Google might feel the need to buy Qualcomm chips (with better cores) rather than buying ARM's Cortex X cores for their flagship phones.
Likewise, Qualcomm is unlikely to stop at smartphones. They're already moving into laptops which will make it harder for any company using ARM-designed cores to get a foothold there. Qualcomm could move into servers in the near future and offer something better than the ARM Neoverse cores that are used by AWS's Graviton, Google's Axion, and Ampere.
So it's an enormous threat to ARM's business and ARM feels like it gave Nuvia a sweetheart deal because they were a small startup looking to enter a mostly new market rather than disrupting their current business - and they gave them a license with restrictions on it. Then Nuvia sold to Qualcomm who is using that IP to stop paying ARM - and ARM thinks that goes against the restrictions that Nuvia agreed to.
There are plenty of ARM chips designed by multiple companies and built by multiple foundries
There are not “plenty of ARM chips designed by multiple companies”, almost all of them except for Apple (and now Qualcomm) use ARMs off the shelf design.
> Annapurna Labs, Ampere Computing, NVIDIA, Intel, Marvell, Pensando Systems, and others use Arm Neoverse and Arm technologies to create cloud-optimized CPUs and DPUs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family
> Companies that have designed cores that implement an ARM architecture include Apple, AppliedMicro (now: Ampere Computing), Broadcom, Cavium (now: Marvell), Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Fujitsu, and NUVIA Inc. (acquired by Qualcomm in 2021).
The second list is out of date. Intel has completely pulled out of ARM earlier this year and most of the others do not actually design their own ARM cores anymore. It’s become a lot less common in the ARMv8+ era.
I'm guessing cloud computing, but guess you could add any buzzword in...
> their so-called architectural license agreement
Definition 2 is when this tends to be used: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so-called
What am I not seeing here? I think they'll just settle.
Whereas RISC-V was created by academics who mostly just claim it's the best because they invented it.
It might have been born in academia, but from those drafts until the first ratified spec there's a good decade of high quality input from distinguished industry veterans.
Whilst Qualcomm has a wide ranging ALA that’s always a possibility. This might just be an opportunistic move to remove that threat to Arm’s business model.
Sure Arm has done things - eg pricing v8 to v9 that customers hate. But do you really think Mediatek for example wants to compete with Qualcomm selling Nuvia based cores with a low ALA based royalty.
Is this just a ploy to strongarm Qualcomm into buying Arm?