Comment by ryao

Comment by ryao 15 hours ago

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AMD and Intel actually fabricate chips for sale to others (outsourced to TSMC in AMD’s case) and take the risks associated with that. ARM on the other hand is just an IP provider. They are not comparable. ARM should have kept its original strategy of aiming to profit from volume that enabled its rise in the first place. Its course change likely looks great to SoftBank’s investors for now, but it will inevitably kill the goose that lays the golden eggs as people look elsewhere for what ARM was.

That said, ARM’s increased license fees are a fantastic advocate for RISC-V. Some of the more interesting RISC-V cores are Tenstorrent’s Ascalon and Ventana’s Veyron V2. I am looking forward to them being in competition with ARM’s X925 and X930 designs.

tails4e 14 hours ago

RISC-V is not immune from license fees, unless you want to design a high performance core from the ground up. If you want something as capable as an M4, there is years of R&D to get to that level. I'm sure a big player could do just that in house, but many would license Si-Five or similar. It will be interesting to see if Qualcomm and the like would make a move towards RISC-V, given their ARM legal issues

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  • ryao 12 hours ago

    There are an incredible number of companies designing their own RISC-V cores right now. Some of them are even are making some of their designs entirely open source so that they are royalty free. The highest end designs are not, but it is hard to imagine their creators not undercutting ARM’s license fees since that is money that they would not have otherwise.

    As for Qualcomm, they won the lawsuit ARM filed against them. Changing from ARM to RISC-V would delay their ambition to take marketshare from Intel and AMD, so they are likely content to continue paying ARM royalties because they have their eyes on a much bigger prize. It also came out during the lawsuit that Qualcomm considers their in-house design team to be saving them billions of dollars in ARM royalty fees, since they only need to pay royalties for the ISA and nothing else when they use their own in-house designs.

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    • theupsidedown 8 hours ago

      I doubt open source designs are going to be competitive with closed source. Also, design is just part of the problem. There is a whole lot of other things you need to get a chip out. I do not think RISC-V chips will be cheaper than other architecture when you take everything into account.

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      • ryao 6 hours ago

        It is funny that you should say that, considering that I was wondering this myself earlier today WRT the Hazard3 cores in the RP2350. It turns out someone did benchmarks:

        https://icircuit.net/benchmarking-raspberry-pi-pico-2/3983

        The Hazard3 core was designed by a single person while the ARM Cortex cores were presumably designed by a team of people. The Hazard3 cores mostly outperforms the Cortex-M0+ cores in the older RP2040 and are competitive with the Cortex-M33 cores that share the RP2350 silicon. For integer addition and multiplication, they actually outperform the Cortex-M33 cores. Before you point out that they lost most of the benchmarks against the Cortex-M33 cores, let me clarify that the integer addition and multiplication performance matter far more for microcontrollers than the other tests, which is why I consider them to be competitive despite the losses. The Hazard3 cores are open source:

        https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3

        That said, not all RISC-V designs are open source, but some of the open source ones are performance competitive with higher end closed source cores, such as the SonicBoom core from Berkeley:

        https://adept.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/_media/eop/adept-eop-je...

        As for the other problem you cite, the RP2350 has both RISC-V and ARM cores. It is a certainty that if the ARM cores had not been present, the RP2350 would have been cheaper, since less die area would have been needed and ARM license fees would have been avoided.

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    • fidotron 10 hours ago

      RISC-V implementations are going to prove to be absolute patent minefields.

      Just because something is open source will not stop you from being stung during manufacturing, rather like how Android deployments are not free.

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      • ryao 10 hours ago

        So far, patent lawsuits have been more of a problem for those using ARM designs (Qualcomm) than those using RISC-V designs. The Raspberry Pi foundation, Western Digital and Nvidia have successfully put RISC-V designs into their products without any issues. The first two even made their core designs open source (see Hazard3 and SweRV).

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  • xbmcuser 12 hours ago

    China will likely be the country taking forward RISC-V and ditching Arm and x86 completely. With USA trying to stop other countries from using latest Chinese tech they are given more reason to ditch any and all propitiatory US tech. So over the next decade I expect RISC-V architecture to enter and flood all Chinese tech devices from Tvs to cars and everything else that needs a CPU.

    I personally hope China get's competitive in the node size as well as I want gpu and cpus start getting cheaper every generation again as once TSMC got big lead over Intel/Samsung and Nvidia got a big lead over AMD prices have stopped coming down generation to generation for CPU's and GPU's

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    • ryao 11 hours ago

      RISC-V is definitely gaining traction in China, but it does not have a monopoly on Chinese CPU core design:

        * Loongson is pushing a MIPS derivative forward.
  * Sugon is pushing a x86 derivative (originally derived from AMD Zen) forward
  * Zhaoxin is pushing a x86 derivative (derived from VIA’s chips) forward.
      There was Shenwei with its Alpha processor derivative, but that effort has not had any announcements in years. However, there is still ARM China. Tianjin Phytium and HiSilicon continue to design ARM cores presumably under license from ARM China. There are probably others I missed.

      There is also substantial RISC-V development outside of China. Some notable ones are:

        * SiFive - They are the first company to be in this space and are behind many of the early/current designs.
  * Tenstorrent - This company has Jim Keller and people formerly from Apple’s chip design team and others. They have high performance designs up to 8-wide.
  * Ventana - They claim to have a high performance core design that is 15-wide.
  * AheadComputing - they hired Intel’s Oregon design team to design high performance RISC-V cores after the Royal Core project was cancelled last year.
  * The Raspberry Pi foundation - their RP2350 contains Hazard3 RISC-V cores designed by one of their engineers.
  * Nvidia - They design RISC-V cores for the microcontrollers in their GPUs, of which the GPU System Processor is the most well known. They ship billions of RISC-V cores each year as part of their GPUs. This is despite using ARM for the high end CPUs that they sell to the community.
  * Western Digital - Like Nvidia, they design RISC-V cores for use in their products. They are particularly notable because they released the SweRV Core as open source.
  * Meta - They are making in-house RISC-V based chips for AI training/inference.
      This is a short list. It would be relatively easy to assemble a list of dozens of companies designing RISC-V cores outside of China if one tried.
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    • bobmcnamara 9 hours ago

      They've already exfiltrated Arm's IP and began designing their own Arm cores. Is there a need for them to switch?

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  • rollcat 10 hours ago

    Correct me if I am wrong, but in RISC-V's case, you would be licensing the core design alone, not a license for the ISA plus the core on top.

    Right now, AFAIK only Apple is serious about designing their own ARM cores, while there are multiple competing implementations for RISC-V (which are still way behind both ARM and x86, but slooowly making their way).

    VERY long-term, I expect RISC-V to become more competitive, unless whoever-owns-ARM-at-the-time adjusts strategy.

    Either way, I'm glad to see competition after decades of Intel/x86 dominance.

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    • ryao 9 hours ago

      Qualcomm has a serious development effort in their Oryon CPU cores. Marvel had ThunderX from the Cavium acquisition, but they seem to have discontinued development.

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  • solarkraft 7 hours ago

    Yes, but the playing field is different. Anyone can become a Risc-V IP provider and many such companies have already been created.

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ksec 9 hours ago

MediaTek and others using ARMv9 design and pricing, heck even Qualcomm are selling their SoC on Windows PC at cheaper price compared to Intel or AMD.

Even at a higher IP price their final product are cheaper, faster and competitive. There may be a strategy about leaving money on the table, but it is another thing about leaving TOO much money on the table. If Intel and AMD's pricing is so far above ARM, there is nothing wrong with increasing your highest performance core 's pricing.

I would not be surprised in a 2 - 3 years time the highest PC performance CPU / SoC is coming from Nvidia with ARM CPU Core rather than x86. But knowing Nvidia I know they will charge similar pricing to Intel :D

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  • ryao 7 hours ago

    So far, Qualcomm is not paying the royalty rate hikes since they are selling ARM hardware using cores covered under the ARMv8 architectural license that they obtained before SoftBank started pushing ARM to improve profitability.

    It is interesting that you should mention MediaTek. They joined the RISC-V Software Ecosystem in May 2023:

    https://riseproject.dev/

    It seems reasonable to think that they are considering jumping ship. If they are designing their own in-house CPU cores, it will likely be a while before we see them as part of a mediatek SoC.

    In any case, people do not like added fees. They had previously tolerated ARM’s fees since they were low, but now that they are raising them, people are interested in alternatives. At least some of ARM’s partners are paying the higher for now, but it is an incentive to move to RISC-V, which is no fee for the ISA and either no fee or low fee for IP cores. For example, the hazard3 cores that the Raspberry Pi Foundation adopted in the RP2350 did not require them to pay royalty fees to anyone.

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