Comment by piltdownman

Comment by piltdownman 7 days ago

12 replies

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They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips. Add in a decent x86 to ARM translation layer, and you have the basis of the next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.

At the high-end they announced two new flagship processor platforms at its 2025 Snapdragon Summit. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 they claim to be the world’s fastest mobile SoC.

Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm - iPhone 17 Pro Max relies on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 Modem for 5G - 5G Edge solutions for RAN, presumably harnessing AI - Non-Terrestrial 5G Provisioning in their partnerships with Thales/Ericsson. - IoT and Wearables - presumably low power/footprint modems

jabl 7 days ago

> They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips.

As an aside, wonder how this will impact Qualcomm's RISC-V plans? They were apparently working on some RISC-V cores, but I wonder whether that was just a play to put pressure on Arm, or are they still planning on bringing those out to market?

(The "Arduino UNO Q" that they're launching now is based on a Cortex A53. One would think if they're serious about RISC-V they would start with this kind of things, as in low-end stuff for tinkerers.)

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  • als0 7 days ago

    So they are using RISC-V already for some embedded cores. For application cores, they are participating in the RISC-V consortium to keep the pressure on ARM and also to be ready for the long game.

    I do not expect to see Qualcomm made RISC-V application cores until Android or Windows is completely ported to it, which I think rules out the next several years.

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  • mrheosuper 7 days ago

    I don't see nothing will affect the RISCV stuff. The risc-v will be likely used in some fixed-function chip(like TPM or security core inside CPU, pretty sure they've done that)

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cogman10 6 days ago

> If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.

They have to fix their approach to Linux driver development. (and driver development in general).

Qualcomm likes to lob hardware to consumers while spending the minimal amount of time making sure the drivers to support that hardware actually works.

I couldn't imagine someone like Valve leaping at the opportunity to use them.

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webdevver 7 days ago

>They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm

did you notice how ARMs stock jumped 5% after that ruling? that tells you everything you need to know.

not to be reddity but reminds me of that scene from The Social Network, where Zuck's buddy couldn't udnerstand how the the record companies winning was actually a massive L.

all the court proved was its total irrelevance to market forces, thats all. ARM is in NVidia accelerators, in Apple phones, in things of actual relevance.

Where is qcom "in"? theyre competing in... laptops!? i could not think of a worse commodity to be in. low volume, no margins, no added value. NPUs? holy snakeoil. again, this edge inferencing that nobody cares about. theres not even a roadmap for anyone to care about it.

>next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.

yeah, a market of what, $50M? jeez louise.

>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm

seems to be the only thing going for it.

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  • Moral_ 7 days ago

    Quoting Arm stock prices is hilarious considering that there is only 10% float available to be traded and 95% of that 10% is owned by institutions already. That stock is so heavily manipulated so the big boys can make insane profits on options.

    On the other topic

    >>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm

    >seems to be the only thing going for it.

    Did you guys forget the $4B a year in auto rev that they generate, they essentially captured the entire auto market from Nvidia and NXP.

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    • piltdownman 7 days ago

      Auto Rev is Snapdragon Digital Chassis based is it not? I presumed people were aware of the legacy Snapdragon stuff, but maybe not!

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    • turtlesdown11 7 days ago

      Thank goodness for that $4B a year. It will certainly keep the stock valued at a market cap of $182B.

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  • piltdownman 7 days ago

    So why on earth did ARM sue to stop their release and force a clean-sheet redesign? Other than SoftBank being Softbank.

    //ARM’s CEO wrote in a contemporaneous internal message that the Nuvia ALA “had left a route to blow a hole in [ARM’s] revenue plan” because “Qualcomm already ha[d] a v9 architecture license” under its own ALA. That observation led him to vent that “I’m struggling not to be pissed that we set up a route for Qualcomm to collapse the payments to Arm,” which “feels like in our chess game we left ourselves very exposed.”

    https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/delawar...

    Re: Handheld gaming - The dedicated Xbox gaming handheld was cancelled because AMD required a minimum of 10 million units in its contract. With Steam Deck only selling ~5 million units and ASUS ROG/Lenovo Legion only selling 1-2 million MS didn't want to take the risk.

    Reduce that BOM, go with ARM, and realise there's an incumbent leaving the market, and you have a compelling argument for Qualcomm. Particularly given the Nintendo Switch 2 sold 1.6M units in June, the highest launch month unit sales for video game hardware in US history

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    • ACCount37 7 days ago

      Good luck getting anywhere close to Nintendo Switch sales with anything that's not Nintendo Switch.

      Valve managing to land Steam Deck within 2 orders of magnitude from that? That was already an unlikely feat.

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      • piltdownman 7 days ago

        One of the main use-cases of the Steam Deck? Wii-U and Switch emulation!

        Valve managing to land Steam Deck within 2 orders of magnitude on their first handheld hardware launch, without some of the largest exclusive gaming IP in the world, selling direct to consumer... represent salient arguments for its ability to compete at a far greater extent when on more equal terms.

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