Qualcomm Launches Global Antitrust Campaign Against Arm (tomshardware.com) 29
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Qualcomm has reportedly filed secret complaints against Arm with the European Commission, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Korea Fair Trade Commission. Qualcomm argues that Arm's open licensing approach helped build a robust hardware and software ecosystem. However, this ecosystem is under threat now as Arm moves to restrict that access to benefit its chip design business, namely compute subsystems (CSS) reference designs for client and datacenter processors and custom silicon based on CSS for large-scale clients.
Qualcomm has presented its case to the EC, U.S. FTC, and Korea FTC behind closed doors and through formal filings, so it does not comment on the matter now. Arm rejected the accusations, stating that it is committed to innovation, competition, and upholding contract terms. The company called Qualcomm's move an attempt to shift attention from a wider commercial dispute between the two companies and use regulatory pressure for its benefit.
Indeed, the antitrust complaints align with Qualcomm's arguments in a recent legal clash with Arm in Delaware. Qualcomm won that trial, as the court ruled that the company did not break the terms of its architecture license agreement (ALA) and technology license agreement (TLA) by acquiring Nuvia and using its IP in its Snapdragon X processors for client PCs. Arm said it would seek a retrial. However, Qualcomm seems to want to ensure that it will have access to Arm's instruction set architecture and technologies by filing complaints with antitrust regulators.
Qualcomm has presented its case to the EC, U.S. FTC, and Korea FTC behind closed doors and through formal filings, so it does not comment on the matter now. Arm rejected the accusations, stating that it is committed to innovation, competition, and upholding contract terms. The company called Qualcomm's move an attempt to shift attention from a wider commercial dispute between the two companies and use regulatory pressure for its benefit.
Indeed, the antitrust complaints align with Qualcomm's arguments in a recent legal clash with Arm in Delaware. Qualcomm won that trial, as the court ruled that the company did not break the terms of its architecture license agreement (ALA) and technology license agreement (TLA) by acquiring Nuvia and using its IP in its Snapdragon X processors for client PCs. Arm said it would seek a retrial. However, Qualcomm seems to want to ensure that it will have access to Arm's instruction set architecture and technologies by filing complaints with antitrust regulators.
Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
USA - arm lost the colableration (Score:4, Interesting)
every engineer left the management of ARM
run by ego's now and its done unless they kick out the senior management team its done in 5 years
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Yep, RISC-V is going to eat their lunch as the development money leaves ARM and goes there, and then they will wind up holding 100% of 0%. Nothing at all is stopping the industry from switching.
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I imagine the thing that will stop the industry switching is that China beat them to it, so they don't want to compete. They really seem to be just hoping that RISC-V doesn't take off, rather than actually developing competitive chips of their own.
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I fear RISC V doesn't stand a chance because they looked at ARM and took away the wrong lesson.
ARM isn't successful because it's RISC - I seriously doubt the cores in most phones, Macs, etc, today even have a RISC architecture, treating the RISC ISA as just another generic architecture to implement as a machine-translation-to-VLIW type thing. ARM is successful because it made a great impression in 1987 (or whenever the Archimedes was released, can't be bothered to look it up), and then Acorn's successors di
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Interesting idea. I think there are some benefits to RISC when it comes to low power mobile devices, traded off against raw performance. The biggest issue is the memory bandwidth needed and the resulting size of instruction caches. It seems that RISC architectures tend to do better for power efficiency though, probably because the simpler instruction set reduces the complexity of stuff like OOE.
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RISC-V has multiply and divide support, it's just not mandatory in the basic configuration. All the high performance cores have it though. It's mandatory to run Linux I believe, as is an MMU.
There is a risk that as Chinese companies develop their own operating systems out of necessity (sanctions or government mandates), large markets shift away from Android. Huawei continue to sell devices in Europe, either Android without Google Play, or their own Harmony OS, and developing markets are even more up for gra
Re:USA - arm lost the colableration (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, RISC-V is going to eat their lunch as the development money leaves ARM and goes there, and then they will wind up holding 100% of 0%. Nothing at all is stopping the industry from switching.
Nothing except standards and interoperability. RISC-V has a lot of gaps currently that it will need to compete with ARM. Different entities can develop what they want in RISC-V but that might fracture it into many separate and incompatible versions unless there is some governance. Today a manufacturer using a ARM CPU from Marvell or Realtek that uses Cortex-A53 processors knows what to expect from it.
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Different entities can develop what they want in RISC-V but that might fracture it into many separate and incompatible versions unless there is some governance.
It will, and then those forks will converge, lather rinse repeat until the winners are chosen. And then ARM will die. They are licensing-agreementing themselves into the grave. Will it happen overnight? No. Is it already happening? Absolutely. There are tons of RISC-V based things happening, it is taking over TONS of low-end stuff that ARM used to get by default since we moved on from MIPS.
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And in their death throes, ARM will do what SCO did to Linux: file bogus lawsuits.
Re: USA - arm lost the colableration (Score:2)
Honestly, I hadn't had that thought yet, but now I'm not going to stop having it. Great insight.
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It will, and then those forks will converge, lather rinse repeat until the winners are chosen.
And how will that happen again and who gets to decide? Not everyone can design chips and those that make custom ARM chips like Google, Amazon, etc design them specifically for them and no one else. They do not expect any interoperability. Manufacturers who use more generic chips expect interoperability that no one is spearheading that effort. I fully expect Qualcomm to design incompatibilities in their chipsets so everyone has to use only their chips.
en. And then ARM will die. They are licensing-agreementing themselves into the grave.
Please describe what are you talking about.
There are tons of RISC-V based things happening,
That does not
Re: USA - arm lost the colableration (Score:2)
"And how will that happen again and who gets to decide?"
Corporations on the supply side, customers on the demand side, like everything else.
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Corporations on the supply side, customers on the demand side, like everything else.
You don't seem to understand the situation. In the future Qualcomm introduces their line of RISC-V which is incompatible with any other RISC-V. Manufacturers don't like the pricing of Qualcomm nor the incompatibilities. So who do they turn to? Samsung also offer their line of incompatible RISC-V to compete with Qualcomm. What about MIPS who now designs RISC-V chips? Same thing: their line of chips are incompatible with Samsung or Qualcomm. It is highly unlikely that if Apple made RISC-v that it would be com
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You don't seem to understand the situation. In the future Qualcomm introduces their line of RISC-V which is incompatible with any other RISC-V. Manufacturers don't like the pricing of Qualcomm nor the incompatibilities. So who do they turn to?
They will have lots of options, because of the open ISA. The chips will be as compatible as customers (manufacturers, that is) want to pay for. The market will decide, which it will be able to do because of the open standard. That's how they work. Everything you're saying applies to every open standard thing. Anyone at any time can fork it and make their own proprietary standard for connectors and interfaces. Sometimes corporations do, like Apple. Sometimes corporations don't, like Google. I don't think you
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They will have lots of options, because of the open ISA.
Lots of incompatible options. The open ISA allows anyone to create incompatible options if the chip designer wants. How is that not clear to you?
. The chips will be as compatible as customers (manufacturers, that is) want to pay for.
Again, not anyone can create a chip. You seem to be under the impression that there is a lot of choice in chip designers out there. Even now with ARM there isn't a lot of choice; however, since they use ARM, they are mostly standard BUT no one expects Apple custom ARM silicon to work with software for Qualcomm custom ARM silicon.
Everything you're saying applies to every open standard thing.
So you are aware of the situation bu
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Lots of incompatible options. The open ISA allows anyone to create incompatible options if the chip designer wants. How is that not clear to you?
I already addressed that point. Come back when you learn to read, kid.
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I already addressed that point. Come back when you learn to read, kid.
"Kid", bahahahahaha. No, you did not. You just said, "Nuh uh" because you don't have a clue. A BSD style license means NOTHING stops a company from taking the RISC-V IP and making it proprietary to themselves. There are only a handful of chip design companies in the ARM space, and they have zero incentives to work together. In fact, they have more incentives to not work together. The only reason their current chips are remotely compatible is that they use ARM. However when designing custom ARM silicon today
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RISC-V is just an ISA. An ISA is just a set of specifications.
That's it. You can get the ISA for ARM, x86/x64, and MIPS as well - they are sold as books or Intel makes it freely available.
The only difference is that to implement the ISA, they can be fees. There are a lot of 486 clones because the ISA for x86 doesn't have patents on 486 instructions. To implement the ARM ISA you need to obtain a license as well. And MIPS was freely available until some later revisions due to patents. SPARC is also open as we
Read this as "even QC says Windows ARM is crap" .. (Score:2)
... at first sight, as I was imagining saying something like "even Qualcomm is against Microsoft on this one and is making their outrage public".
Many alternatives are available... (Score:2)
You probably know that RISC-V exists, and remember that the Power ISA is also open source and royalty free... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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They missed Japan and China. (Score:2)
I guess that they missed Japan because is the Home of SoftBank (owners of ARM)...
But china? China would be very interested in the opportunity to make the fine folks at ARM more ammenable to "competition" and to treat their (chinese) customers "much "moar nicelyer" "
Anti-trust? No. (Score:2)
Patent troll gets trolled (Score:2)
Definitely a pair of companies that deserve each other.
ARM’s Closed Future, RISC-V’s Open Pas (Score:2)
What we're watching unfold between RISC-V and ARM feels like a reboot of a classic: the rise of Linux all over again — just this time at the silicon level.
ARM’s slide into unpopularity — especially since the SoftBank acquisition — is not about the tech falling behind. It is about control. Qualcomm’s lawsuit and now this global antitrust push suggest a deeper rot: ARM wants to claw back more of the stack, jack up licensing, and squeeze its own ecosystem. Cue flashbacks to when e
That's rich (Score:2)
Qualcomm got pissed when Apple realized that they were getting screwed on licensing and now Qualcomm gets pissed when they can't use Arm's stuff?