While every comment here seems to scream “end patents”, arm has less patent bs than other tech (rounded corners) meant to sue/prevent use. Arm works hard on developing and improving architecture and designs to offer licenses at a compelling price. Qualcomm paying as much as other licensees should be preferable to Qualcomm than bankruptcy.
Oh so they aren’t as shitty as other companies so it is all good? Sounds like horseshit to me. Patents on a quickly changing area like computer technology are pretty asinine hence why people don’t like them.
Also there is nothing preventing them from changing their behavior and turning into patent trolls in the future. In fact, enshitification pretty much guarantees they will at some point in the future.
Truly yes, but RISC-V.
I hope this isn’t a cartoony scheme driven by Apple honeydicking Arm with the M-series processors to tank PC and Android.
Arm owner softbank wants more mulah, want line goes up.
Qualcomm thinks this is not allowed in their license contract.
Without having read the contract, I think Qualcomm has a strong case, seams arm wants this to be settled before court in December. Qualcomm also thinks they have a strong case, so they say let the courts begin.
But it doesn’t matter if it’s an American court, because Qualcomm is American, softbank is Asian, arm is European. So, you have home turf advantage
So typical capitalism horseshit.
This seems like a tactic that might win a battle but lose the war. Reminds me of Unity.
What happened with Unity in the end? Did they back down?
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Good. Godot exists. Or even that weird engine from Amazon (?) they open sourced. You could make a Unity competitor out of that. Just create an asset store for it and sell stuff, give other creators a decent cut and they will come.
Oh no, not copilot!
Anyway…
A risky move… Or should I say… A RISCV move…
“risc architecture is gonna change everything”
It really did.
FYI, ARM stands for Advanced RISC Machines.
And before that “Acorn RISC Machines”.
We had Acorn Archimedes systems at school that ran RISC OS.
It actually did, but not in a way people expected at the time that movie was made. It changed a lot underneath the hood.
Hack the planet!
Year of the riscv desktop
year of the linux riscv desktop
Is this somewhat related why qualcomm suddenly decided to bring oryon to smartphones?
Yes, absolutely related. This fight started because Qualcomm bought Nuvia and started using their designs (and their ARM license for those designs). This recent escalation is almost certainly because Qualcomm is about to bring Oryon, which was designed by Nuvia, to smartphones.
Read this article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/arm-to-cancel-qualcomm-chip-design-license-in-escalation-of-feud/ar-AA1sK49J
Geez, that is some stupid situation, I kinda got excited with oryon going on android since it is their only ip that is currently being opensourced.
IDK man but my tinfoil hat says that apple are the one who is pulling the strings on arm with regards to this.
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Laughs in OpenPOWER
Tech patents are ridiculous. Let’s end them or reduce them to 1-3 years with no renewal. Then all that’s left is the specific copyright to the technology, not lingering webs of patents that don’t make any sense anyway to anyone with detailed knowledge of the tech. All they’re good for is big companies using legal methods to stop innovation and competition. Tech moves too fast for long patents and is too complex for patent examiners or courts to understand what is really patentable. So it comes down to who has the most money for lawyers.
Yeah, but another big issue is that big companies can afford to bribe or buy out the patent holders in the first place. Ideally, the patent holders would benefit the most from everyone making their tech, but instead they benefit the most from one company being the exclusive manufacturer and highest bidder.
The act of an agreement asking a patent holder not to sell to other manufacturers in itself should be illegal.
Yeah, making patents nontransferable would solve that. Ultimately, getting rid of most would be good, but if we have to keep them, then they should be dissolved if a company fails or is bought out because obviously the patent itself wasn’t enough to make a product that was viable. So everyone should get the chance to use the patent. The whole purpose of a patent vs keeping tech proprietary until the product is released was to benefit society once the patent expires. Otherwise, it makes more sense for companies to keep inventions secret if they aren’t just stockpiling them like they do now.
Seeing things like “slide to unlock”, “rounded corners”, and “scroll bouncing” are all patentable is ridiculous.
The free market is going very well here
This is 100% capitalism. It’s not free market to have a goverment-enforced monopoly.
You are correct. There would be no copyrights or patents in a free market.
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Copyrights and patents are literally government enforced monopolies for huge companies. Without them, there would be a lot more competition.
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Companies such as Disney have armies of lawyers to enforce their monopolies. Copyright and patent laws are designed exclusively for the rich.
Disney can very well “steal” other people’s work and get away with it under this system. Without such laws, everyone else would be able to “steal” from Disney as well, which would level the playing field.
Or trade secrets. “Perfect information” is a bitch. Not to speak of “perfectly rational actors”: Say goodbye to advertisement, too, we’d have to outlaw basically all of it.
Trade secrets don’t need to be enforced much by law. You can create an ad hoc trade secret regime by simply keeping your secret between a few key employees. As it happens, there are some laws that go beyond that to help companies keep the secret, but that only extends something that could happen naturally.
To get closer to the free market there would have to be a duty to disclose any- and everything that’s now a trade secret, no matter how easily kept. To not just get closer but actually get there we all would need to be telepathic. As said, perfect information is a bitch of a concept.
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I’m not arguing for any policies, just explaining what would be necessary to make the theoretical model of the free market a reality in actual reality: It assumes perfect information and perfectly rational actors, it’s a tall order.
This is textbook late stage free market ideals at work. This is how the free market always ends.
X -
The system is broken.✅ - The system is working exactly as intended and must be destroyed.
Yeah the system that actually exists, capitalism.
That sounds like obligatory old movie quote.
Sorry have you been around to observe a lot of free markets ending?
There are lots of different kinds of markets, like phone market, grocery market, goldsmith market, etc.
The governments have to interfere in many markets all the time, that there aren’t monopolies forming or Price-fixing agreement be done, which would lead to prices go ridiculously high, or last companies in markets fucking up taking tons of knowhow with them.
What’s government enforced about it? Is ARM the only allowed chip designer for cellphones?
Copyrights and patents
That’s not a government enforced monopoly. A government enforced monopoly means nobody else is allowed in the market. Like utility companies.
Nobody else is allowed to sell these phones without licenses
But they can sell phones.
That’s called “monopolistic competition”. They can’t sell the same phone they were already making.
Hopefully Qualcomm takes the hint and takes this opportunity to develop a high performance RISC V core. Don’t just give the extortionists more money, break free and use an open standard. Instruction sets shouldn’t even require licensing to begin with if APIs aren’t copyrightable. Why is it OK to make your own implentation of any software API (see Oracle vs. Google on the Java API, Wine implementing the Windows API, etc) but not OK to do the same thing with an instruction set (which is just a hardware API). Why is writing an ARM or x86 emulator fine but not making your own chip? Why are FPGA emulator systems legal if instruction sets are protected? It makes no sense.
The other acceptable outcome here is a Qualcomm vs. ARM lawsuit that sets a precedence that instruction sets are not protected. If they want to copyright their own cores and sell the core design fine, but Qualcomm is making their own in house designs here.
Don’t just give the extortionists more money
Or maybe they were just trying to pay a lot less money, and then they got caught at their little trick.
By that logic every company would just run on linux. Free to use ≠ free to implement and support.
Do you know how much money you have to pay to make a RISC V chip? Even less than that, since it’s free
Saying an ISA is just a hardware API vastly oversimplifies what an architecture is. There is way more to it than just the instruction set, because you can’t have an instruction set without also defining the numbers and types of registers, the mapping of memory and how the CPU interacts with it, the input/output model for the system, and a bunch of other features like virtual memory, addressing modes etc. Just to give an idea, the ARM reference is 850 pages long.
APIs can be complex too. Look at how much stuff the Win32 API provides from all the kernel calls, defined data structures/types, libraries, etc. I would venture a guess that if you documented the Win32 API including all the needed system libraries to make something like Wine, it would also be 850 pages long. The fact remains that a documented prototype for a software implementation is free to reimplement but a documented prototype for a hardware implementation requires a license. This makes no sense from a fairness perspective. I’m fine with ARM not giving away their fully developed IP cores which are actual implementations of the ARM instruction set, but locking third parties from making their own compatible designs without a license is horribly anticompetitive. I wish standards organizations still had power. Letting corporations own de-facto “standards” is awful for everyone.
Simping for Qualcomm is definitely not a take i expected
In the mobile Linux scene, Qualcomm chips are some of the best supported ones. I don’t love everything Qualcomm does, but the Snapdragon 845 makes for a great Linux phone and has open source drivers for most of the stack (little thanks to Qualcomm themselves).
Qualcomm is one of the worst monopolists in any industry though. They are widely known to have a stranglehold on all mobile device development
takes this opportunity to develop a high performance RISC V core
They might. This would never be open sourced though. Best case scenario is the boost they would provide to the ISA as a whole by having a company as big as Qualcomm backing it.
BUT Imagine if it was open sourced. God, Gods, by the nine, would be heaven.
If Qualcomm released a FOSS RISC-V IP core that would’ve required spending multiple millions on hardware engineer salaries (no chance in hell), I would:
- Spontaneously ejaculate
- Pull out my FPGA
RISC V is just an open standard set of instructions and their encodings. It is not expected nor required for implementations of RISC V to be open sourced, but if they do make a RISC V chip they don’t have to pay anyone to have that privilege and the chip will be compatible with other RISC V chips because it is an open and standardized instruction set. That’s the point. Qualcomm pays ARM to make their own chip designs that implement the ARM instruction set, they aren’t paying for off the shelf ARM designs like most ARM chip companies do.
The RISCV instruction set IS open source. What they’d do to ratfuck it is lock the bootloader or something.
Go RISC-V phones please!! Omg. I really hope RISC-V goes mainstream because of this.
Let’s wait and see how this develops…
We shall break into the desktop and laptop market! Let’s start by severing ties with one of the most successful companies to do that so far.
Part of the reason why when people were saying they wanted competition to unseat x86, I didn’t want it to be ARM based, because I knew 100% that ARM would jump in and do some shit to rake in more profit and negate all the potential cost savings to the consumer. As long as theres a single(or in the case of x86, essentially (but technically not) duopoly) that controls all the options for one of the options, then it’s not a good form of competition.
And so the corporate wars have begun
RiscV! RiscV!
