Qualcomm talks up RISC-V, roasts 'legacy architecture' amid war with Arm - The Register

Comment As Qualcomm tries to combat disconnected a suit from Arm demanding Qualcomm destruct its customized cores, the Snapdragon elephantine has signaled it whitethorn person a bigger aboriginal with RISC-V.

And that's each portion Qualcomm criticized an "existing bequest architecture" for having useless features and not gathering definite requirements.

At the RISC-V Summit this week, Qualcomm Director of Product Management Manju Varma said RISC-V, an emerging alternate to the proprietary Arm acquisition acceptable architecture, has opportunities crossed a scope of devices Qualcomm designs chips for, from wearables and smartphones to laptops and connected cars.

While Qualcomm continues to usage Arm's acquisition acceptable architecture (ISA) and off-the-shelf CPU designs arsenic the ground for the exertion processing cores wrong its system-on-chips (SoC), the US elephantine turned to RISC-V for microcontroller cores wrong its chips, starting with the Snapdragon 865 SoC successful 2019, according to Varma, who helps thrust Qualcomm's CPU strategy and roadmap crossed the company's full portfolio.

Varma said the Snapdragon elephantine present uses RISC-V microcontrollers successful SoCs successful PCs, mobile devices, wearables, connected cars, arsenic good arsenic augmented world and virtual world headsets. These microcontrollers execute low-level enactment successful the background, specified arsenic managing hardware.

This has resulted successful Qualcomm seemingly shipping much than 650 cardinal RISC-V cores to date, making the ISA "one of the halfway technologies for Qualcomm" and Qualcomm "one of the leaders of RISC-V implementation."

Qualcomm is, we note, a founding subordinate of RISC-V International, the assemblage that oversees the royalty-free, unfastened root ISA, truthful its enactment and enthusiasm for RISC-V is not a surprise.

The Qualcomm exec added that RISC-V has opportunities for usage cases with higher worth than microcontrollers.

"Now having a communal basal acquisition acceptable architecture that tin standard from low-end microcontrollers, each the mode to high-performance compute, and thing successful between, it truly enables efficiencies successful the wide industry," Varma said successful her keynote.

The claimed benefits of RISC-V implicit the 'legacy architecture'

Qualcomm archetypal turned to RISC-V for a microcontroller successful the Snapdragon 865 due to the fact that it "needed thing that was customizable, met our unsocial requirements, and had a tiny footprint," according to Varma. One happening astir RISC-V is that it tin beryllium extended with customized instructions and features by CPU halfway implementers.

"The solutions from the existing bequest architecture didn't conscionable these requirements," she added.

Varma said the large payment of RISC-V is that it receives diagnostic contributions from assorted companies and organizations successful each layers of the "value chain," from the ISA and CPU, to the strategy software, to the operating system, to the end-user applications. This contrasts with the bequest architecture, which is "owned by 1 entity successful the worth chain," she added.

The publication operation for RISC-V, enabled by its open-source quality and governed by the nonprofit RISC-V International, creates an "opportunity to adhd features that adhd worth to extremity consumers [and] are defined successful performance with everyone successful this worth chain," according to Varma.

This is different country wherever the bequest architecture has fallen short, she added.

"Now, often we've seen successful the past, with the bequest architecture, wherever features were introduced that didn't truly look to adhd worth to extremity consumers," Varma said.

With RISC-V, there's an accidental to specify spot designs that person "best-in-class performance, best-in-class powerfulness efficiency, and value-added features," she said.

So wait, is Arm the 'legacy architecture?'

In the 3 times Varma referenced this "legacy architecture," she didn't telephone it by name. While we can't accidental definitively that she is talking astir Arm, determination are fewer bully reasons to judge that she is:

1. Qualcomm has historically been a large licensee of Arm's ISA and off-the-shelf spot designs.
2. Arm has claimed that it's a dominant player successful the microcontroller space, with its Cortex-M designs accounting for nearly 3 quarters of Arm-based spot shipments each year.
3. Varma compared RISC-V to the bequest architecture successful the discourse of an ISA that tin standard from microcontrollers to high-performance computing, which represents the scope of Arm's capabilities. As a result, we don't deliberation she was talking astir the galore different ISAs retired determination for microcontrollers. And we didn't get the content she was talking astir x86.

Then there's the information that Arm is suing Qualcomm successful an effort to destruct the latter's customized Nuvia cores, which are designed to beryllium compatible with the former's ISA.

Arm believes Qualcomm's customized cores should beryllium destroyed because, successful Arm's view, the Snapdragon elephantine failed to negociate a caller architectural licence statement aft it acquired the startup Nuvia, wherever improvement of the cores began, successful 2021.

Qualcomm, connected the different hand, argues it tin proceed processing the customized cores due to the fact that it has existing architectural licence with Arm that is "broadly overlapping" with the 1 Nuvia had.

While Qualcomm hasn't said what it volition bash if it loses the lawsuit, multiple analysts person said the ineligible feud is giving companies much crushed to see RISC-V arsenic an alternate to Arm, whether oregon not Arm wins.

As we pointed retired before, however, Qualcomm's involvement successful RISC-V isn't new. The institution started utilizing RISC-V for microcontrollers successful products successful 2019, and it invested successful SiFive, a RISC-V spot decorator that competes with Arm, the aforesaid year.

Varma says RISC-V needs improvements

While Varma spent a bully woody of her keynote espousing the benefits of RISC-V, she issued a call-to-arms for the improvement assemblage astir the ISA, saying contributors request to enactment connected standardizing features and reducing fragmentation, a known contented among developers.

"As a silicon vendor, we spot a request for standardized, RISC-V-compatible strategy IPs. We spot a batch of innovation successful the exertion processor space. We spot a batch of diversity, competition, differentiation, and that is great. But we request to marque definite that we standardize the strategy IPs to trim ecosystem fragmentation," Varma said.

The Qualcomm enforcement said the RISC-V assemblage needs to guarantee it doesn't regress connected features that are being marketed for the ISA.

Varma added different privation database items for RISC-V:

If the RISC-V assemblage developed a "best-in-class architecture specification" for security, instrumentality learning, and AI, and introduced caller features astatine a faster clip, the ISA's ecosystem "would person a tremendous time-to-market advantage," Varma concluded. ®