Qualcomm Acquires Risc-V Focused Ventana Micro Systems
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The tech world is buzzing as Qualcomm gobbles up RISC-V focused Ventana Micro Systems, sparking debate about the motivations behind this strategic move. Some commenters, like Pet_Ant, wonder if Qualcomm is trying to escape the "Arm monopoly," while others, like dismalaf, see it as a savvy acquihire and hedge against future uncertainties. As the discussion unfolds, intriguing ideas emerge, such as designing a chip with both ARM and RISC-V decoders, with some speculating about the potential for "fuse-off" options to avoid licensing fees. The consensus seems to be that Qualcomm is diversifying its bets, with some attributing it to a desire to break free from Arm's grip, while others see it as a straightforward business play driven by greed or a desire to eliminate competition.
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Is all the IP they acquired with Nuvia[1] tainted? Or were they just using ARM-derived internals?
From my understanding, just slapping on a different instruction decoder isn't a big technical hurdle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm#2015%E2%80%932024:_NX...
A dual ISA decoder with with fuse-off options will likely have unwelcome power-perf-area and yield consequences.
Apart from that there’s the other usual angles: The very fact that there’s additional logic in the compute path (eventually fused off) means additional design and verification complexity. The additional area, although dark, eats into the silicon yield at the fab.
Not saying it’s not possible.
Implementing ARM and RISC-V decoders might depend on licensing fine print for each licensee
[0] https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3
Buying a team that's already working on RISCV also reduces the chances of ARM lawyers getting involved.
Ventana is a company founded and build around a team to do massive ultra wide chips for data-center, and their focus was not efficiency primary. The kinds of chips they build are just not the right fit. Moving all that team over to something on the literal other end of the spectrum and dropping their existing products and costumers seems a bit silly.
Correct. However you need circuitry on silicon to implement said architecture which is the expensive and time consuming part.
Qualcomm also wants the RISC-V engineers and their Knowledge and the Software Ecosystem and SDKs/Tools that Ventana has developed over the years to create CPU cores that execute that RISC-V ISA. And that includes all the design Verification tools/EDA tools that Ventana developed for their specific CPU core designs and all that non hardware stuff that takes a larger investment in dollars than just the hardware's development alone costs!
So the RISC-V ISA is Royalty free but not anyone's actual RISV-V ISA executing CPU core designs that cost millions to create and are the proprietary part of the Acquisition that Qualcomm is after. I'd imagine that Qualcomm's Nuvia engineers could more rapidly swap out the ARM ISA Instruction Decoders on any Oyron cores with some RISC-V Decoders and use most of the same Oryon Micro-op engine design that's native to the current Oryan generation cores but maybe Ventana's micro-op execution engine has something that's valuable to Qualcomm as well.
And so ISAs on modern microprocessors are abstracted away at the actual hardware level by the Micro-ops execution engine desogns that are proprietary to the ones that created them. And the reason that many license from ARM holdings is not just the ISA but the software/OS/Drover ecosystem that's built up over the decades for the ARM ISA ecosystem and that costs many times more than the hardware's costs to develop and maintain over the years. And so the ARM OS/Software/API and driver ecosystem is decades more mature than the RISC-V OS/Software/API and driver ecosystem, and that took years and 100s of billions in investments to get ARM where it is today!
But since RISC-V is royalty free there are hundreds of companies using RISC-V, including Nvidia for it's FALCON(FAst Logic CONtrollers) that are used all over Nvidia's GPUs and other accelerators. And with RISC-V one is free to implement only a subset of the RISC-V ISA or create custom RISC-V ISA extensions unlike ARM holdings where licensees have to implement the entire ARM Licensed ISA regardless of if all the instructions are needed for the task and no ISA extensions allowed.
So maybe Qualcomm is interested in the micro-controller market that's lower margin and that makes RISC-V's Royally Free more attractive! Or Qualcomm, like Nvidia, wants to develop some RISC-V Micro-Controllers for it's own in-house needs and not have to pay for ARM Holdings ISA based Micro-Controller designs. Look at Nvidia's dozens of on GPU die Controllers(Encoder/Decoder Logic,Etc) and because that's Nvidia FALCON RISC-V based that's quite a bit of savings in Royalty Payments and CPU core design payments to ARM Holdings or anyone else because FALCON is Nvidia's In-House IP and that RISC-V ISA is free to use for Nvidia or others to save billions that way.
RISC-V being freely available does not mean that implementations of it will not be patented from here to the Orion nebula and back.
They'll need to license future versions of the ARM ISA and now they know the licensor is hostile.
That's not quite what Raspberry Pi did with the RP2350 (the ARM and RV cores are wholly separate) but they did include the ability to fuse off one side or the other, so I wonder if they'll release a cheaper RV-only version at some point.
Frankly, Ventana seemed like an interesting entry in the space, but I have no idea who would have actually bought their servers at the end of the day. They taped out multiple designs, but none actually seem to exist outside their labs. I don't really see any path to meaningful RISC-V server adoption for at least several more years and by that time Qualcomm could design something on their own, assuming they are serious about re-entering the market. Grabbing the talent and any useful IP/core design components makes the most sense to me, anyway.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-failed-to-buy-sifive
What they might have issues with is finding clients to license it to.
I would love to resurrect my XPS 13s with a durable battery and working in Linux without trigerring the fan. The same for my Lenovo Xs.
which means the M1 was being worked on since at least 2018, I'd bet much earlier than that, for sure much earlier than that if you count silicon which never left the lab.
reminder iphones run on apple silicon since 2010, which means they had to be working on it at least since 2008. they have a lot of experience in silicon design by now.
Sooner or later this industry will have to realize that Softbank doesn't want anyone else making ARM chips.
The difference you perceive is mostly software. Windows and Linux are really just designed for desktop machines first and foremost. MacOS was too, but when they transitioned to Apple Silicon, they replaced a lot of the internals with stuff taken from iOS, and iOS is designed with batter life first and foremost.
Getting the level of battery life out of non-apple laptops is just going to be a long, hard slog of going through the operating systems and auditing *everything* and every design decision for how it affects battery life and how much resources its using.
Is that still true when you consider the whole system power consumption vs performance? I was under the impression that Apple's ram and storage solutions give them a small edge here (at the cost of upgradability / repairability)
The reason an old M1 laptop gets better battery life is almost entirely a software difference.
If you want an example of where Apple's design chops are pretty weak, look at their GPUs: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
The M3 Ultra is putting up some of the saddest OpenCL benches I've ever seen from a 200-300w GPU. The entry-level RTX 5060 Ti runs circles around it with a $400 MSRP and 180w TDP. I truly feel bad for anyone that bought a Mac Studio for AI inference.
Gotta love paying extra for dark silicon, amirite?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have't been using a CUDA-supported machine as a basis of comparison...
Qualcomm may be solely to blame themselves, as they are giving competitors (including Chinese ones) an advantage with the newer ARM chips, while Qualcomm now has to invest in researching and developing an underdeveloped architecture, quickly.
Both Nuvia and Qualcomm had Arm Architecture licenses that allowed them to develop and sell their own Arm-compatible CPUs.
There was no bypassing of license fees.
If Qualcomm had hired the Nuvia engineers before they developed their core at Nuvia, and they developed exactly the same core while employed at Qualcomm, then there would be no question that everyone was obeying the terms of their licenses.
Arm's claim rests on it being ok for Nuvia to sell chips of their own design, but not to sell the design itself, and not to transfer the design as part of selling the company.
Qualcomm is claiming that Arm is refusing to license the v10 architecture to them and refused to license some other TLA cores requiring them to get the Nuvia Custom CPU team to build cores for those products instead.
This explains their expansion into Risc-V it's a hedge against Arm interfering with QC's business.
If I were to guess, Qualcomm wants to replace its various Cortex-M cores with RISC-V equivalents. This saves them money on licensing, reduces their dependency on ARM, and doesn't break customer-facing compatibility.
But more likely, the early product line will meet the same fate as the dog in "Old Yeller" (1957) in a market consolidation push. =3
They're more likely to replace the smaller CPU cores imo.
ARMv8 hardware (other than Apple) only shipped 3-6 years before RV64GC/RVA20, and ARMv9 is only about two years before the equivalent RVA23 -- at least in SBCs/Laptops. Obviously ARMv8 hardware went into mobile devices a lot earlier, though it was often running 32 bit code for the first few years.
It's nothing at all like the maturity lead x86 has over both.
Pretty much everything coming out in 2026 -- including Ventana's Veyron V2 -- is RVA23.
One profile to rule them all.
Currently-shipping applications processors are either RVA20 (plus the B extension in practice) or RVA22 with V as a standard option.
That's not fragmentation, it's just a standard linear progression. Each thing can run all the software from the previous thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
Even most ARM software compilers still cripple the advanced vendor specific asic features simply for stability mitigation. ARM 8/9 was actually a much leaner design. Cheers =3
https://xkcd.com/927/
No one is ever going to design an ISA that is complete and finished forever on Day #1. There are always going to be new data types and new algorithms to support e.g. the current rush to add "AI" support to all ISAs (NPUs, TPUs, whatever you want to call them).
Arm has ARMv9-A following on from ARMv8-A, and they are already up to Armv9.7-A in addition to as many ARMv8-A enhancements.
Intel/AMD have all kinds of add-ons to x86_64, and not even linear e.g. the here now gone now AVX512. Finally here to stay (presumably) in x86-64-v4. And there is already APX and AVX10 to add to that.
There were may great chips that never survived in consumer product spaces. When manufacturers tell chip houses there is a permutation compatibility risk issue, and people take a petulant stance on the feedback... "not my clown... not my circus" as they say.
1. Intel is kept alive by the promise of an integrated NVIDIA RTX SoC.
2. AMD understood something important about the software market, and that was easy backward-compatibility wins over _every_ other feature. Even Intel had to learn this the hard way.
3. 93% of the market is change sensitive... anyone that assumes cross-compiling is on the queue for that sector is greatly mistaken. Note, it took ARM over a decade driven by Googles dominance with mobile to gain traction.
4. Most software libraries will only enable advanced chip features if hardware is detected, and most compiled code simple uses the compatibility subset of compiled features (sure its 3 times slower, but it works everywhere.) No one is going to go through every permutation of an ISA with vendor specific features. The NERF'd subset of features in most Aarch64 and amd64 packages should be enough indication software people won't give a bean about unstable vanity silicon features.
We shall see how RISC-Y plays out in the market. Old Yeller sure looks nervous. =3
There is no X280 hardware available yet for general purchase. There is the HiFive Xara X280 announced in May, but that is believed to be available to SiFive licensees only. The SG2380 was going to have X280s as an NPU alongside P670 main cores, but that's been cancelled as a result of US sanctions on Sophgo. The PIC64-HSPC is a rad-hard chip using the X280 for NASA and other space customers, but will not be cheap -- the RAD750 PowerPC chip it is replacing reportedly costs $200,000 each.
Regulatory capture is something people need to take seriously. Some may shelve product IP for a few years, or set-up parallel factories in other countries without the artificial trade/global-talent barriers.
A standard doesn't have to be perfect, but must be consistent over significant periods of time to matter. Consider what happened to OpenSparc, Cell, IA-64, dojo tiles, and early RISC (Windows NT prototype was ported off by Microsoft.)
The NVIDIA CUDA card kludge wasn't necessarily "better" than something like the M3/M4/M5 at every task. But was economical hardware due to volume pricing, has 92% of the ecosystem, and most software already worked given it isn't walled-off.
Note people tend to avoid buying work, or porting to short-lived hardware. Best of luck, =3
They're a totally different gate count niche than a Cortex-M equivalent.
But switching fully to RISC-V would shut Qualcomm out from QNX and would limit its Android compatibility. And on the Qualcomm chips that I've seen so far, they're really bought in on both QNX and Android. That's why I think this is probably an aquihire more than a desire to ship Ventana's CPU cores.
More like Neoverse-V3: https://www.ventanamicro.com/technology/risc-v-cpu-ip/
Feels kind of unlikely though. Ventana probably ran out of money.
but unfortunately very in-line with the thesis that qualcomm is getting squeezed by a commodifying market where value-add opportunity is shifting outside of the SoC platform.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/startup-key-apple-goog...