Either you have an extremely broad interpretation of what open source is or you simply ignore all the cases where this didn’t happen or indeed the opposite occurred.
Also I'm not quite sure how much of an advantage being open source is for RISC-V. Unless we’re taking about low cost chips with extremely narrow margins the licensing fee a manufacturer needs to pay ARM is insignificant. Even the price for an ARM architectural license is pocket change compared to the cost it would take to design a competitive core if you’re aiming for data-centers.
A company like ARM (i.e. willing to license their designs and architecture to anyone for a small fee, it's basically behaving like a non-profit compared to many other tech companies) seems like the best case scenario for the industry. With RISC-V why would a company which designed a high-end CPU core license it to anyone instead of trying to maximize their profit/competitive advantage? With Arm at least there something to fallback to accessible for everyone.
You sound like someone from the 90's dismissing Linux.
The bottom line is that ARM represents vendor lock-in and broken market with only one seller. A company can take it upon itself to design a high-end processor for servers and be successful (like Apple did for user machines) but it's certain it won't choose the ARM arch, that would make no sense. Now that the RV arch is established and growing it's inevitable that it will be the arch of choice, because no-one in their right mind is going to tie their hands and donate money to ARM for nothing useful in return.
Yes, CPUs are expensive to design, but it's amazing what a free and functioning market can produce. We're about to find out exactly what.
> You sound like someone from the 90's dismissing Linux.
Software seems to be very different from hardware. How would a company like Red Hat, Canonical or basically almost every enterprise company which primarily relies on Linux/OSS/GNU products make money from RISC-V? The cost of entry is much higher and there is no clear way of building a business around open source RISC-V (yet)
> The bottom line is that ARM represents vendor lock-in and broken market with only one seller
Yes. But why would anyone who which was capable of building a high-end RISC-V core give their design away for free? Unless there is a clear incentive for them to do that it’s objectively worse than the current situation where anyone can license a high-end CPU design from ARM.
> like Apple did for user machines) but it's certain it won't choose the ARM arch
Right, except in the one case where they did choose ARM?
> that would make no sense
Why? As long as the cost of designing such a processor remains very high, there are no open source designs available and it’s cheaper to build on top of what ARM than build it from scratch it makes perfect sense.
I mean in principle I agree with you. It would be great if CPU design was open source, anyone could take a high end core design improve on top of it and then share their changes with everyone but I don’t see a clear path to that. Instead companies might just take what they can from the OSS community and contribute nothing back. ARM seems like a somewhat decent but far from perfect solution for this (as long as it remains independent)
>Right, except in the one case where they did choose ARM?
You mean the M1?
I'm fairly sure this was designed even before the RISC-V base spec, the unprivileged one (no supervisor vs user, or MMU), was ratified. It was ratified in 2019, by the way.
The batch of extensions ratified by the end of 2021 contains important featuresets like vector or hypervisor support.
So, of course they didn't pick RISC-V back then. Yet, nobody in their right mind would pick ARM today.
Leaving aside the merits of the two ISAs, for Apple using ARM for the M1 had the huge advantage unifying all their devices to a single ISA.
Based on just that (and the fact that they own a perpetual license to all things ARM) they would likely make the same choice now and even in a couple of years.
>for Apple using ARM for the M1 had the huge advantage unifying all their devices to a single ISA.
Wait, let me read that again. Oh, so you're saying that Apple wants to unify their ISA... by switching their already ARM smaller/hidden cores to RISC-V?
No I am saying that even if RISC-V was strictly better than ARM Apple would have likely still chosen ARM for the M1 generation as it would be the simplest way to unify their ISAs across their devices.
The Nuvia people had just spent years developing high performance ARM cores (for Apple) and as a small company obviously want a ready market for their designs.
By "nothing in return" I mean if you want to design a CPU from scratch, what exactly are you getting from licensing the ARM arch? Software compatibility? That doesn't mean anything for servers where compatibility is largely a recompile away.
Of course ARM is a huge supplier of IP and their ability to design processors in not question, but they only supply IP for one arch which they control. If you want to design something different you must get ARM's permission and they have proven to be fickle about that.
It's not "boosterism" is a real and hard fact that freedom for the fundamental parts of any class of technology means that a vibrant ecosystem can flourish around it. That's the fundamental difference here and the technical challenges have proven not to be a barrier.
By all accounts Nuvia got substantial help (and probably quite a bit of IP) from Arm and I imagine that would be the case for any architectural licensee - they weren't just get sent a copy of the ISA spec and left to it! So 'nothing in return' just isn't true.
What is the price of an ARM architectural license? I don't think any of us know.
What does it let you do? Not what Qualcomm thought it did, apparently. No exchanging notes with other holders of an ARM architectural license. Wow. Everyone is strictly on their own -- use ARM's cores, or use their own completely internal design, and nothing else.
Assuming ARM wins in court, of course, which is not necessarily going to happen.
If you have your own ASIC design and validation teams targeting the latest nodes, the ARM license is not a major cost to you. Heck, it's probably less than what you pay for your simulator or clock tree compiler. And probably worth it given the high quality support you get.
And if you are not at that level, do you really need a custom architecture? Can you pull it off with your limited resources?
It's not the direct cost of the license that is the big problem with using Arm. It's bullshit you have to deal with, not least the 18 months of time to negotiate the license in the first place.
Why don't Arm have a standard license that you download the PDF, tick the box for what you want, with a standard cost, sign it, and mail it in?
I don't know, but from all accounts from people who have been there, done that, they don't.
As we can see from the current revelation (or at least claim) that despite both Nivia and Qualcomm having "Arm Architectural Licences" they're apparently not allowed to do the thing that was the sole reason for Arm wanting to buy Nuvia i.e. use the core they had designed.
Because Qualcomm - of all companies - would never push the envelope of what their licenses allow them to do?
This is a firm that got endorsements from 22 other companies for their acquisition of Nuvia but apparently somehow forgot to tell the firm that that are legally obliged to inform.
ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law" or whatever BS on the rest of the world, "sanctions" is a nice word that gets thrown around a bit....
Tomorrow USA can force ARM to not sell products to countries on their naughty list. They can do that because of sanctions but what about those countries? why should say IRAN or russia not get to enjoy the fruits of open source because foss/open source does not care about such petty things, in the long run.
If i build a GPL software/hardware, i don't care if iranians or americans or russians or chinese use it. If i was building proprietary one, then i do care.
>With RISC-V why would a company which designed a high-end CPU core license it to anyone instead of trying to maximize their profit/competitive advantage? With Arm at least there something to fallback to accessible for everyone.
> ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law"
Yes but how does that incentivize western companies to invest into RISC-V? I mean any western company would have to comply with US sanctions if they want to do business with US companies regardless of the architecture they are using.
And if they don’t care about any of that they might as well just use ARM anyway without licensing it. It’s not like all the documentation required wasn’t already leaked anyway making it basically equivalent to RISC-V (if you don’t want to play by the (western) rules). In fact it probably make more sense for Iran or Russia to clone ARM/x86 designs because they don’t have enough resources or expertise to create anything even marginally competitive on their own.
> If i build a GPL software/hardware, i don't care if iranians or americans or russians or chinese use it. If i was building proprietary one, then i do care.
> FOSS ?
Unlike in software there seems to be little incentive for companies to opensource their designs. Why would a hardware company which invested millions to design a RISC-V core give it away for free to their competitors? Unless they can monetize it some other way (.e.g like software companies can) there is no incentive for them to do that.
> ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law" or whatever BS on the rest of the world, "sanctions" is a nice word that gets thrown around a bit....
> Tomorrow USA can force ARM to not sell products to countries on their naughty list.
You make it sound like sanctions are arbitrary. The United States may not be perfect and may not always live up to its ideals. But there is an enormous difference between the imperfect democracies of the liberal world order (eg. US, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc) and the autocracies or downright totalitarian crypto-fascism in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Both sides are imperfect, but they are not equally imperfect.
I want RISC-V to succeed. I believe in the freedom that FOSS delivers. The fact that dictators will be able to use these tools to oppress their citizens is unfortunate consequence of this freedom.
>ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law" or whatever BS on the rest of the world, "sanctions" is a nice word that gets thrown around a bit....
RISC-V Foundation timely moved to Switzerland before this became an issue.
From what I heard from my contacts, RISC-V did so to accommodate Chinese companies which were deeply concerned that US export restrictions would become an issue; RISC-V is huge in China.
Also I'm not quite sure how much of an advantage being open source is for RISC-V. Unless we’re taking about low cost chips with extremely narrow margins the licensing fee a manufacturer needs to pay ARM is insignificant. Even the price for an ARM architectural license is pocket change compared to the cost it would take to design a competitive core if you’re aiming for data-centers.
A company like ARM (i.e. willing to license their designs and architecture to anyone for a small fee, it's basically behaving like a non-profit compared to many other tech companies) seems like the best case scenario for the industry. With RISC-V why would a company which designed a high-end CPU core license it to anyone instead of trying to maximize their profit/competitive advantage? With Arm at least there something to fallback to accessible for everyone.