Ampere says no changes to its Arm licensing as it readies new chips Arm-based server chip outfit Ampere's chief product officer says its licensing with Arm is not changing, as the company prepares to launch the latest processors built with its own fully custom core design. Ampere celebrated the fifth anniversary of its founding this month by former Intel president Renée James, and in that time …
It's particularly interesting, I think, that a cloud processor design company has come out and said that Arm has not indicated that they want to alter their agreements : it adds weight to the idea that Arm (and allegedly its string-puller, Apple) are particularly fearful of Nuvia's design prowess.
IF it turns out to be that Arm are directing their ire solely at Qualcomm and one or more of its closely associated OEMs, that is still going to have a huge impact on the industry.
Yep, the fact that Ampere hasn't been notified of the changes in licensing Qualcomm claims other licensees have makes Qualcomm's claims less likely to be true in my book.
Surely if ARM was notifying its licensees of such a major change to its licensing, one of them would make some noise. If they fear doing so on the record, they'd at least be willing to contact some tech site and let them know on background. That would be a pretty major scoop if a couple ARM licensees told The Reg this so they could write an article that Qualcomm's claims were confirmed by multiple sources at companies with ARM licenses! So the fact no such articles have been written by anyone is telling.
You think Apple is behind this? They haven't owned a piece of ARM for a long time, how are they going to exert that type of influence over their operations that even their actual owner at Softbank's Vision Fund is powerless to override? Talk about a conspiracy theory!
If anything Qualcomm SoCs with Nuvia cores would benefit Apple. People aren't buying iPhones because their CPUs are faster, so they won't leave iPhone if Android phones are able to match their performance. ARM based PCs being competitive with x86 PCs would be a good thing for Apple, as it would force Microsoft and Windows devs to treat ARM/Windows as a first class citizen, which would help Mac sales (as they'd be a viable alternative for people who "must run Windows" at times like x86 Macs have been)
At worst Nuvia is a non-issue for Apple.
I can't take any credit for the conspiracy theory - it's Rob Enderle's :
https://www.technewsworld.com/story/arm-vs-qualcomm-litigation-makes-no-sense-177352.html
"At worst Nuvia is a non-issue for Apple."
I don't think that's true. It was widely reported that Apple was... niggled when a significant group of their best designers left to start Nuvia. Oddly, Apple said at the time that they weren't going to sue them (for allegedly taking design plans), but they'd like a share, thank you very much - that seemed kind, in a Cray brothers kind of way. And just because Apple are not still a part owner of Arm, doesn't mean that they're not still a preferential and influential customer. [Which is the bigger revenue producer for Arm, I wonder, Apple or Qualcomm? Perhaps there's not much in it.]
OEMs must have been screaming at Arm and processor design companies for an M1 (now M2) equivalent for consumer tech - since the Summer of 2020.
As for Micro$oft, they seem to be going all out for DaaS - they don't seem to be interested in Windows for Arm, or Office for Arm, beyond a few pieces of hardware they've made. Any interest for ARM that Micro$oft has will be in the datacenter.
Arm ought to be rubbing their hands in anticipation, rather than trying to force Qualcomm/Nuvia to destroy all their workings.
I found the following statement ito be inaccurate or misleading:
“You don't want multiple threads running on a single core when you're running in a shared cloud environment, because that just creates contention. You put two people on the same core, and then they're fighting over resources.”
In fact, it is beneficial to run different threads of a same process or the threads that share same L1/L2/L3 to be on the different hardware threads of a CPU core. I am not sure how this can be discounted for the cloud native applications unless these applications themselves are single threaded or they do not have any shared data.
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