Qualcomm takes RISC on Arm alternative with Ventana acquisition Qualcomm could soon be serving up RISC-V cores alongside its custom Arm ones following the acquisition of Ventana Micro Systems on Wednesday. Founded in 2018, Ventana has developed several generations of high-performance RISC-V-based CPU designs aimed at datacenter and enterprise applications. The terms of the acquisition …
It's all well and good to have more Arm and or RISC-V gear available, or at least in the proverbial pipeline.
But what's the plan for software support, starting with the OS these things are intended to run. And, what are Qualcomm prepared to do to help it happen.
I imagine there's already some Linux kernel support, BSD too, but that's just a start. And CPU cores are not a complete system -- firmware, buses, memory, nics, storage, etc. have to be accounted for and driven too.
This is especially true when you don’t own all the software. Look how long it took Google to push Android to 64-bit only which they ostensibly own but of course contains heaps of libraries that will have needed porting. Those ports are not necessarily difficult, but they are still work and still collaborative effort on somebody else’s code.
It took Arm 10 years to gain a foothold in the datacenter, so expect RISC-V to have a similar battle.
I don't understand the argument re. 32 or 64 bits of Android for ARM, which was a very different beast to x86 and x86_64, but the libraries and core OS were never the issue. Most of the work for any particular platform had to be done by the manufacturers, and many of them would go with the cheapest SoC out there and do little or no updates after releasing. Even then, I don't think that many phones would have benefitted from a 64-bit OS before memory became cheap enough.
Yep, it's the ISA – industry standard architecture – around the chips that you need to get traction. Even Apple hasn't tried to create its own.
The licensing costs for ARM versus RISC-V pale into comparison with the costs of customising the design and developing the controls. The real ARM versus RISC-V battle is still being fought at lower levels and this is where single architecture system SoCs, say for switches, may offer advantages.
But this could be just another "buy the competition, extract the IP and shutdown" deals.
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