Go RISC-V phones please!! Omg. I really hope RISC-V goes mainstream because of this.
Let’s wait and see how this develops…
I hope this isn’t a cartoony scheme driven by Apple honeydicking Arm with the M-series processors to tank PC and Android.
Arm owner softbank wants more mulah, want line goes up.
Qualcomm thinks this is not allowed in their license contract.
Without having read the contract, I think Qualcomm has a strong case, seams arm wants this to be settled before court in December. Qualcomm also thinks they have a strong case, so they say let the courts begin.
But it doesn’t matter if it’s an American court, because Qualcomm is American, softbank is Asian, arm is European. So, you have home turf advantage
So typical capitalism horseshit.
Good. Qualcomm refuses to make it easy to run linux on their hardware. Instead they try to hide basic information about their processors and chips in the name of selling a license for every little thing.
And so is Arm, especially their Mali drivers.
While some go “um, ackchually, you don’t need a GPU driver for your hobby project of using a cheap SBC to run emulators”, it does affect usability a lot. Yeah, Arm also pointing at the licensors and so are licensors to Arm in this case, but it’s still not good that the only SBCs with relatively good GPU drivers for Linux are made by Raspberry Pi, and in all other case, you either need to pirate the drivers (!), use the tool that allows regular Linux to use Android GPU drivers, or just use the framebuffer-only driver with heavy limitations.
I agree.
Oh no, not copilot!
Anyway…
While every comment here seems to scream “end patents”, arm has less patent bs than other tech (rounded corners) meant to sue/prevent use. Arm works hard on developing and improving architecture and designs to offer licenses at a compelling price. Qualcomm paying as much as other licensees should be preferable to Qualcomm than bankruptcy.
Oh so they aren’t as shitty as other companies so it is all good? Sounds like horseshit to me. Patents on a quickly changing area like computer technology are pretty asinine hence why people don’t like them.
Also there is nothing preventing them from changing their behavior and turning into patent trolls in the future. In fact, enshitification pretty much guarantees they will at some point in the future.
Qualcomm paying as much as other licensees should be preferable to Qualcomm than bankruptcy.
Not saying this is wrong, but where do you get it from? The article just states that ARM considers Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia a breach of license. Both companies held ARM licenses before. What’s the issue with such a purchase?
Truly yes, but RISC-V.
Yeah. The crowd rooting for Qualcomm has never worked with them
ARM has it’s problems, but they aren’t in the wrong here
Tech patents are ridiculous. Let’s end them or reduce them to 1-3 years with no renewal. Then all that’s left is the specific copyright to the technology, not lingering webs of patents that don’t make any sense anyway to anyone with detailed knowledge of the tech. All they’re good for is big companies using legal methods to stop innovation and competition. Tech moves too fast for long patents and is too complex for patent examiners or courts to understand what is really patentable. So it comes down to who has the most money for lawyers.
Seeing things like “slide to unlock”, “rounded corners”, and “scroll bouncing” are all patentable is ridiculous.
Yeah, but another big issue is that big companies can afford to bribe or buy out the patent holders in the first place. Ideally, the patent holders would benefit the most from everyone making their tech, but instead they benefit the most from one company being the exclusive manufacturer and highest bidder.
The act of an agreement asking a patent holder not to sell to other manufacturers in itself should be illegal.
Yeah, making patents nontransferable would solve that. Ultimately, getting rid of most would be good, but if we have to keep them, then they should be dissolved if a company fails or is bought out because obviously the patent itself wasn’t enough to make a product that was viable. So everyone should get the chance to use the patent. The whole purpose of a patent vs keeping tech proprietary until the product is released was to benefit society once the patent expires. Otherwise, it makes more sense for companies to keep inventions secret if they aren’t just stockpiling them like they do now.
A risky move… Or should I say… A RISCV move…
“risc architecture is gonna change everything”
It really did.
FYI, ARM stands for Advanced RISC Machines.
And before that “Acorn RISC Machines”.
We had Acorn Archimedes systems at school that ran RISC OS.
It actually did, but not in a way people expected at the time that movie was made. It changed a lot underneath the hood.
Hack the planet!
Year of the riscv desktop
year of the linux riscv desktop
It’s a quote from a film
For a firm that already have their own core designs that simply use the ARM instruction set, it might be easier to adapt to RISC-V. For a firm that licenses ARM cores on the other hand…
You should say that, yes, very hopefully much so.
The amount of IP money grubbing in the IT industry is able to literally make millions out of sand, this is just more of it.
Not necessarily “out of sand”. IP is basically putting a price tag on a person for them to say “Yes, I consent”. In other words, technofeudalism.
I may be off base but I think that might be referencing what the computer chips are made of…
Think you’re right lol
This seems like a tactic that might win a battle but lose the war. Reminds me of Unity.
What happened with Unity in the end? Did they back down?
the fact that you know they fucked up but don’t know how they fixed it says it all.
even if they did “fix” it, public opinion has been settled and nobody will trust them for awhile.
Good. Godot exists. Or even that weird engine from Amazon (?) they open sourced. You could make a Unity competitor out of that. Just create an asset store for it and sell stuff, give other creators a decent cut and they will come.
Yeah, iirc, at first they tried to downplay the change, then they paused it, then they walked it back entirely. I think that last step happened relatively recently, even.
But IMO the damage was done from just trying to alter the deal like that.
And, for me personally, I (naively) thought that ARM was an open standard. I opposed the Nvidia purchase because I thought they would do their corporate bullshit to kill off competition or for greed and thought that it getting blocked meant it would be free of corporate bullshit. This action makes it clear that it’s already got some of that going on and ARM has been mentally re-filed to a spot beside x86 and its derivatives.
Though now I’m wondering if that’s the whole point. Do some shitty corporate stuff so that the next time someone wants to buy them out, there isn’t as much opposition and the current owners and C-suite can cash out.
The free market is going very well here
This is 100% capitalism. It’s not free market to have a goverment-enforced monopoly.
This is textbook late stage free market ideals at work. This is how the free market always ends.
X -
The system is broken.✅ - The system is working exactly as intended and must be destroyed.
Problem is that most people who say that, have nothing to replace that works better.
Liquid democratic socialism
Yeah the system that actually exists, capitalism.
That sounds like obligatory old movie quote.
Light switch rave!
The Cheat is grounded!
When did it start?
Sorry have you been around to observe a lot of free markets ending?
There are lots of different kinds of markets, like phone market, grocery market, goldsmith market, etc.
The governments have to interfere in many markets all the time, that there aren’t monopolies forming or Price-fixing agreement be done, which would lead to prices go ridiculously high, or last companies in markets fucking up taking tons of knowhow with them.
Gestures wildly at current state of things
Yes but the statement was “this is how free markets always end”. And I’m just wondering if the commenter has actually been around to see “free markets ending.”
That’s a fair comment I guess…but it’s the reality of the game. The US was a free market through it’s early history and today is the result of that.
It’s just how the free market ends, always. It starts with a few winners consolidating, abusing their monopoly and buying their government protections, and poof…welcome to late stage capitalism.
“Free Market” people always disregard human nature at it’s worst. There will always be people and orgs that game the system. You simply can’t prevent that. The US is absolutely an end game free market.
I think they were less talking about them ending as much as them tending towards the monopoly state over time.
Got it. Saying “this is how free markets always end” if they meant “free markets tends to move towards monopolies” confused me.
You are correct. There would be no copyrights or patents in a free market.
Yeah, the huge companies would dominate over small companies even more than they already do.
Copyrights and patents are literally government enforced monopolies for huge companies. Without them, there would be a lot more competition.
Really? Calling it a government enforced monopoly seems very disingenuous.
Good luck trying to make a movie without Disney stealing it or making an invention with really effective solar panels or something without the biggest companies stealing it and bankrupt the original creator.
Copyright and patents protect everyone involved in creation and while there are a LOT of problems with the systems. Removing it entirely seems like the biggest overcorrection possible.
Companies such as Disney have armies of lawyers to enforce their monopolies. Copyright and patent laws are designed exclusively for the rich.
Disney can very well “steal” other people’s work and get away with it under this system. Without such laws, everyone else would be able to “steal” from Disney as well, which would level the playing field.
The playing field won’t be level without patents or copyright. Why would I an average idiot make or invent something if the exact second I show the world my invention someone takes it and mass-produces it within a week? I have no chance to raise capital to make the invention myself if you can already buy it in every store. The Chinese manufacturing industry essentially does this already but to a lesser degree. Imagine if every company did that. No small companies or individuals would stand a chance against Goliath.
And again the word monopoly is very misleading in this discussion, especially when it comes to copyright. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from making superhero movies just because Marvel/Disney owns a lot of superhero rights. You are just not allowed to make an exact copy of their movie but you are allowed to make similar movies all day long.
Another example is a professional photographer. Do you really think that they should be awarded no rights whatsoever to the photograph they took?
The same obviously applies to huge companies as well. Why make a movie if it’s available for free download literally everywhere.
How do you propose that the makers of content, inventions and products get paid? Donations? Get real, that won’t happen.
Or trade secrets. “Perfect information” is a bitch. Not to speak of “perfectly rational actors”: Say goodbye to advertisement, too, we’d have to outlaw basically all of it.
To be fair, we absolutely should outlaw at least 99% of all currently practiced forms of advertising and make it so that new forms of advertising have to be whitelisted by a panel of psychiatrists, sociologists, environmentalists and urban planners before they’re allowed.
Trade secrets don’t need to be enforced much by law. You can create an ad hoc trade secret regime by simply keeping your secret between a few key employees. As it happens, there are some laws that go beyond that to help companies keep the secret, but that only extends something that could happen naturally.
To get closer to the free market there would have to be a duty to disclose any- and everything that’s now a trade secret, no matter how easily kept. To not just get closer but actually get there we all would need to be telepathic. As said, perfect information is a bitch of a concept.
Being free to innovate and keep your own ideas to yourself sounds like it should be part of the free market though.
Forcing people to disclose their (mental) secrets seems bizarre.
I’m not arguing for any policies, just explaining what would be necessary to make the theoretical model of the free market a reality in actual reality: It assumes perfect information and perfectly rational actors, it’s a tall order.
Are you telling me that the axioms behind the simplistic model are wrong??
shocked-pikachu.jpgIt’s not so much that they’re wrong is that they’re impossible in practice. Axioms, by their very nature, cannot be justified from within the system that they serve so “true” or “false” aren’t really applicable.
The model does have its justification, “given these axioms, we indeed get perfect allocation of resources”, that’s not wrong it’s a mathematical truth, and there’s a strain of liberalism (ordoliberalism) which specifically says “the state should regulate so that the actually existing market more closely approximates this mythical free market unicorn”, which is broadly speaking an immensely sensible take and you’ll have market socialists nodding in agreement, yep, that’s a good idea.
And then there’s another strain (neoliberalism) which basically says “lul we’ll tell people that ‘free market’ means ‘unregulated market’ so we can be feudal lords and siphon off infinite amounts of resources from the plebs”.
Wrong as in not sound. An argument can be valid assuming its assumptions are true. The argument is the model, which really is a set of arguments. Its assumptions which are taken axiomatically are as you say impossible, therefore they are not true (which I called wrong). So the argument is not sound. I’m not saying anything different than what you said really, just used informal language. ☺️
Its assumptions are inconsistent with the conditions in the material world, but that doesn’t make the model itself unsound. A model is not an argument, definitely not in the political sense, it’s just a model.
You can also include the model in the material world, as was done, at the very least, when the paper introducing it was published and that doesn’t make the material world unsound, either: The model lives in organic computation machines which implement paraconsistent logic in a way that does not, contrary to an assumption popular among those computation machines, make those paradoxes real in the material realm they’re embedded in.
Everything is, ultimately, sound, because the universe, nay, cause and effect itself, does not just shatter willy-nilly. “ex falso quodlibet” would have rather interesting implications, physics-wise. For one, an infinite amount of Boltzmann brains would haunt an infinite amount of physicists.
What’s government enforced about it? Is ARM the only allowed chip designer for cellphones?
Copyrights and patents
That’s not a government enforced monopoly. A government enforced monopoly means nobody else is allowed in the market. Like utility companies.
Lots of Utilities are consumer cooperatives which is funnily enough Socialist, but the people working there wouldn’t like to hear that.
Nobody else is allowed to sell these phones without licenses
But they can sell phones.
That’s called “monopolistic competition”. They can’t sell the same phone they were already making.
Lol copyrights and patents are capitalism
I agree
license enforcement is a thing because if someone bypasses it you can sue them, which is a government interaction. Technically, claiming X means nothing if there’s no one that enforces your claim.
Yes but that rule protects you the same as it does them. They can be a monopoly if nobody else can get their chips sold but they cannot be a government enforced monopoly unless nobody else is allowed to sell chips.
That’s your interpretation and that’s fine but I understand that they have a monopolies because their patent is broad enough to be hard to create alternatives, and the patent is government enforced. That’s how I understood it at least.
In any case, I don’t really mind if you want to keep using your interpretation, I was just trying to rationalise what the other commenter said and explain what I though was their point of view to say what they said.
Have a great day.
That’s not just my opinion. That’s the definition going straight back to Adam Smith.
thanks, proprietary licenses.
can we finally move to open standards now or will these fucks keep on losing money just to spite foss? are they that afraid we read some of their source code?
Laughs in OpenPOWER
RiscV! RiscV!
I’m hoping for a nice warm x86_64 phone.
IA64 phones would have been pretty hot too!
Hopefully Qualcomm takes the hint and takes this opportunity to develop a high performance RISC V core. Don’t just give the extortionists more money, break free and use an open standard. Instruction sets shouldn’t even require licensing to begin with if APIs aren’t copyrightable. Why is it OK to make your own implentation of any software API (see Oracle vs. Google on the Java API, Wine implementing the Windows API, etc) but not OK to do the same thing with an instruction set (which is just a hardware API). Why is writing an ARM or x86 emulator fine but not making your own chip? Why are FPGA emulator systems legal if instruction sets are protected? It makes no sense.
The other acceptable outcome here is a Qualcomm vs. ARM lawsuit that sets a precedence that instruction sets are not protected. If they want to copyright their own cores and sell the core design fine, but Qualcomm is making their own in house designs here.
takes this opportunity to develop a high performance RISC V core
They might. This would never be open sourced though. Best case scenario is the boost they would provide to the ISA as a whole by having a company as big as Qualcomm backing it.
RISC V is just an open standard set of instructions and their encodings. It is not expected nor required for implementations of RISC V to be open sourced, but if they do make a RISC V chip they don’t have to pay anyone to have that privilege and the chip will be compatible with other RISC V chips because it is an open and standardized instruction set. That’s the point. Qualcomm pays ARM to make their own chip designs that implement the ARM instruction set, they aren’t paying for off the shelf ARM designs like most ARM chip companies do.
The RISCV instruction set IS open source. What they’d do to ratfuck it is lock the bootloader or something.
BUT Imagine if it was open sourced. God, Gods, by the nine, would be heaven.
If Qualcomm released a FOSS RISC-V IP core that would’ve required spending multiple millions on hardware engineer salaries (no chance in hell), I would:
- Spontaneously ejaculate
- Pull out my FPGA
Simping for Qualcomm is definitely not a take i expected
In the mobile Linux scene, Qualcomm chips are some of the best supported ones. I don’t love everything Qualcomm does, but the Snapdragon 845 makes for a great Linux phone and has open source drivers for most of the stack (little thanks to Qualcomm themselves).
Qualcomm is one of the worst monopolists in any industry though. They are widely known to have a stranglehold on all mobile device development
Saying an ISA is just a hardware API vastly oversimplifies what an architecture is. There is way more to it than just the instruction set, because you can’t have an instruction set without also defining the numbers and types of registers, the mapping of memory and how the CPU interacts with it, the input/output model for the system, and a bunch of other features like virtual memory, addressing modes etc. Just to give an idea, the ARM reference is 850 pages long.
APIs can be complex too. Look at how much stuff the Win32 API provides from all the kernel calls, defined data structures/types, libraries, etc. I would venture a guess that if you documented the Win32 API including all the needed system libraries to make something like Wine, it would also be 850 pages long. The fact remains that a documented prototype for a software implementation is free to reimplement but a documented prototype for a hardware implementation requires a license. This makes no sense from a fairness perspective. I’m fine with ARM not giving away their fully developed IP cores which are actual implementations of the ARM instruction set, but locking third parties from making their own compatible designs without a license is horribly anticompetitive. I wish standards organizations still had power. Letting corporations own de-facto “standards” is awful for everyone.
Don’t just give the extortionists more money
Or maybe they were just trying to pay a lot less money, and then they got caught at their little trick.
Do you know how much money you have to pay to make a RISC V chip? Even less than that, since it’s free
Development is never free, especially, if you have to build new knowhow and can not build upon the one they have built at development of ARM chips.
If it’s that’s easy / cheap then why have they not?
This is a big ol’ game of bluff from both sides. So, according to you, Qualcomm should call their bluff?
They would need a new core design
Wonder how long that’d take, hmm?
By that logic every company would just run on linux. Free to use ≠ free to implement and support.
You have not read the article.
We shall break into the desktop and laptop market! Let’s start by severing ties with one of the most successful companies to do that so far.
Apple?
Folks, grab your popcorn.
God, I know exactly the sketch
