>Qualcomm and Apple are not going to ditch ARM any time soon
Just two notes:
- Qualcomm is a top-tier RISC-V member and has an ugly lawsuit going on with ARM about Nuvia's IP. They did multiple presentations in RISC-V Summit where they were very clear about their intent to move to RISC-V.
- Apple has been hiring RISC-V experts for a while (now years). Keywords included performance and optimization.
So do not count on either to remain faithful to ARM.
>What I’m saying is that RISC-V is a hypothetical contender until manufacturers adopt it.
As per RISC-V's foundation presentation in RISC-V Summit December 2022, RISC-V had at that point already shipped 10 billion cores.
That's some serious manufacturing, and we're talking about what already happened. It's safe to assume much more of that is ongoing.
I can guarantee that not Qualcomm, neither Apple, will ditch ARM any time soon.
It’s any company’s duty to explore alternatives. Intel used to make ARM CPUs, Mediatek makes MIPS chips, etc.
It does not mean that it is possible to completely reverse course in less than a decade.
Qualcomm is definitely not going to dramatically reverse its core business direction to go full RISC-V in less than a decade. It makes no sense, especially after dumping $1.5B in Nuvia.
ARM’s case against Qualcomm is a licensing one. So you suggest that Qualcomm may be ditching ARM because of an argument about licensing ARM, which would make no sense whatsoever. It would be akin to Intel ditching AMD64 and adopting some exotic architecture, because of a disagreement about cross-licensing.
Apple just switched to ARM, of which they have a perpetual license. They are also getting into display production and modem design. Their aim is to control the production line to the last bit, they do not need to be compatible with anything else, so why would they ditch ARM any time soon? It would make no financial sense.
> As per RISC-V's foundation presentation in RISC-V Summit December 2022, RISC-V had at that point already shipped 10 billion cores.
There were 7 billion ARM cores shipped in the last quarter of 2020 alone, many of them inside actual consumer products, not SBCs or niche platforms. Virtually all portable, IoT, and in-car devices run on ARM. ~14% of laptops run ARM and the share is growing, same goes for datacenters. And most importantly, software support for RISC-V is still in its infancy, with no large scale consumer products currently available.
This is to say that RISC-V has a very long road ahead, and it is not going to topple ARM dominance any time soon, simply because the economics of it make no sense.
That’s why I asked you to give me a single example of a mass produced consumer product using RISC-V cores. You know, like widely available phones, cars, routers, etc.
Get off your bubble. SBCs are a tiny fraction of the CPU market.
Just two notes:
- Qualcomm is a top-tier RISC-V member and has an ugly lawsuit going on with ARM about Nuvia's IP. They did multiple presentations in RISC-V Summit where they were very clear about their intent to move to RISC-V.
- Apple has been hiring RISC-V experts for a while (now years). Keywords included performance and optimization.
So do not count on either to remain faithful to ARM.
>What I’m saying is that RISC-V is a hypothetical contender until manufacturers adopt it.
As per RISC-V's foundation presentation in RISC-V Summit December 2022, RISC-V had at that point already shipped 10 billion cores.
That's some serious manufacturing, and we're talking about what already happened. It's safe to assume much more of that is ongoing.