If you say which company ARM hates the most now, it might be Qualcomm . When it comes to this matter, many people may be surprised. As a major contributor to the global popularity of ARM in the past ten years, Qualcomm can be said to have made great contributions to the popularization of ARM chips in mobile phones. How can the two companies now be at odds with each other? But in fact, it is ARM's domineering behavior that makes Qualcomm dissatisfied. It even publicly stated that ARM has become a traditional outdated chip architecture, and the future belongs to RISC-V chips.
At the recent RISC-V Summit event, Qualcomm's product management director said that RISC-V is an emerging alternative to the ARM instruction set architecture, and has the opportunity to be used in a range of devices where Qualcomm designs chips, including wearable devices, smartphones, notebooks, and connected cars. According to Qualcomm, starting with the Snapdragon 865 processor in 2019, Qualcomm has actually begun to promote the CPU strategy and roadmap of the entire product portfolio to RISC-V.
Of course, we all know that Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips are actually based on the ARM architecture. It can be said that without the ARM architecture, Qualcomm would not be what it is today. However, Qualcomm itself stated that Qualcomm now uses RISC-V microcontrollers in chips for PCs, mobile devices, wearable devices, connected cars, and AR/VR glasses. These microcontrollers perform low-end hardware management tasks in the background. Qualcomm says it has shipped more than 650 million RISC-V cores and is one of the de facto leaders in RISC-V.
Qualcomm believes that RISC-V has the opportunity to be used in higher value products, not just microcontrollers. Qualcomm said: "Now having a common basic instruction set architecture that can be extended from low-end microcontrollers all the way to high-performance computing and anything in between, it really improves the efficiency of the entire industry." Qualcomm also insinuated ARM, saying that existing traditional architecture solutions do not meet industry requirements. It's obvious that Qualcomm is quite dissatisfied with the ARM architecture, even though Qualcomm's mainstream chips still use ARM architecture chips.
Why do Qualcomm and ARM have such a quarrel, and even let Qualcomm disclose DISS, the chip architecture that made it famous? This also starts with ARM’s recent business strategy. In ARM's latest business strategy, ARM has strictly controlled downstream manufacturers. For example, in the future, manufacturers will be prohibited from freely selecting the GPU core and can only use ARM's own GPU architecture. This means that Qualcomm's exclusive advantage in the GPU part will be gone. In the future, Snapdragon chips will either use ARM architecture in the GPU part; if you use the Adreno architecture GPU, you cannot use the ARM architecture in the CPU part.
In addition to requiring future downstream manufacturers to adopt ARM's own CPU and GPU architecture, ARM also requires semiconductor manufacturers not to use any combination design other than the public version architecture. The cores responsible for various important functions of smartphones, such as NPU and ISP, can only be designed according to the parts provided by ARM. This has a huge impact. For example, Qualcomm, , Huawei, and all had their own ISP chip architecture before, , Google, , and Huawei also had their own NPU designs. If these companies use ARM architecture in their chips in the future, this means that they cannot use other chips that they have developed and designed.
Therefore, ARM is so strong that it will naturally cause dissatisfaction among manufacturers. Qualcomm, which has a higher market share in the chip market and has relatively strong self-research and development capabilities, will naturally bear the brunt. You must know that Qualcomm can maintain its position as the leader of Android flagship chips because of its self-developed chip architectures such as GPU and ISP. If this part can only fully adopt ARM's public version design, then Qualcomm's own advantages will be gone, and the difference with other companies will be very small.
Therefore, it is understandable that Qualcomm publicly supports the RISC-V architecture. After all, the business strategy that ARM is about to implement is indeed too overbearing and can be said to stifle the innovation of manufacturers. This will inevitably force manufacturers to invest in the open source and freer RISC-V architecture.Qualcomm and ARM are currently in a lawsuit. Qualcomm's latest customized Nuvia core uses Qualcomm's own-designed architecture, but it can fully support ARM's ISA instruction set, which has really angered ARM. Now it depends on how many companies will follow Qualcomm’s footsteps and collectively resist ARM. In our opinion, this number should not be small.
