Question Qualcomm's first Nuvia based SoC - Hamoa

[poke01]

Qualcomm's working on a 2024 PC chip codename "Hamoa" with up to 12 (8P+4E).

Said to the same cache layout as M1. large private L1$, per-cluster L2$ (cluster = 4 cores, 12MB for every cluster) and a lot of LLC.

source:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1589405172979339264

 

[Doug S]

Apple falling behind in GPU efficiency might have something to do with this:

https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/23/apple-chip-gpu-blunder/

 

[richardskrad]

The Information: Apple silicon drama dates to the exit of a key engineer | Philip Elmer‑DeWitt

From Wayne Ma's "Inside Apple’s War for Chip Talent" ($) posted Friday.

www.ped30.com

Interviews with more than two dozen former Apple employees and a review of legal filings show that Apple has lost dozens of key people to chip startups and more-established silicon companies since 2019. Collectively, this information provides the most complete picture to date of how Apple’s secretive silicon group operates and the behind-the-scenes drama that has unfolded since the departure of Gerard Williams III, the Apple executive responsible for the central processor inside iPhones, who left to create his own chip startup, Nuvia, in 2019.

“The gains in Apple’s CPU performance over the last few years have been very minor and mostly due to improvements in chip manufacturing rather than Apple’s chip design,” said Dylan Patel, chief analyst at research firm SemiAnalysis. “Since Williams left, Apple’s CPU performance gains have slowed significantly.”

Apple sued Williams six months after he left, accusing him of using its intellectual property at his new venture and of poaching key chip engineers to work at Nuvia while he was still employed at Apple. Earlier this year, Apple made similar accusations against Rivos, another chipmaker that has lured away key Apple silicon engineers.

People familiar with the two startups say the departures have had a deeply personal impact on [Apple SVP JohnySrouji] and his top lieutenant, Sribalan Santhanam, given their friendships with the former Apple employees who left for Nuvia and Rivos. They have also created tensions with a pair of venture capitalists—Lip-Bu Tan and Amarjit Gill—who are investors in both startups. Tan, a powerful figure in the chip industry who sits on the board of Intel, is closely linked to Apple as a key supplier of software tools for chip design, while Gill worked briefly at Apple after it bought his former startup, P.A. Semi, which helped Apple get its start in chips. Tan’s and Gill’s investments in Rivos haven’t been previously reported.
Qualcomm, which now owns Nuvia, declined to comment. Williams and representatives for Rivos, Tan and Gill didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. In legal responses, lawyers for both Williams and Rivos have claimed the Apple lawsuits are baseless.

My take: Ma, a reporter relentless in his search for ways to take Apple down a notch, pegs this story to -- and blames the behind-the-scenes drama for -- a "snafu" that feels blown out of proportion:

Apple planned a generational leap for the graphics processor in the latest version of its high-end smartphones, the iPhone 14 Pro. But engineers were too ambitious with adding new features, and early prototypes drew more power than what the company had expected based on software simulations. That could have hurt battery life and made the device too hot, according to two people with direct knowledge of the incident. Because Apple discovered the mistake late in development, it had to base the graphics processor in its iPhone 14 Pro line—which powers the phone’s user interface, games and everything else visible on its screen—largely on the design of the chip that went into last year’s iPhone model, according to four people familiar with the matter.

 

[FlameTail]

Report: Google looked at buying Nuvia before Qualcomm acquisition

Before Qualcomm made the winning $1.4 billion acquisition, Google and other tech companies were also interested in buying Nuvia...

9to5google.com

Apparently, Google wanted to buy Nuvia.

 

[FlameTail]

As Arm plays chicken with Qualcomm, both have a lot to lose

High risk means high reward ... well, usually

www.theregister.com

One interesting said in this article is that ARM will suffer a greater or lesser loss, irrespective of if they lose or win the lawsuit.

 

[Doug S]

Unless the dueling lawsuits are resolved before then, Qualcomm might not be able to sell it and even if they can OEMs might shy away for fear of being sued by ARM or it being pulled off the market by a judge's ruling at some point.

 

[FlameTail]

What is LLC ?

 

[FlameTail]

Said to the same cache layout as M1. large private L1$, per-cluster L2$ (cluster = 4 cores, 12MB for every cluster) and a lot of LLC

How does these cache counts compare to Apple A16/M2/M1 Max ?

 

[FlameTail]

Unless the dueling lawsuits are resolved before then, Qualcomm might not be able to sell it and even if they can OEMs might shy away for fear of being sued by ARM or it being pulled off the market by a judge's ruling at some point.

ARM is shooting themselves in the foot here. Even worse, they want Qualcomm to destroy the Nuvia IP. WHAT!?

That Nuvia IP might very well be the key for ARM to break into the PC market with full force and end the reign of x86.

What is ARM thinking ?

 

[Thala]

ARM is shooting themselves in the foot here. Even worse, they want Qualcomm to destroy the Nuvia IP. WHAT!?

That Nuvia IP might very well be the key for ARM to break into the PC market with full force and end the reign of x86.

What is ARM thinking ?

I would assume ARM was forced into this by their owner, because Softbank surely appreciates making quick money.

 

[igor_kavinski]

What is LLC ?

Last level cache.

A Primer On Last-Level Cache Memory For SoC Designs

Eliminate system bottlenecks and improve efficiency by using a cache between functional blocks and external memory.

semiengineering.com

 

[A///]

I would assume ARM was forced into this by their owner, because Softbank surely appreciates making quick money.

most drugs are illegal in japan even common otc medication in the western world. they mus tbe hallucinating on something else.

 

[Roland00Address]

ARM is shooting themselves in the foot here. Even worse, they want Qualcomm to destroy the Nuvia IP. WHAT!?

That Nuvia IP might very well be the key for ARM to break into the PC market with full force and end the reign of x86.

What is ARM thinking ?

A tool they do not control is not a tool that makes them money. They may make some money but it would be a fraction of what they could make, if Qualcomm figured a way to skirt the licensing arrangement. This is because ARM makes more money the larger the core they sell.

 

[KompuKare]

I would assume ARM was forced into this by their owner, because Softbank surely appreciates making quick money.

So much for Japanese companies taking a long term view.
Yes, the may want to re-negotiate the royalties, but killing of the most promising ARM core (outside of Apple) would be to their long-term loss.

 

[Doug S]

So much for Japanese companies taking a long term view.
Yes, the may want to re-negotiate the royalties, but killing of the most promising ARM core (outside of Apple) would be to their long-term loss.

ARM is not owned by Softbank but by the Vision Fund, which Softbank founded and owns a large share of (Saudi Arabia's public investment fund owns the largest chunk) It basically operates like a venture capital fund, so high risk high reward strategies like what ARM appears to be doing (if Qualcomm's claims are true) fit right in.

The reason (founder/chairman) Son is a multibillionaire is he was a very early investor in Alibaba, and made something like a 3000x return on millions invested, so he knows about high risk high reward investments!

 

[FlameTail]

Meet Startup Chiplet Designer Eliyan And Their NuLink Interconnect Tech - PC Perspective

Meet Startup Chiplet Designer Eliyan And Their NuLink Interconnect Tech It's a little early to sound the demise of TSMC, but it does look like they might have

pcper.com

I want Qualcomm to use this technology in their Nuvia SoCs. Ideally, I hope Qualcomm uses this to implement high bandwidth Unified Memory like Apple does in their M chips

 

[FlameTail]

And I also hope they adopt a sensible naming scheme "Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3" is bad enough. With a large Apple M1-like SoC of that type, there is going to be various SKUs with different frequencies and core counts.

 

[poke01]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1593029503240245252

They say 2023 but most likely early 2024. Intel should be wary.

 

[senttoschool]

ARM is shooting themselves in the foot here. Even worse, they want Qualcomm to destroy the Nuvia IP. WHAT!?

That Nuvia IP might very well be the key for ARM to break into the PC market with full force and end the reign of x86.

What is ARM thinking ?

You need to understand how ARM works.

ARM licenses two things mainly:

1. The ARM ISA
2. Core and IP designs

Apple only license the ISA for Apple Silicon. Qualcomm licenses both the ISA and core designs. Qualcomm pays ARM money to license their core designs. With Nuvia, Qualcomm won't have to pay ARM for core designs anymore.

In addition, if Nuvia dominates ARM designs in performance, then companies such as Mediatek won't be able to compete because people will want to buy Nuvia-based devices. Mediatek also uses ARM core designs and pays a fee to ARM by device sold.

Licensing core designs is much more profitable than just licensing the ISA for ARM.

Nuvia is a huge threat to ARM.

 

[Thibsie]

You need to understand how ARM works.

ARM licenses two things mainly:

1. The ARM ISA
2. Core and IP designs

Apple only license the ISA for Apple Silicon. Qualcomm licenses both the ISA and core designs. Qualcomm pays ARM money to license their core designs. With Nuvia, Qualcomm won't have to pay ARM for core designs anymore.

In addition, if Nuvia dominates ARM designs in performance, then companies such as Mediatek won't be able to compete because people will want to buy Nuvia-based devices. Mediatek also uses ARM core designs and pays a fee to ARM by device sold.

Licensing core designs is much more profitable than just licensing the ISA for ARM. Hence, if Nuvia designs are as good as Apple's, then ARM will lose a huge customer in Qualcomm, and will lose royalties from companies like Mediatek due to Nuvia dominating non-Apple sales.

Nuvia is a huge threat to ARM.

Ok but in the past, didn't QC produce their own core designs ? If so, that would just be back to a precious situation and at that time ARM wasn't annoyed that much so...

 

[LightningZ71]

There were multiple "tiers" to the core design license. ARM cores (at least used to be) are like lego blocks to some extent. ARM can sell you a complete top to bottom design with cache sizes, functional unit layouts, etc, that you can have taped and produced at several different places. they can also license to you a stack of functional units and the needed IP to use them together, but you get to decide how you arrange them, how many of them that you use, how big your internal caches are, and other features inside of the core. That's where QC was, they were using a bunch of ARM IP for hardware, but they were adding some of their own logic, choosing how their caches and buffers were sized and arranged, and using some setups that weren't standard ARM. Sometimes it payed off for them, sometimes, ARM's design was better than what they came up with in practice. Eventually, ARM's cores got good enough that they couldn't justify internally developing them further than ARM was and disbanded their own in house CPU core team.

And, of course, there's Apple's license, which just lets them use the ARM ISA and several fundamental associated technologies in perpetuity with the ability to add and subtract to them as needed without ever having to pass it by ARM. I believe that their trade for getting that license is that they aren't allowed to sell their processors to third parties, which suits them fine anyway.

And that's the big issue here. Nuvia had a license that's similar to Apple's in spirit for their own products for certain segments which would have allowed them to sell server chips to integrators. QC has the "you only get the vanilla cores" license, but could sell in the broader market. QC maintains that by purchasing Nuvia, they inherited the licensing from Nuvia to use Nuvia's cores in anything they sell. There's a whole lot more nuance to this, and there are lawyers earning enough money to retire for life on this case I'm sure.

 

[Doug S]

Ok but in the past, didn't QC produce their own core designs ? If so, that would just be back to a precious situation and at that time ARM wasn't annoyed that much so...

The core designs they produced before were no better (and sometimes worse) than ARM designed cores. Some will claim the difference is that Qualcomm cores (from Nuvia) are better now, but I still think there must be some language in these agreements about transfer of IP since that's what ARM keeps harping on in their filings and what Qualcomm's filings seem to dismiss.

If the language was absolutely crystal clear in either direction it would be tough to fight in court, so I'm guessing there's enough ambiguity that lawyers on both sides can attempt to argue their side is right. Too bad we can't see that language, if nothing else so we can armchair lawyer it and attempt to guess which side has a stronger position.

 

[scineram]

There were multiple "tiers" to the core design license. ARM cores (at least used to be) are like lego blocks to some extent. ARM can sell you a complete top to bottom design with cache sizes, functional unit layouts, etc, that you can have taped and produced at several different places. they can also license to you a stack of functional units and the needed IP to use them together, but you get to decide how you arrange them, how many of them that you use, how big your internal caches are, and other features inside of the core. That's where QC was, they were using a bunch of ARM IP for hardware, but they were adding some of their own logic, choosing how their caches and buffers were sized and arranged, and using some setups that weren't standard ARM. Sometimes it payed off for them, sometimes, ARM's design was better than what they came up with in practice. Eventually, ARM's cores got good enough that they couldn't justify internally developing them further than ARM was and disbanded their own in house CPU core team.

And, of course, there's Apple's license, which just lets them use the ARM ISA and several fundamental associated technologies in perpetuity with the ability to add and subtract to them as needed without ever having to pass it by ARM. I believe that their trade for getting that license is that they aren't allowed to sell their processors to third parties, which suits them fine anyway.

And that's the big issue here. Nuvia had a license that's similar to Apple's in spirit for their own products for certain segments which would have allowed them to sell server chips to integrators. QC has the "you only get the vanilla cores" license, but could sell in the broader market. QC maintains that by purchasing Nuvia, they inherited the licensing from Nuvia to use Nuvia's cores in anything they sell. There's a whole lot more nuance to this, and there are lawyers earning enough money to retire for life on this case I'm sure.

That isn't what QC claims. They terminated the Nuvia arch license after purchase. But the Nuvia core designs are not Arm property. They have zero claim to that, hence QC is free to use them as sole owner.

 

[FlameTail]

Whatever happens, even if Qualcomm gets an $1 billion fine, I hope the Nuvia designs do come to the market. If they do not, it is bad for the consumer.

 

[BorisTheBlade82]

You know that we already have a thread about that legal battle with some very interesting and thoughtful posts?

Question - ARM lawsuit against QCOM/Nuvia !

https://www.arm.com/company/news/2022/08/arm-files-lawsuit-against-qualcomm-and-nuvia-for-breach-of-license-agreements-and-trademark-infringement Yummy, don't you think ?

forums.anandtech.com

 

[FlameTail]

You know that we already have a thread about that legal battle with some very interesting and thoughtful posts?

Question - ARM lawsuit against QCOM/Nuvia !

https://www.arm.com/company/news/2022/08/arm-files-lawsuit-against-qualcomm-and-nuvia-for-breach-of-license-agreements-and-trademark-infringement Yummy, don't you think ?

forums.anandtech.com

Indeed, I am well aware, as I myself have posted on that thread😆

But I guess any discussion about Qualcomm's upcoming chips will inevitably steer towards the lawsuit and it's prospects.