Acquihire and hedging bets.

> Actually, I wonder if it would be possible to design a chip with both an ARM and a RISC-V decoder on the same die and just fuse-off the ARM die on select units to avoid any fees...

That's not quite what Raspberry Pi did with the RP2350 (the ARM and RV cores are wholly separate) but they did include the ability to fuse off one side or the other, so I wonder if they'll release a cheaper RV-only version at some point.

> They don't need to license RISC-V.

Correct. However you need circuitry on silicon to implement said architecture which is the expensive and time consuming part.

QC likely use a lot of Arm IP, Nuvia notwithstanding, and want a way out of the general Arm monopoly. Seems to be a growing trend.

A dual ISA decoder with with fuse-off options will likely have unwelcome power-perf-area and yield consequences.

Eating the competitor is one way to win. If you're scared of them, just buy them out.

They are basically acquiring talent and/or preexisting IP. RISC-V is free but implementations are the sole IP of the company.

Implementing ARM and RISC-V decoders might depend on licensing fine print for each licensee

ARM cancelled their architecture license and sued them, Qualcomm won, but with a threat like that to your core business it's best to have an escape hatch.

They'll need to license future versions of the ARM ISA and now they know the licensor is hostile.

There are a lot of little cores in phones doing little core things. Having a first rate design team experienced in an ISA that is royalty free probably makes sense. They'll be able to expand the use of RISCV up the value chain ver time.

Buying a team that's already working on RISCV also reduces the chances of ARM lawyers getting involved.

It's probably just for IP and talent acquisition, if I had to guess. People who can design high performance server-class CPU microarchitectures are rare.

Frankly, Ventana seemed like an interesting entry in the space, but I have no idea who would have actually bought their servers at the end of the day. They taped out multiple designs, but none actually seem to exist outside their labs. I don't really see any path to meaningful RISC-V server adoption for at least several more years and by that time Qualcomm could design something on their own, assuming they are serious about re-entering the market. Grabbing the talent and any useful IP/core design components makes the most sense to me, anyway.

Might be worth more than Qualcomm is willing to spend and/or introduce antitrust concerns. This feels like a hedging of bets, no need for Qualcomm to buy the biggest name in the RISC-V space.

SiFive have apparently been shopping themselves around for a while. But they've been around for a long time, taken loads of investment, had a huge number of employees at one point (not now), and don't have very competitive products. My speculation is they're just not a very attractive acquisition with a complex ownership structure, and are demanding too much money to compensate their earlier investors.

> Apple launched the M1 in 2020.

which means the M1 was being worked on since at least 2018, I'd bet much earlier than that, for sure much earlier than that if you count silicon which never left the lab.

reminder iphones run on apple silicon since 2010, which means they had to be working on it at least since 2008. they have a lot of experience in silicon design by now.

Qualcomm has had DSPs in its chips for a long time, providing a lot of NPU-like functionality before the term NPU had been coined. What Qualcomm currently calls its NPUs are just Hexagon DSP cores with specific instructions and abilities for matrix math and common inferencing datatypes.

The original Apple M1's performance per Watt and physical battery size may have been special when it first came out, but nowadays there's nothing special about its hardware specs relative to a modern x86 laptop.

The difference you perceive is mostly software. Windows and Linux are really just designed for desktop machines first and foremost. MacOS was too, but when they transitioned to Apple Silicon, they replaced a lot of the internals with stuff taken from iOS, and iOS is designed with batter life first and foremost.

Getting the level of battery life out of non-apple laptops is just going to be a long, hard slog of going through the operating systems and auditing *everything* and every design decision for how it affects battery life and how much resources its using.

> Another incredible aspect is the early addition of an NPU by Apple in a SoC.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you've not used CUDA yet. NPUs are a lot of things, but "incredible" is the last word an engineer would use to describe it.

If it happens, Arm will have only themselves to blame. Suing your own customers is not the smartest move.

Could be good if a large firm stabilized the RISC-V version fragmentation with a massive standard SoC product boost in the Android space.

But more likely, the early product line will meet the same fate as the dog in "Old Yeller" (1957) in a market consolidation push. =3

bad, bad, bad sign, when a company starts to penny pinch like that.

but unfortunately very in-line with the thesis that qualcomm is getting squeezed by a commodifying market where value-add opportunity is shifting outside of the SoC platform.