> not allowed to carry RISC-V logo or claim "RISC-V compatible", etc
If Qualcomm’s offering is performant (in its dollars, power and speed mix) and Qualcomm keeps it open enough (I think this is at the moment, as they are using an instruction set that anybody can copy), would Qualcomm’s customers care about that? If so, would Qualcomm?
The largest possible concern I see is that customers would have to be convinced that Qualcomm can deliver good compilers that don’t inadvertently spit out instructions not supported by their somewhat off-beat hardware.
I think costumers have a few issus. First of all, one of the biggest reason consumer companies want RISC-V is because they can select between multiple vendors. Qualcomm would very likely be the only high performance implementation of their standard. So you are binding yourself to Qualcomm.
Second, the software ecosystem is huge, far more then compiles. And given how everybody today uses open source, making all that available for Qualcomm seems like a losing effort.
Is Qualcomm gone pay to make Android Qualcomm-RISC-V ready. Are they gone provide advanced verification suits. Formal analysis and all that stuff?
To be fair here you have historically been able to bork certain Qualcomm devices running legitimate ARM code due to them not supporting all the instructions they claimed. (And the BSP would do sneaky things to attempt to obfuscate this).
Qualcomm absolutely have the market power in the Android space to redefine a new open ISA if they want to though.
If Qualcomm’s offering is performant (in its dollars, power and speed mix) and Qualcomm keeps it open enough (I think this is at the moment, as they are using an instruction set that anybody can copy), would Qualcomm’s customers care about that? If so, would Qualcomm?
The largest possible concern I see is that customers would have to be convinced that Qualcomm can deliver good compilers that don’t inadvertently spit out instructions not supported by their somewhat off-beat hardware.