alt Hacker NewsMost SOCs on the market today have a mix of various CPU cores. It's common to see designs with a few big ARM Cortex-A cores running an OS like Linux or Android, and then some smaller Cortex-M microcontroller cores that do housekeeping things like security checks, power management, realtime features, peripheral management, etc.
If I were to guess, Qualcomm wants to replace its various Cortex-M cores with RISC-V equivalents. This saves them money on licensing, reduces their dependency on ARM, and doesn't break customer-facing compatibility. Ventana is probably more of an aquihire to get their designer team.
"We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile." -Qualcomm, probably
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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.
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
Ventana's cores were 15 instruction wide, massively out of order cores that on paper compete with the application cores in Apple's M series SoCs.
They're a totally different gate count niche than a Cortex-M equivalent.