[nrclark]

Most 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

[monocasa]

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.

[drob518]

Yea, this to me signals that Qualcomm is starting to hedge its ARM bets. Given all the kerfuffle around licensing they have had with ARM already, I suspect that they are signaling to ARM that they have options and so ARM's leverage is a lot lower than it might be. That said, there are also huge switching costs to Qualcomm's customers, so this is not a move it takes lightly. In the mean time, I'm sure those Ventana engineers can also help them improve their ARM designs, too.

[nrclark]

Fully agree - Ventana's cores are more like Cortex A76 kinds of things, and are on a completely different scale from typical Cortex-M cores.

But switching to RISC-V would shut Qualcomm out from QNX and would limit its Android compatibility. And on the Qualcomm chips that I've seen so far, they're really bought in on both QNX and Android. That's why I think this is probably an aquihire more than a desire to ship Ventana's CPU cores.

[webdevver]

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.

[Joel_Mckay]

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

[nrclark]

I'd be surprised if Qualcomm replaces their application processors (the cores that typically run Android/Linux or QNX) with RISC-V any time soon. Aarch64's ecosystem is huge, and Qualcomm would cut their customers off from it by moving fully to RISC-V.

They're more likely to replace the smaller CPU cores imo.

[brucehoult]

What version fragmentation?

Pretty much everything coming out in 2026 -- including Ventana's Veyron V2 -- is RVA23.

One profile to rule them all.

Currently-shipping applications processors are either RVA20 (plus the B extension in practice) or RVA22 with V as a standard option.

That's not fragmentation, it's just a standard linear progression. Each thing can run all the software from the previous thing:

    RVA20 (what e.g. Ubuntu 25.04 and earlier require)
    -> RVA20 + B
    -> RVA22
    -> RVA22 + V
    -> RVA23 (what Ubuntu 25.10 and later require)