Qualcomm is known for having a particularly aggressive & hardball-style legal department to enforce its patents on core telecom IP. I believe the most likely outcome is they just settle the dispute here. Arm fighting hardball with hardball.<p>Which would not really affect the ecosystem of phones using Qualcomm arm chips, it would just change the margins / market cap of Qualcomm.<p>Yes, longterm Q might invest in their own RISC implementations, but I don't see a viable business case for Qualcomm to just stop ARM development for the foreseeable future.
As I understand it [1] the context is:<p>Qualcomm had one type of ARM license, granting them one type of IP at one royalty rate.<p>A startup called "Nuvia" had a different type of ARM license, granting them more IP but at a higher royalty rate. Nuvia built their own cores based on the extra IP.<p>Then Qualcomm brought Nuvia - and they think they should keep the IP from the Nuvia license, but keep paying the lower royalty rate from the Qualcomm license.<p>ARM offer a dizzying array of licensing options. Tiny cores for cheap microcontrollers, high-end cores for flagship smartphones. Unmodifiable-but-fully-proven chip layouts, easily modifiable but expensive to work with verilog designs. Optional subsystems like GPUs where some chip vendors would rather bring their own. Sub-licensable soft cores for FPGAs. I've even heard of non-transferable licenses - such as discounts for startups, which only apply so long as they're a startup.<p>If Nuvia had a startup discount that wasn't transferable when they were acquired, and Qualcomm has a license with a different royalty rate but covering slightly different IP, I can see how a disagreement could arise.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/31/arm_sues_qualcomm/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/31/arm_sues_qualcomm/</a>
What is often overlooked on this topic is, that ARM also has a duty to protect its ecosystem.<p>By using its dominant position in Smartphone chipsets, Qualcomm is in progress to establish a custom ARM-architecture as the new standard for several industries, fragmenting the ARM-ecosystem.<p>For decades, ARM is carefully avoiding this to happen, by allowing selected partners to "explore" evolutions of the IP in an industry but with rules and methods to make sure they can't diverge too much from ARM's instruction set.<p>Qualcomm acquired Nuvia and now executes the plan of using their restricted IP in a unrestricted fashion for several industries ("powering flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, and digital cockpits, as well as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, extended reality and infrastructure networking solutions").<p>ARM has designed architectures which achieve comparable performance to Nuvia's IP (Blackhawk, Cortex-X), but Qualcomm's assumption is that they don't need it and that they can apply Nuvia's IP on top of their existing architecture without the need of licensing any new ARM design.
> If Arm follows through with the license termination, Qualcomm would be prevented from doing its own designs using Arm’s instruction set<p>i'm not sure this is true. certainly "chip" IP has been a real legal quagmire since, forever.<p>but it was my understanding that you could neither patent nor copyright simply an "instruction set".<p>presumably what you get from ARM with an architecture license would be patent licenses and the trademark. if so, what patents might be relevant or would be a problem if you were to make an "ARMv8-ish compatible" ISA/Architecture with a boring name? i haven't seen much about ARM that's <i>architecturally</i> particularly unique or new, even if specific implementation details may be patent-able. you could always implement those differently to the same spec.<p>to further poke at the issue, if it's patents, then how does a RISC-V CPU or other ISA help you? simply because it's a different ISA, doesn't mean its implementation doesn't trample on some ARM patents either.<p>if it's something to do with the ISA itself, how does that affect emulators?<p>what's ARM's IP really consist of when you build your own non-ARM IP CPU from scratch? anyone have examples of show-stopper patents?
Most comments here seem to think that Qualcomm has to settle or switch to RISC-V. But from my understanding the article is only about their license to design custom chips with ARM IP, not about using ARM's designs.<p>For example the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 uses 1 ARM Cortex-X2, 3 ARM Cortex-A710 and 4 ARM Cortex-A510, which are ARM designs. Their latest announced chip though, Snapdragon 8 Elite, uses 8 Oryon cores, which Qualcomm designed themselves (after acquiring Nuvia).<p>So is Qualcomm not still able to create chips like the former, and just prevented from creating chips like the latter? Or does "putting a chip together" (surely there is a bit more going into it) like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 still count as custom design?
This "cancellation" is likely to be paused until the lawsuit is resolved so it's hard to say what this means. Presumably this is a part of the negotiations going on behind the scenes.
Let’s just assume this happens for a moment.<p>What do Android OEMs do? They can’t use Apple chips, or now Qualcomm chips. Switching to another architecture is a big deal.<p>Would this basically hand the Android market to Samsung and their Exynos chips? Or does another short term viable competitor exist?
Because of all the discussions in the comments about ARM and RISC-V, could someone explain to me the difficulties of designing a chip for a new ISA?<p>I'm wondering because to me as a layman it sounds like it's 'only' a different language, so why is it not that easy to take already existing designs and modify them to 'speak' that language and that's it?<p>Or is an ISA more than just a different 'language'?<p>Or is hardware not really the biggest problem, but rather Software like compilers, kernels, etc.?
And Qualcomm is the only competitive ARM chip on the market besides Apple's. And now they are being taken out by ARM. Is it really that expensive to re-license things? This seems self-defeating.
There's a missing word here (which otherwise makes the sentence nonsensical):
"He’s also expanding into new areas, most notably computing, where Arm is making its own push."<p>I'm guessing <i>cloud</i> computing, but guess you could add any buzzword in...
On mobile devices efficiency is so important, I don't see how Qualcomm would be able to live without ARM licences. RISC-V and other architectures like x86-64 are nice, actually I think the peripheral libraries, boot and stuff like that are bigger headache to replace for Qualcomm's clients given that they can just switch the gcc to a different arch - still if your code is 25% less efficient, that'll be quite noticable for the consumer - or in your battery and weight costs.<p>What am I not seeing here? I think they'll just settle.
What’s missing from most of these analyses is the perspective that Arm really doesn’t want Qualcomm to become a dominant - architecture license (ALA) based - vendor of Arm based SoCs. Bad for Arm and for Arm’s other customers and the ecosystem.<p>Whilst Qualcomm has a wide ranging ALA that’s always a possibility. This might just be an opportunistic move to remove that threat to Arm’s business model.
Bloomberg disappoints by failing to mention RISC-V at all in the entire article.<p>They have to be doing this deliberately, as it's hard to explain otherwise.
Next week, Qualcomm will likely announce a 64 core RISC-V RVA23.<p>ARM really shouldn't pursue an aggressive posture with lines outside iOS or Win11 ecosystems. The leverage won't hold a position already fractured off a legacy market. =3
ARM is owned by an investment bank, SoftBank. It operates kind of like Goldman Sachs. ARM is becoming a chipmaker, just like Intel. But Intels' CHIP grant is more similar to a pre-emptive 2008-era bailout of the banks (TARP), for being "too big to fail." (because it makes defense chips) <a href="https://irrationalanalysis.substack.com/p/arms-chernobyl-moment/comment/74000764" rel="nofollow">https://irrationalanalysis.substack.com/p/arms-chernobyl-mom...</a>