Arm To Cancel Qualcomm's Chip Design License As Tech Feud Deepens (yahoo.com) 35
Arm has moved to cancel Qualcomm's architectural license agreement, escalating a legal battle that threatens to upend the global smartphone and PC chip markets. The British chip designer issued Qualcomm a 60-day termination notice for the license that allows the U.S. chipmaker to design custom processors using Arm's intellectual property. The cancellation could force Qualcomm to halt sales of products that generate much of its $39 billion annual revenue, Bloomberg reports.
The dispute stems from Qualcomm's $1.4 billion acquisition of chip startup Nuvia in 2021. Arm claims Qualcomm breached contract terms by using Nuvia's designs without permission, while Qualcomm maintains its existing agreement covers the acquired technology. The companies are set for a December trial to resolve Arm's 2022 breach-of-contract lawsuit and Qualcomm's countersuit. Arm is demanding Qualcomm destroy Nuvia designs created before the acquisition.
The dispute stems from Qualcomm's $1.4 billion acquisition of chip startup Nuvia in 2021. Arm claims Qualcomm breached contract terms by using Nuvia's designs without permission, while Qualcomm maintains its existing agreement covers the acquired technology. The companies are set for a December trial to resolve Arm's 2022 breach-of-contract lawsuit and Qualcomm's countersuit. Arm is demanding Qualcomm destroy Nuvia designs created before the acquisition.
This seems like a really bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
There's already a lot of attention on market consolidation because the hurricane hit a single factory that made IV fluid and it turns out 70% of all the IV fluid in the country comes out of that one factory. Never mind the massive baby formula shortages we had several months back because again market consolidation meant a single factory shutting down completely crushed the supply.
And at this point we have more than an update to prove that inflation we've been facing is just price gouging by monopolies.
I'm saying people have noticed the effects of market consolidation and antitrust violations. This is likely to bring a hammer down in a lot of ways. Again assuming the election goes the right way. We all remember when the Microsoft antitrust law case was dropped by the Justice department immediately following an election
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What evidence do you have that inflation is caused by price gouging (as if companies only just figured out they can raise prices in 2021) and not from trillions of trash dollars getting printed up and dumped into the near zero interest rate economy?
I'll wait.
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Search for "greedflation" and you'll find plenty of good articles with studies to back them up.
It's no coincidence that right around the time Joe Biden started talking about anti-trust law enforcement inflation got under control. If he had more political capital he could've done it sooner. But he was busy trying to keep the Twitter Faction in the House of Reps from crashing the economy with a pointless government shutdown. Which to Joe's credit he did.
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STFU - Harris is the most bought and paid for sack of crap ever to run for office. She isn't going let Trust busters do jack or shit.
https://capstonedc.com/insight... [capstonedc.com]
but hey the only way to make a Democratic candidate look good is to aggressively lie and misdirect about their intentions. I get it; gaslighiting everyone all the time must be a real challenge.
Ya triggered bro? (Score:2)
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You won't have to wait long. [bloomberg.com]
Under oath testimony from one of the nation's largest grocery chains admitting to price gouging above inflation, under oath, in a hearing where they're trying to buy one of the other largest grocery chains in the nation.
If you don't even believe them when they tell you what they're doing under penalty of perjury, then you just are un-anchored from reality.
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Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Qualcomm is famous for levering their customers into positions they don't want to be in through patents and malignant licensing terms. It's a damn shame that it's their turn to get bent over.
Go RISC-V Qualcomm! (Score:2)
I would love to see Qualcomm get behind RISC-V and kill ARM.
Re:Go RISC-V Qualcomm! (Score:4, Insightful)
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What do you mean "their version"? It's an open ABI, anyone can build a compatible chip without licencing fees. You mean their specific design? Obviously that will be proprietary, like most of the other RISC-V implementations out there.
There was an official Android kernel for RISC V, but Google discontinued it for now, saying they would come back to it later. It may well end up being one of the Chinese variants of Android for their domestic market that really sparks the boom in RISC V mobile devices. Compani
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What do you mean "their version"? It's an open ABI, anyone can build a compatible chip without licencing fees. You mean their specific design? Obviously that will be proprietary, like most of the other RISC-V implementations out there.
1) Who says Qualcomm will build a compatible chip? 2) If Qualcomm builds a proprietary design that has high licensing fees, how will that help RISC-V adoption in general. It does not as no one else would work with their design.
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Seems a bit pointless building an incompatible chip.
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You mean like an ARM CPU? There are loads of people making those.
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Wider adoption wouldn't really matter.
The community benefit would be more tooling in RISC-V and more eyeballs on the ISA.
ARM has been the go-to arch for a long time in embedded. My first ARM device was in the early 90's.
e.g. if the Raspberry Pi project were first started today it would be RISC-V based, not ARM.
ARM went from innovative to a drag on the industry sometime in the past few decades. Remember how hard MALI was to work with for no good reason except a lack of competition?
You can already buy a RPi
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If Qualcomm did switch whole-hog into RISC-V they would have the opportunity to completely define the way consumer RISC-V systems work since nobody has shipped any yet.
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RISC-V is not new.
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f*ck ARM (Score:2)
Re:f*ck ARM (Score:5, Informative)
Nuvia had architectural license.
Nuvia had a special architecture license which specifically stated any IP could not be transferred in the event of company sale. This was because as a startup Nuvia could not afford the true architecture license fees and paid way less. Qualcomm wants to ignore that part of the license.
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If this wasn't disclosed as part of the sale, the sellers of Nuvia should expect legal action from Qualcomm. If this was disclosed as part of the sale and Qualcomm didn't enter a three-way negotiation with ARM as part of the purchase, that's borderline negligent.
This story was originally a yawn but now you have me interested.
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To be clear, ARM does not really want to kill Nuvia designs. I would even imagine they are happy their ISA has a foot in the door in the windows PC market.
The threat of killing Nuvia designs is the same as North Korea's threat to use nukes. It is simply a scare tactic to force Qualcomm to pay additional licensing fees.
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The threat of killing Nuvia designs is the same as North Korea's threat to use nukes. It is simply a scare tactic to force Qualcomm to pay additional licensing fees.
Or given the legal history Qualcomm has faced with Nokia, Apple, the EU, the FTC, etc, Qualcomm might not be angels when it comes to legal and contractual matters.
I remember when tech was about innovation (Score:2)
Now, it seems to be all about social media and lawsuits
Re:I remember when tech was about innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, it seems to be all about social media and lawsuits
Your memories must be from before the days of SCO, circa 2002.
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Or before Windows / OS2.
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The theme of the last 20 years really has been market consolidation
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Is an instruction set even copyrightable? (Score:1)
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