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Arm To Cancel Qualcomm's Chip Design License As Tech Feud Deepens (yahoo.com) 54

Posted by msmash from the bad-blood dept.
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.

Arm To Cancel Qualcomm's Chip Design License As Tech Feud Deepens More | Reply

Arm To Cancel Qualcomm's Chip Design License As Tech Feud Deepens

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  • This seems like a really bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @10:53AM (#64887275)
    Depending on how the election goes here in America you're going to see some major antitrust law enforcement and this sets off so many red flags I don't know where to even begin.

    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

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 )
        https://fortune.com/2024/01/20... [fortune.com]

        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.

      • 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.

        • Is that Kroger and Albertsons are saying that it's okay they're merging because they will sell off 500 stores and they got caught talking internally about how they plan to sell them to accompany that can't properly run them so they can buy them back when they crash out in 2 years.

          You would think that would get the merger request immediately denied but here we go again with zero antitrust law enforcement so there's still a chance to mergeable go through even though we all know it's massively anti-competi

    • 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.

    • It seems like an equally dangerous issue for both ARM and Qualcomm; the latter has a history of abusive contracts.

      The inflation issue is a harder one to really say who is at fault-- were prices increased proactively vs reactively, or was it really price gouging. Nobody wants to be the last one to raise prices, and once everybody does it and labor costs have increased as a result you are pretty much stuck with a gap-up on inflation. Early on there was a chance to avoid where we are at now, but that ship sa

  • I would love to see Qualcomm get behind RISC-V and kill ARM.

    • Re:Go RISC-V Qualcomm! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @11:07AM (#64887319)
      If Qualcomm gets behind RISC-V do not expect their version to be widely adopted. Any RISC-V chip Qualcomm makes will be behind high licensing fees and an army of lawyers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        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

        • 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.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Seems a bit pointless building an incompatible chip.

            • Some of the incompatibility will be for practical reasons as they customize RISC-V in ways that others will not. Some of the incompatibility is they want to distinguish their own chip as their entire business is to sell proprietary designs in ARM now. Why would anyone think that Qualcomm is interested in selling a chip that can be replaced with one of their competitors easily.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                You mean like an ARM CPU? There are loads of people making those.

                • So you can drop a Qualcomm Snapdragon SOC into an Apple iPhone then and everything works? That is the point you are missing. The only difference if Qualcomm uses RISC-V is that they do not have to pay ARM royalties. Their business model of making incompatible proprietary chip designs does not change. Qualcomm will never make an open RISC-V chip. Their chips will not be compatible with Samsung, Broadcom, everyone, anyone.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                    Their business model is selling Android compatible SoCs, and now Windows on ARM compatible ones too.

                    At the very least they would need to get Google and Microsoft to support their proprietary stuff.

                    • Their business model is selling Android compatible SoCs, and now Windows on ARM compatible ones too.

                      Can you drop a Qualcomm SOC into any Samsung phone that has their Exynos chip? What about Xaomi with their MediaTek chips? The answer is no. Both use ARM and Android. That's what I mean by incompatibility. Even if you could get the hardware to work despite chip pin layout/voltage/spec differences, you will need to install Android again as the drivers are not going to work.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                      In fact Samsung does drop other manufacturer's ICs into its phones that use Exynos chips in one region and another chip in other regions.

                      The compatibility is that there is a standard ABI for the CPU, and a standard API for the GPU and some other components. The SoC manufacturer provides a "board support package" (BSP) that has firmware and drivers.

                      They can't provide a BSP that works around differences in the CPU ABI though. Well, I suppose they could provide some kind of emulation layer, but it would be pre

                    • In fact Samsung does drop other manufacturer's ICs into its phones that use Exynos chips in one region and another chip in other regions.

                      Sigh. Let me explain this slowly. You cannot drop a Qualcomm SOC into a board designed for an Exynos chip. This is no different than Intel chips not working in a AMD board. Samsung has chosen to name two different phones with same name and model but use different internal parts. From a hardware standpoint, they are not the same hardware. From a performance standpoint they are not the same. From a software standpoint, they are not the same. If you took the HD from one phone and put on the other, it would not

                  • Can you take an Apple M# chip and put it in any other device?

                    Most Arm implementations are proprietary SoCs. Qualcomm isnâ(TM)t doing anything different from most other vendors. And Apple is the worst offender of all.

      • 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

      • So what? All of their products are like that and people still buy them. Usually because of power consumption, performance, or both.

        • One of the major reasons ARM is used in so many chip applications is that stock ARM is standardized. ARM does not only power the high end SOCs in smartphones but many microcontrollers. If Qualcomm uses their own RISC-V that is not compatible with any other RISC-V, who is going to support them other than Qualcomm?
    • RISC-V has an interesting design process... but I'd expect a LOT MORE of these types of lawsuits in a world where RISC-V devices were common.

      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.

    • Uh, it will take a decade+ of intense focussed work to get RISC V to be on par with ARM. Good luck with that.

  • Nuvia had architectural license. Qualcomm had architectural license. Qualcomm bought Nuvia and ARM wants to shake down. Qualcomm is their best chance of taking some windows PC market. Dumb move.

    • Re:f*ck ARM (Score:5, Informative)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @11:20AM (#64887355)

      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.

      • I don't know if your statement is true or not and have no way to confirm, but it's the most plausible thing I've heard for sure.

        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.

        • Everything I have stated is from ARM. Granted it might not be true but it seems plausible. ARM architecture licenses are very expensive and only a handful of companies hold them like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc. Of the holders, Nuvia was the only startup and it seems likely that they could only get pay for a license if there were conditions.
          • Qualcomm clearly know that Nuvia was making ARM designs. And they knew that ARM architecture requires licenses. That's certainly enough to indicate that they should have known about potential licensing issues and resolved them concurrently with the purchase transaction.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        Nuvia had a special architecture license which specifically stated any IP could not be transferred in the event of company sale.

        However, since Qualcomm already has the architectural license they already hold that ARM IP. Thus there is no ARM IP to be transferred in the company sale, only Nuvia IP that is entangled with the same IP Qualcomm is already licensing.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by gabebear ( 251933 )
      We aren't allowed to actually read the contracts but Nuvia didn't have the same agreement with Arm that Qualcomm has/had. Nuvia's contract was specifically to develop server CPUs and Qualcomm/Nuvia agreed to destroy designs produced under it during the acquisition... Qualcomm obviously wasn't going to destroy that work and should have just renegotiated. Instead of negotiating the management at Qualcomm ignored the problem and it's now going to cost them way way more than if they had done it during the acqui

    • 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.

      • 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.

    • Apple is probably behind the whole thing if we follow the money.

  • Now, it seems to be all about social media and lawsuits

  • I am thinking if the Google v Oracle Supreme Court case, where it was found that the Java API was not copyrightable for Android. Why not just decide an ISA is an API?
    • This case does not involve copyright. This is a dispute about contracts and licensing. According to ARM, Nuvia's license with them had a provision that their technology could not be transferred even in the event of company sale. This was because Nuvia could not afford the full price of an architecture license. I imagine Qualcomm's argument is that their full architecture license includes everything that ARM has. We will see in court.
      • Devil will be in the details. Qual probably has some super license and probably expected to be able to acquire companies with lessor licenses and supercede the lessor license with their own terms. The wording in qualcomm's license I am sure will be picked over ad nausium. The only real winners are going to be the lawyers billing at 2 grand an hour. Pity, all that capital could be put to innovation, but the west now prefers courthouse casino instead.

    • The A in "ISA" .. the architecture, is patentable. It is nearly impossible (uh ok, in theory it might be possible if you're some kind of genius, but good luck) to efficiently implement a modern ISA without violating a bunch of patents on how the instruction and CPU is implemented. Here's a famous example of a patent from back in my day on an instruction implementation that MIPS (a famous CPU company) used to sue a company called Lexra (a company that tried to sell clones of their CPUs) over a set of unalign

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