News Qualcomm accuses Arm of anticompetitive conduct as its license is terminated due to 'repeated material breaches of Arm's license agreement

[Admin]

Arm confirms revocation of license from Qualcomm as Qualcomm accuses Arm of anticompetitive conduct.

Qualcomm accuses Arm of anticompetitive conduct as its license is terminated due to 'repeated material breaches of Arm's license agreement : Read more

 

[nrdwka]

Looks like by forcing "I want more money" stans, Arm give time time to x86 to counter arm Dev in pc space on one hand and give more reasons to turn to RISC V instead of arm architecture, on other hand...

 

[ezst036]

I thought Qualcomm had an ARM license anyways prior to the Nuvia purchase.

 

[ThisIsMe]

I thought Qualcomm had an ARM license anyways prior to the Nuvia purchase.

It did. But, Nuvia had its own license to produce its own custom cores/CPUs. When Qualcomm finalized the purchase of Nuvia, it decided it no longer had to honor the agreement between Nuvia and ARM. Therefore, it was no longer obligated to pay for Nuvia’s license and thus stopped the payments.

So, Qualcomm claims its preexisting license agreement allows it to make whatever it wants. Meanwhile, ARM claims that Nuvia’s license agreement still applies to any of its IP, is different from Qualcomm’s license, and requires continued renewal in order to use Nuvia’s IP, or even keep its designs at all.

 

[ezst036]

It did. But, Nuvia had its own license to produce its own custom cores/CPUs. When Qualcomm finalized the purchase of Nuvia, it decided it no longer had to honor the agreement between Nuvia and ARM. Therefore, it was no longer obligated to pay for Nuvia’s license and thus stopped the payments.

So, Qualcomm claims its preexisting license agreement allows it to make whatever it wants. Meanwhile, ARM claims that Nuvia’s license agreement still applies to any of its IP, is different from Qualcomm’s license, and requires continued renewal in order to use Nuvia’s IP, or even keep its designs at all.

Thanks. That's what I thought.

It sounds like ARM is the one being anti-competitive here dictating against the use of specific IP. That is arrogantly bold. The irony is that some years ago when Nvidia was trying to purchase ARM this is some kind of shenanigans that people were afraid of happening.

Now ARM is doing it without even being owned by Nvidia. The end result has become the same. What this means then is if (made up example) Apple purchased Ampere then Apple could never use anything out of Ampere's ARM core designs otherwise ARM would sue them.

I will stipulate though, since these contracts are not public knowledge that I am aware of. If Qualcomm's own ARM contract specifically says they cannot use other core/design technologies then it does fall on them all along.

 

[DS426]

Whoa, shots fired!! *heads down until the smoke clears*

I'm not a business law expert, but this seems like a rather trivial scenario. M&A's happen all the time in the U.S.

I also feel like Qualcomm has the upper hand here. Either way, both parties should be renegotiating their contracts after the acquisition of Nuvia was completed, but if that hasn't happen, it's a break-down on both sides -- not specifically Qualcomm's fault. Additionally, I'd expect that a licensing agreement would only apply to now and in the future, not retroactively. If it does apply retroactively, Arm's "partners" need to wise up and try to form more favorable terms.

All this does make it seem like Arm's motivation is greed. Probably not a good idea to be that way or seem that way as it incentives partners to jump ship to RISC-V, especially Qualcomm who has the size and resources to develop competitive products on alternative ISA's.

 

[jlake3]

If Qualcomm's own ARM contract specifically says they cannot use other core/design technologies then it does fall on them all along.

That's sort of what ARM is alleging in the lawsuit. Their claim is that Nuvia and Qualcomm's ALAs had different terms (and different royalty structures), and that Nuvia had a license to design and produce cores based on the ARM IP but not to transfer those designs to others without ARM's blessing (and rent seeking), and that Qualcomm's license covered designs "created at Qualcomm, by Qualcomm engineers and Qualcomm subsidiaries during the period while those entities were subsidiaries of Qualcomm, licensed subject to the terms of that [the Qualcomm] ALA".

So Qualcomm could use other core designs, if they were developed in house. Or Qualcomm could have kept Nuvia's ALA as well as their own, and produced Oryon under the Nuvia ALA (which is believed to have much higher per-chip fees than the Qualcomm ALA because the original stated intent was datacenter). Or Qualcomm could have negotiated with ARM to change the ALA terms, which ARM would 100% use as a chance to extract money from them.

The fact you can't buy/sell/transfer core designs that compete with ARM's designs without their approval (and likely fee extraction) seems problematic, but it seems that Nuvia and Qualcomm both agreed to it, and I haven't seen any good counter-arguments from Qualcomm about why ARM's allegations are wrong or which specific allegations are false, just a general insistance they're in the right and ARM is bullying them. Maybe there's something good that's not public yet they're sitting on.

 

[AkroZ]

All this does make it seem like Arm's motivation is greed. Probably not a good idea to be that way or seem that way as it incentives partners to jump ship to RISC-V, especially Qualcomm who has the size and resources to develop competitive products on alternative ISA's.

Most of their clients use Android or Windows. If it is doable to port Android to RISC-V (project started end of 2023) as Android is a Linux distribution and most applications use the Java Virtual Machine, for Windows they need to ask Microsoft to do it.
They are leader in ARM processors, all there business is on it. They can't easily change it, it will need many years, but yes Qualcomm and others clients of ARM have already started to make RISC-V products as a rescue solution. Qualcomm produce a RISC-V cpu for smartwatch.