Arm says it wants all Snapdragon X Elite laptops destroyed
xda-developers.com
xda-developers.com
According to Arm the Nuvia license is contractually tied to server/datacenter usage, while Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia packaged these server cores into "Oryon" for PC use in the Snapdragon X Elite SoC and intends to use them in smartphones too, breaching the original agreement.
Here's a better source: https://www.heise.de/en/news/ARM-torpedoes-Windows-on-ARM-De...
I remember Qualcomm making phone SoCs with custom cores some years back. Why is it suddenly an issue now? Or were those just rebrands of tweaked Cortex designs?
EDIT: From reading the Reuters article [0] it seems that Arm's argument is that since Nuvia's cores were developed under a now-terminated licence, Qualcomm doesn't have a right to use them, their other licences notwithstanding.
[0]: https://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2024-06-10/a...
Qualcom now wants to use technology developt under a specific licence agreement in use cases not covered in that licence agreement, because they have general licence agreement with arm.
The question is:
Does the general licence agreement from qualcom override the specific licence agreement between Nuvia and arm for this specific technology.
I found some sources which partially explains this:
https://www.ft.com/content/5535ce39-ab22-497a-a8d6-52a690d1b...
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/01/why-arms-lawsuit-against-qua...
(...Nuvia, a startup founded by former Apple and Google engineers, was developing a server chip with custom cores under an architecture license. It also had access to Arm’s core designs....)
They don't want to have a long fight expensive fight with qualcom and make other arm companies uneasy about investing in the arm platform.
They also don't want to open the door to have companies buy their IP for "cheap" by buying smaller companies with special arm licences instead of directly negotiating with them.
Is it really ARMs IP or the IP developed by the smaller company. My understanding is ARM is like a blueprint, and you then make changes as needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#Licens...
You can either licence a IP Core block(Core, gpu,etc) to embedd in your device, our you can buy an architect licence and design your own cores as long as they comply with the arm architecture.
AFAIK the IP is actually buildable cores which arm get's by partnering with companies to get it right, e.g. there is not that much difference between them fully building them in house and selling them vs. letting partners build them(for the end user).
The only reason small companies can get a license on easy terms is because of the narrow planned use.
Qualcomm is trying to transfer everything Nuvia has developed under that specific narrow ARM-license to the broad license of Qualcomm and use it for "powering flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, and digital cockpits, as well as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, extended reality and infrastructure networking solutions"
ARM has filed a lawsuit that this was never in scope of the license of Nuvia, the court-ruling is still pending on that one...
The related court-filing is worth a read: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22273195/arm-v-qualco...
In detail, the dispute goes like this:
1. ARM gave a broad range of licenses to Nuvia to develop an ARM-based architecture for use in servers, with a license-fee to match this objective (probably a favorable one for ARM, because it's a field ARM aims to expand):
"Nuvia’s licensing fees and royalty rates reflected the anticipated scope and nature of Nuvia’s use of the Arm architecture. The licenses safeguarded Arm’s rights and expectations by prohibiting assignment without Arm’s consent, regardless of whether a contemplated assignee had its own Arm licenses."
2. Qualcomm acquires Nuvia with the intention to use the developed IP for (quote):
"powering flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, and digital cockpits, as well as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, extended reality and infrastructure networking solutions"
Sounds quite reasonable if the claim is validated: ARM gave favorable conditions to a startup which aimed to compete in a field where ARM is weak (servers). Now the biggest customer of the strongest revenue-market of ARM (mobile devices) has acquired that startup to repurpose their development and license to use in mobile devices, PCs, automotive, VR,...
Which side is right or wrong here depends on the exact wording of the license between ARM and Qualcomm, and since this is not publicly known, no-one outside those companies knows which side is in the right.
Nuvia's ARM license (now owned by Qualcomm) may be invalid for Qualcomm non-server use.
But how can Nuvia IP be invalid?
Presumably ARM never owned Nuvia's IP: why would they have negotiated that, given they already had license control?
Ergo, Qualcomm owns Nuvia IP without a Nuvia ARM license.
... but that's fine, because Qualcomm has a Qualcomm ARM license.
"I revoke your license, so you can't sell your IP to a willing third party" is a pretty dangerous precedent. You should be perfectly free to do so, to the extent that your buyer would also need their own license.
If this makes no sense then here's a simple example: a DVD is not property, it's intellectual property. If it were property then region locks couldn't exist. Compare it to a book. You buy a book in London, no one stops you from reading it in New York, it's your property. Absurdity is the name of the game: in the DeCSS trial it was argued Johansen trespassed on his own computer.
Edit: ah, I have a better, simpler explanation: Arm and Nuvia made a contract. Qualcomm bought Nuvia. Arm argues Qualcomm violated the terms of the contract. That's it.
Depending on the wording of Qualcomm's architectural ARM license, it seems like that might cover Nuvia's IP?
Or in other words, if anyone who wasn't an ARM architectural licensee bought Nuvia, Nuvia's IP would have been unusable.
But because someone with a "do anything custom with this core" bought Nuvia, Qualcomm effectively bought some "anything custom".
The real IP needle in this haystack seems to be: what ARM IP did Nuvia use that Qualcomm doesn't already have an architectural license for? I.e. extra sauce ARM shared with them for their specific use case.
Which sets up for a SCO-Unix-style threshing of technical details for individual pieces.
Which I imagine both ARM and Qualcomm will eventually want to avoid, as they'd like to continue doing business together, so this will eventually collapse into a new licensing agreement that covers all claims. (Assuming neither pisses the other off badly enough to salt the earth)
Right, but ARM says "Nuvia’s licensing fees and royalty rates reflected the anticipated scope and nature of Nuvia’s use of the Arm architecture. The licenses safeguarded Arm’s rights and expectations by prohibiting assignment without Arm’s consent, regardless of whether a contemplated assignee had its own Arm licenses"
Basically ARM says Qualcomm should pay more than they did before because no, their blanket doesn't cover Nuvia.
> so this will eventually collapse into a new licensing agreement that covers all claims
Obviously. That's the crux of the matter. Qualcomm says they shouldn't pay more, ARM says they should.
I have actually fought to keep specific team members off NDAs to enable them to be maximally useful for this reason.
Since the license the Nuvia IP was built on became void when the company changed ownership, the IP is not built on a valid license.
> "I revoke your license, so you can't sell your IP to a willing third party" is a pretty dangerous precedent. You should be perfectly free to do so, to the extent that your buyer would also need their own license.
ARM does offer licenses for comparable designs (Blackhawk, Cortex-X), but Qualcomm apparently insists that they don't need to license those because they acquired Nuvia and can simply integrate that IP on top of their existing ARM-license instead.
My guess is that the gamble of Qualcomm is to force ARM to license the Nuvia IP to Qualcomm again for a more-favorable fee than ARM's comparable designs cost, and ARM sees no reason to do so.
Here's where the wording gets confusing.
ARM has their own IP: their core designs, ISA (?), etc.
ARM also has licensing of that IP.
ARM also has platform licensing: allowing others to implement their ISA, call themselves ARM-compatible, etc.
Nuvia built a product, with an ARM license (because they wanted to go to market).
Did they also incorporate ARM IP into their design (i.e. extend existing ARM core designs)?
But neither of those should matter... because afaik Qualcomm already has an architecture ARM license (one of the few, ~15). [0]
Consequently, if Qualcomm already has an architecture license to the core Nuvia built on... that's a superset of any license Nuvia had, given that an architecture license allows for unlimited customizability.
Consequently, this feels like ARM trying to defend their (future) revenue by retroactively limiting licenses they already sold.
[0] Background https://semiaccurate.com/2013/08/07/a-long-look-at-how-arm-l...
Well yes, they created a modified architecture compatible with ARM instruction-set, by using extensive access to ARM's IP and resources.
Agree on the rest, except that ARM obviously doesn't retroactively limit the license they gave to Nuvia, these terms were already part of Nuvia's license from the start.
From the court-documents it seems that Qualcomm doesn't argue the interpretation of those terms, they argue that they should not be enforced.
The retroactive part is the concept of not being able to transfer the Nuvia IP.
> From the court-documents it seems that Qualcomm doesn't argue the interpretation of those terms, they argue that they should not be enforced.
Earlier you said the Nuvia license was void. Isn't the meaning of void that no terms will be enforced?
The license is void, the contract is still valid and defines what has to happen when there no longer is a valid license.
But is "built on" a thing that matters at all?
Plenty of things that will eventually need a license to go into production get "built" without that license. And that's a worse case, analogous to the Nuvia license never even existing.
That seems to me to be the key point in contention, or at least whether or not ARM owns the right to prevent Nuvia from selling IP that Nuvia created. As Qualcomm's lawyers put it
> 25. Second, ARM was claiming a right to control the transfer of NUVIA technology when NUVIA’s ALA provided no such rights to ARM.
and as ARM's lawyers put it
> 25. Arm denies the allegations in paragraph 25.
Note if you deny in part you say which part you are denying and which part you are admitting, thus here they are denying the statement entirely, and thus claiming they had the rights to control the transfer of NUVIA technology (which is also the broader theme of the filing).
Without being able to actually see the contractual terms I don't see how the public could conclude which side is right in this dispute, but basically everything seems to center on this. Either ARM's license grants them control over technology Nuvia created, even if all the confidential information that technology was based off of is no longer confidential, and/or the party you are trying to transfer it to has licenses to all the technology it was based off of (and ARM probably wins), or it doesn't (and Qualcomm probably wins).
If I was thinking about doing business with arm I'd want to be very sure that whatever agreements I signed where of the second form, or I was getting a huge company-altering discount in exchange for them being of the first form.
"Qualcomm is trying to transfer everything Nuvia has developed under that specific narrow ARM-license to the broad license of Qualcomm"
ARMs legal claim is that the broad license of Qualcomm is not applicable to "host" the IP of Nuvia, because this IP was built on a very specific narrow license ARM provided to them, with contractual terms which do not allow the License and IP to be transferred
But I'd also caution people new to this that lawyers are extremely good at making their case seem obviously right even when it isn't. If you're not nodding along going "that seems right" when you read the argument in a complaint the lawyers either have a really bad case, or they screwed up (or in rare cases they're making technical arguments that they think will seem right to the judge even if they don't seem right to lay people). It's better to wait for a chance to read the response from the other side before agreeing that the side you are reading is right.
In this case this lawsuit is from 2022, we have the responses already :)
Here's the docket that lists all the filings: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64938776/arm-ltd-v-qual...
And to extract the relevant items from that docket
Here's the response, at a minimum if you find ARMs complaint convincing you should read this: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.798...
Here's ARMs response to the response: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.798...
From a reasonably quick scan it looks like everything else in this suit is about discovery, scheduling, and whether it should be a jury a trial or just heard in front of a judge.
Scheduling note: A 5-day Jury Trial is set for 12/16/2024
- Qualcomm requesting the court to order ARM to provide ALL Architecture License Contracts with ANY party so Qualcomm can judge whether they are in violation of THEIR contract [1]
- Apple requesting the court to NOT share this information, as they are not relevant to this case and a customer of BOTH ARM and Qualcomm [2]
- Qualcomm trying to subpoena other licensees Apple, MediaTek, Google, Intel, etc. to court [3]
Meanwhile Snapdragon X Elite pre-production is ramping up, Qualcomm-customers finalize their Hardware-design, Microsoft putting all their weight onto that architecture. So by end of 2024 the products are already launched, products are shipped and Qualcomm has more allies to help them arguing against trade-restrictions...
Regardless what the final outcome is, the better strategy of Qualcomm is obviously to have no outcome in short-term.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.798...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.798...
[3] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64938776/arm-ltd-v-qual...
So ARM is suing Qualcomm stating that the IP rights were non-assignable per the ALA, then Qualcomm finds out that ARM also did not hold up its side of the ALA termination agreement and is using Nuvia IP in their current gen designs.
They don't agree since 2022 that Nuvia's related IP must be destroyed on termination of that license agreement, because they expect to own it due to a different license-agreement they have with ARM, but argue that ARM, the owner of the licensed architecture in question, should have destroyed all information, already KNOWING that Qualcomm intends to fight this contract.
So in turn, for ARM to defend itself in this case moving forward, Qualcomm's implication is that ARM should ask Qualcomm to provide the required information to them. But the whole case of ARM is that Qualcomm is NOT the rightful owner of this information.
-
It's also quite a visible move just to delay the proceedings.
Qualcomm states [1] that they learned this new evidence at (ARM's) Mr. Agrawal’s deposition on Dec.12 2023, contacted ARM "less than three weeks" after that to "meet and confer", but "ARM would not meaningfully engage until January 16".
Less than 3 weeks after Dec.12 2023 is NYE, between Dec.28 and Jan.03, ARM obviously responded (but did not "engage meaningfully" according to Qualcomm)
At the point Qualcomm considers ARM showing meaningful engagement, they met within 3 days, on a Friday. And on Jan.22, "the next business day", they contacted the court.
So ARM's legal team was not available to meet at NYE, didn't respond "meaningfully" immediately and an appropriate meeting-slot agreed by ARM and Qualcomm was only possible more than a month after that deposition...
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.798...
The way you phrased that does sound like trying to have it both ways, but wouldn't those designs be co-owned by Arm and Nuvia? If so it makes logical sense to say that Arm has to delete and Qualcomm doesn't, because Qualcomm has a claim to both sides, but Arm only has a claim to one side. That's not trying to have it both ways.
> So in turn, for ARM to defend itself in this case moving forward, Qualcomm's implication is that ARM should ask Qualcomm to provide the required information to them. But the whole case of ARM is that Qualcomm is NOT the rightful owner of this information.
That's just being clever.
> 5. Even putting aside Qualcomm’s broad license rights, ARM’s reading of the termination obligations in the NUVIA Architecture License Agreement (“ALA”) is wrong. To the extent any destruction obligation exists, it explicitly applies only to ARM Confidential Information.1 But ARM again omits important facts: (1) under the NUVIA ALA, information in the public domain is not subject to confidentiality obligations, and (2) ARM publishes its instruction set without confidentiality restrictions. Anyone is free to go to the ARM website and download the 10,000+ page ARM Architecture Reference Manual.2 In this case, Qualcomm’s CPU cores are designed to be compatible with the publicly-available ARM Architecture version <redacted>.
> 36. Moreover, even though ARM demanded destruction of Confidential Information obtained under NUVIA’s ALA, NUVIA had implemented ARM Architecture <redacted>, which had been publicly available on ARM’s website for anyone to download since at least around January 2021—over a year before the destruction request. <Redacted sentence>. Therefore, ARM Architecture was not Confidential Information, not subject to any restrictions, and not subject to any destruction obligation. For the same reasons, the NUVIA core design did not contain ARM Confidential Information.
...
> It's also quite a visible move just to delay the proceedings.
I really don't agree. It looks like a bog standard discovery dispute.
(cites are paragraph numbers in https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.798...)
Ignore it, use technical measures to overcome it, disregard it.
If a stranger came up to you in the street and demanded $5 to continue looking at them, you’d tell them to fuck off (in so many words). You certainly wouldn’t avert your eyes, nor would you cough up.
Fuck these bozos and their shrink wrap licenses and their cookie popups and all.
According to Qualcomm, they already have a separate architecture license from ARM that allows them to produce their own cores and sell them in whatever they want. And by their reading of that license, they can purchase the core IP they use for that from a third party, and then use it under their existing license.
Or instead of "shake down", dare I say...strongarm?
Interesting. That's what Qualcomm itself does, right?
I could totally see every single server board saddled with some obsolete appendix of a cell baseband to satisfy the letter of some sweet contract qualcom had with arm saving the company a fair few million.
> Qualcomm bought a company called Nuvia to do this, and it originally used Nuvia's architectural license. Arm's argument is that the Nuvia license was canceled when it was taken over by Qualcomm. A new deal would have to be negotiated if that holds up in court.
> So, there you have it. Arm wants Qualcomm to stop shipping the product it's been contesting, but to be honest, that's not usually how these things end. It's unlikely that any product will be delayed from hitting shelves. These cases tend to end with one company giving a bucket of cash to the other, and everyone moves on.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/gov.u...
From the complaint:
22. (Page 6)
[...]
The licenses safeguarded Arm’s rights and expectations by prohibiting assignment without Arm’s consent, regardless of whether a contemplated assignee had its own Arm licenses.
39. (Page 12)
On February 1, 2022, Arm sent a letter to Nuvia and Qualcomm terminating the Nuvia licenses effective March 1, 2022. The letter terminated the licenses based on Nuvia’s material breach of the assignment provisions of the Nuvia licenses by entering into the acquisition of Nuvia without Arm’s consent.
42. (Page 12)
On April 1, 2022, Qualcomm’s General Counsel sent Arm a letter enclosing a Nuvia representative’s termination certification. The certification acknowledged—without objection—that the Nuvia licenses had been terminated. The certification recognized the obligations upon termination, and asserted that Nuvia was in compliance. Qualcomm and Nuvia thereby conceded that termination of the Nuvia licenses was appropriate, and that the termination provisions had been triggered, are binding, and are enforceable.
47. (Page 14)
Qualcomm’s Arm licenses do not cover products based on or incorporating Arm-based technologies developed by third parties under different Arm licenses
62. (Page 17)
Upon termination, the Nuvia ALA requires Nuvia to cease using and destroy any technology developed under the Nuvia ALA, as well as cease using Arm’s trademarks in connection with any technology developed under the Nuvia ALA.
I then showed him that no, the iptables binary was present and giving me an error i had never seen before: warning iptables is not present in this kernel.
He went white and made a quick phone call and i was awarded for my discovery.
Since then i have been fairly skeptical of qualcomm... Great hardware but that incident was somehow very alarming to me as it is not possible to disable iptables normally in kconfig so they had been mucking about in the source tree of the firewall enough to break it.
I wonder what happened there.
That’s scary
Edit, I was thinking market share when I said “do well” but ffgjgf1 pointed out that they’ve not been doing well financially. That’s an excellent point and likely explains some of ARM’s behavior. The problem is, alienating your license holders will only make the financials worse…
Financially they haven’t really been doing that well, especially no compared to other chip designers, they are basically making peanuts.
> Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
> "The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure all software ills. However, a critical observer may observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in size and sluggishness."
I’ve had some doubts the last few years but I have never really bet against intel. They have been shockingly good for a very very long time. A wave of elite x like parts on the desktop, at good prices, would hurt them, badly as the ecosystem spins up. AMD jumping in would also hurt them. The more ARM wastes this window of time, the more likely intel will get their process sorted and push out an aggressive microarchitecture on “x86s” and have ARM64 like qualities with some backwards compatibility
If his litigation goes away I see a bright future for Arm.
I'm just thinking of how much power I am wasting per day on Intel machines compared to Arm devices. (not taking into account the cost of purchase of course).
Are Risc-V designs unencumbered, or there's still some IP holder that could sue you when the money pot grows big enough to make it worth it?
... now. How about when it gets popular and too much resources have been poured into them? Like arm...
This is like a windows (or anything else) license for a private person, that you cannot resell or give to anyone else. I'm curious whether these shenanigans will stand up between corporations as well.
Bad way of doing business, in any case.
Source: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22273195/arm-v-qualco...
We don't know who is right with only public info to go on. It all depends on what exactly Qualcoms contract says.
Obviously Qualcom has fully educated and competent lawyers who have read their own contracts in detail, and concluded they are good to go.
So it's not a given that ARMs assertion is the only valid and winning assertion. It's merely what they want. Maybe they have a right to what they want, maybe they don't.
Here's a court-statement from Qualcomm on that topic: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.798...
Qualcomm agrees that the Nuvia License is void, they just claim that they can transfer all their IP to the Qualcomm license:.
"3. Qualcomm has its own license agreements with ARM, under which Qualcomm has licensed and paid for the same intellectual property that NUVIA licensed under its own separate agreements with ARM. Therefore, even though ARM terminated the NUVIA licenses, Qualcomm owns independent licenses for the same ARM technology and information"
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ARM disagrees on this, referring to a clause in their license-contract with Nuvia: "Upon termination, the Nuvia ALA requires Nuvia to cease using and destroy any technology developed under the Nuvia ALA, as well as cease using Arm’s trademarks in connection with any technology developed under the Nuvia ALA"
The response of Qualcomm is this: "4. The notion that ARM has the right to control technology that is not ARM’s—and worse yet, to ask Defendants to destroy their innovation and inventions unless substantial monetary tribute is paid to ARM—offends customary norms of technology ownership, as well as NUVIA’s and Qualcomm’s rights under their agreements with ARM."
and this: "7. ARM’s position is a threat to the industry generally. Unless this Court rejects ARM’s arguments, ARM’s extreme position could be weaponized against all of its licensees, allowing ARM to claim ownership over all its licensees’ innovations."
-
So:
1. Nuvia's license (and everything created under it) became void when Qualcomm acquired the company --> Qualcomm obviously agrees.
2. Qualcomm's license doesn't cover the IP Nuvia created with their license --> Qualcomm argues that this is "offending" and "a threat to the industry"
-
So it is not so much in dispute what Qualcomm's or Nuvia's contract says, Qualcomm apparently tries to convince the court that they have the right to use Nuvia's IP despite the license of Nuvia saying otherwise...
From Qualcomm?
ARM gave Nuvia a sweetheart deal (including IP access) specifically to help tune and spread ARM on the server. Rather than negotiate for their own deal, Qualcomm decided to purchase Nuvia in order to reuse the IP and licenses, neither of which the agreement allowed according to ARM.
ARM claims that Qualcomms pre-existing license does not allow "technologies developed by third parties under different Arm licenses".
So I guess the case will come down to arguing if an acquired company counts as "a third party" or not
Even in a contract there are limits. You can never have a contract for murder is the obvious example. A contract that is very unfair to one party can be void as well - check with a lawyer for details in your area.
How could the reporter possibly know one way or another, certainly it depends on the contents of that contract? Has anyone outside these three parties (Qualcomm, Arm, Nuvia) have seen the contract in question?
To me the reporting seemed quite unbiased.
Here's one from Qualcomm: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.798...
And a quote from it, where Qualcomm states that it has the rights to use the IP from Nuvia because it has a ARM-license covering the same IP as Nuvia's ARM-license:
"3. Qualcomm has its own license agreements with ARM, under which Qualcomm has licensed and paid for the same intellectual property that NUVIA licensed under its own separate agreements with ARM. Therefore, even though ARM terminated the NUVIA licenses, Qualcomm owns independent licenses for the same ARM technology and information"
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To this statement of ARM: "Upon termination, the Nuvia ALA requires Nuvia to cease using and destroy any technology developed under the Nuvia ALA, as well as cease using Arm’s trademarks in connection with any technology developed under the Nuvia ALA"
The response of Qualcomm is this: "4. The notion that ARM has the right to control technology that is not ARM’s—and worse yet, to ask Defendants to destroy their innovation and inventions unless substantial monetary tribute is paid to ARM—offends customary norms of technology ownership, as well as NUVIA’s and Qualcomm’s rights under their agreements with ARM."
and this: "7. ARM’s position is a threat to the industry generally. Unless this Court rejects ARM’s arguments, ARM’s extreme position could be weaponized against all of its licensees, allowing ARM to claim ownership over all its licensees’ innovations."
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So, as an amateur reading through the case, there is sufficient information to conclude that ARM has a contract that limits the use of Nuvia IP to Nuvia alone, and Qualcomm tries to argue that these terms are "offending" and "a threat to the industry".
--> So, there is obviously no disagreement that these crucial terms are in fact part of the ARM/Nuvia License contract.
The article sums up rough positions of both parties well enough.
RISC-V will probably get it's first big adoption through some new or shifting industry creating their own chip. Like how ARM got into phones or Amazon started to use their own ARM chips. This guarantees all the infrastructure can be build and used in the future.
Ventana Veyron V2 and Tenstorrent Ascalon/Alastor are other already announced, highly competitive, very high performance microarchitectures.
The high performance chips are coming. RISC-V is inevitable.
0. https://www.sifive.com/cores/performance-p870-p870a
1. https://www.sifive.com/press/sifive-announces-differentiated...
Qualcomm is trying to transfer everything Nuvia has developed under that specific narrow ARM-license to the broad license of Qualcomm and use it for "powering flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, and digital cockpits, as well as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, extended reality and infrastructure networking solutions"
ARM has filed a lawsuit that this was never in scope of the license of Nuvia, the court-ruling is still pending on that one...
Maybe not exact duplicate, but the ideas cross polinated.
My guess is that the work Nuvia did happened in close exchange with ARM, with each party owning their respective IP for commercialization (ARM for new generic designs, Nuvia for new server-centric designs).
Some generations back Qualcomm took the ARM design-license, designed their own CPU-cores based on it and added their custom GPU, DSP, etc.
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Scorpion, Krait (32bit): Custom Qualcomm designs with full compatibility to ARM's instruction sets. They were the best in the business, knowing more about tailoring an ARM-core to a mobile use-case than any company in the world.
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Then Apple disrupted the space with a 64bit ARM CPU. Qualcomm had to move fast from 32bit to 64bit to respond (why? ...that's arguable)
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Kryo (64bit): To move from 32bit to 64bit within one year (!), Qualcomm adopted the available ARM 64bit design, added their IP for adjacent components and created the first Kryo CPU (SD820, mamma mia what a bad SoC that was...). Over time they applied more customization to that platform, but the base was always this Kryo-architecture (-> newer vanilla ARM-design + Qualcomm modifications)
For years, this approach was used now, including Snapdragon 8cx (modified ARM Cortex-X1 + Cortex-A78 + Qualcomm IP)
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Oryon (64bit): Snapdragon X Elite is now Nuvia's modifications made on top of ARM's design, combined with Qualcomm's IP & modifications. So instead of being an iteration of the previous Qualcomm Kryo-based generation (applying Qualcomm's modifications onto a newer vanilla ARM-design), Qualcomm obviously applied their modifications on top of Nuvia's Design.
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So (over)simplified: Qualcomm did the same as they did before on Kryo, but replaced the foundation with an already-modified ARM-design from the Nuvia team (I don't want to play down the effort Qualcomm took for that, for sure the Nuvia team they acquired had a huge amount of work to merge their design with Qualcomm's modifications. But overall, they put their customization-process on top of the Nuvia-output instead of the ARM-output)
ARM's lawsuit is now obviously also about Qualcomm assuming that they don't need to license a new core-design from ARM because they acquired Nuvia, which achieves a comparable result using an older ARM-design.
Here goes the pivot to become the next Intel, I guess?
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655516
Yeah, basically this. Though it seems rather risky of Qualcomm to essentially byte the hand that feeds them. If I was ARM, I'd consider not extending any licenses given to Qualcomm this.
- tried to discretely transfer the licenses to a brand new entity
- worked directly with Nuvia’s cores, which Qualcomm’s own license did not permit
- kept at it after nuvia’s own license was terminated
- kept using the Arm trademark in their copy despite that also being linked to the licensing agreement
So from ARM’s point of view, Qualcomm are the greedy ones, and lazy to boot.
Or maybe the cores aren't as custom as Qualcomm is telling us, and they contain some separately-licenced Arm tech.
Imagine you buy a non profit which has a special windows licence and then you use that licence for all your for profit windows devices, I don't think that that would be possible.
AFAIK ARM gave Nuvia a licence to use their ip (and access to their IP) for a specific market.
imho Qualcom has the right to use the nuvia ip as laid out in the licence agreement, but not for markets where no licence exists e.g. laptops.
Edit: removed some nonsensical text
Like if you bought a non-profit and Microsoft told you thay you can't use your pre-existing Visual Studio licence to edit their code, but need to re-negotiate theirs.
A more apt analogy would be if Microsoft gave the source code of Office to a research center and IBM then tried to resell their version of the office suite after buying the research center.
To me out feels very similar to how a spyware company might want to buy a VPN just for their personal data. Except that here there is an actual contract forbidding this.
My uninformed opinion is that Qualcomm is perfectly allowed to keep all the assets and artifacts that Nuvia produced, but is not allowed to create chips based on them
No, the analogy above was correct. Qualcomm wants to use the license they already had.
Arm seems to also have given Nuvia access to the technology behind their own cortex cores.
Arm sees anything that nuvia developed as a derivate of their IP and therefore subject to the agreed upon licencing term.
I think that removes some of the weird feeling around the idea of just sharing patents and entering a licensing agreement, but even if arm only gave patent(licences) rights, it would still mean that all of the products of nuvia would be based on that ip.
I don't think your example is applicable, in your situation the product is not a derivate of visual studio, but visual studio is just a tool.
I think this fits the situation better:
You want to write a custom video decoder and because you are small and new a bigger company allows you to use their super fast video decoder and some of their patents if you only sell your software for ios smartphones for a good price.
If you breach any of this, your licence to use their encoder as a base for your products expires and you can't use any of their patents.
Qualcomm is trying to transfer everything Nuvia has developed under that specific narrow ARM-license to their own broad license and use it for all their products, but the license Nuvia had explicitly limits the use of IP created under this license and the license itself is non-transferrable.
So Qualcomm doesn't have Nuvia's ARM-license anymore, and their own ARM-license doesn't cover the IP of Nuvia.
ARM is arguing that the IP of Nuvia therefore does not belong to Qualcomm, and they seem to have the contract to support that.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm thinks that they have no need to license newer (comparable) architectures from ARM, because they acquired the IP from Nuvia...
This article, although a year old, seemingly does a better job of explaining each company's position:
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/arm-qualcomm-lawsu...
ARM has designed new architectures (Blackhawk, Cortex-X) which achieve comparable performance to Nuvia's IP, but Qualcomm's assumption is that they can apply Nuvia's IP on top of their existing architecture without the need of licensing this new ARM design.
Outside of this case and any financial implications, this bears a big risk for ARM as well, as Qualcomm's heavily-customized architecture could become the de-facto standard for use-cases where generic ARM is already well-supported (i.e. Smartphones, Windows PCs, cars,...).
That's why it makes sense that ARM's contract with Nuvia restricted the license and any derived IP from being transferred to another party. ARM obviously supported Nuvia to develop ARM for servers, but applied conditions to that contract to mitigate the risk for that custom architecture to be applied in other (rather harmonized) use-cases.
If you even try to do any business with Qualcomm they make it incredibly clear they will go nuclear on anyone for the slightest breach of their contracts to protect their IP, but they completely fail to make this reciprocal. It is a classic case of what-I-do-is-valuable-what-you-do-is-trivial.
And from Qualcomm’s point of view, ARM are greedy and would like to double-dip Qualcomm for licensing fees and whatnot…
But you know what, they might both be right.
- Qualcomm’s license doesn’t provide for using third-party developments
- Nuvia’s license doesn’t allow using it on other platforms than servers
- Nuvia’s derived IP is not transferable without ARM agreement
>- Nuvia’s derived IP is not transferable without ARM agreement
Binds Nuvia and Nuvia's license, not Qualcomm.
An analogy I can think of is how sometimes luxury brands give gifts or discounts to celebrities for marketing purposes with contract that forbid resales. (eg [0])
In this case the brand can only sue entities it had a specific contract with.
Back to the case at hand I believe that unless Qualcomm license includes a term along the lines of "You cannot buy Arm's IP unless Arm pre-approves it"[1] to hold Qualcomm culpable of this transfer.
To my understanding Arm used this proibition mainly to terminate Nuvia's license
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=john+cena+sells+car+lawsuit+ford&t...
[1] AFAIK this line might be in their license. I obviously do not have specific knowledge.
"I am a Patent Attorney with 20+ years experience in complex IT contracts"
Or not posting at all.
Definitive statements should demand some relevant experience.
Even if a lawyer comments though their comments will be in context of what every country(s) they work in. International contract law is very complex and nobody can tell you how it works in every country.
https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2023/08/leading-semic...
People world admire then and the government would bail them out.