A dispute currently opposes the designer of chips ARM and the manufacturer Qualcomm around licensing rights. At the end of the lawsuit, ARM could completely change its entire business model in just a few years.
Today, ARM chips are everywhere. They are found via two types of agreement: on the one hand, technology agreements (TLA), which include ARM’s own designs such as Cortex cores and slight modifications to these (Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung, etc. .), and, on the other hand, architecture agreements (ALA), which allow own designs based on the ARM instruction set. This is what Apple does, for example, with the Apple M2 chips or the Apple A16 Bionic.
ARM wants to sell its ARM chips directly to OEMs
In the context of the lawsuit, what emerges from a document of the lawsuit between the two companies, is that ARM strives to be able to have a sales logic comparable to that of Intel and AMD. If the outcome of the lawsuit were to put an end to the current model, in short, we could no longer create custom ARM chips. That would mean the end of the Samsung Exynos, MediaTek Dimensity and Qualcomm Snapdragon chips that use ARM chips. For its part, ARM wants to be able to sell its chips directly to manufacturers (OEM), as Intel does.
ARM also plans to force its partners to use its own technologies for GPU, NPU or ISP (Image Signal Processor) via the new CPU license for OEMs. Qualcomm and other chipmakers would then no longer be able to combine ARM chips with their own technologies such as GPUs, including Qualcomm’s Adreno or AMD’s RNDA 2 in the Samsung Exynos. This could also concern the Google Tensor NPU or Nvidia GPUs… found on servers or the Nintendo Switch.
It all started with Nuvia
The conflict between ARM and Qualcomm started following the acquisition of Nuvia by Qualcomm. This American start-up founded in early 2019 and released from anonymity a few months later may not mean anything to you, and yet it was to represent the most sensible acquisition made by Qualcomm in recent years.
By buying Nuvia, the American SoC giant has indeed secured the services of a team with very high added value… a team made up of former engineers from Google, Apple, Broadcom and AMD. However, it is a violation of license and trademark rights according to ARM, hence the current lawsuit.
Qualcomm already having particularly broad ARM license rights, in particular for the creation of custom cores, it ended the license paid by Nuvia in March 2022, judging that it did not have to pay twice. For its part, ARM does not agree, even though Qualcomm bought Nuvia.
In addition to the risks to Snapdragon chips, Qualcomm’s planned business for laptop and server chips is also at risk.
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