Judge dismisses Arm's last legal claim against Qualcomm in licensing spat Qualcomm is claiming complete victory over Arm in their licensing spat, after a court in Delaware ruled it has not breached the terms of any architecture license agreement (ALA) with the chip designer. This latest verdict [PDF] follows the court case at the end of last year, when a jury found largely in favor of the California …
I understand the sentiment but I agree with the verdict and expect it would have been the same under any non-biased jurisdiction.
Qualcomm found a way to advantage themselves which ARM took exception to and didn't like the idea of losing huge licensing payments they believed they deserved, or thought they could prevent Qualcomm using that advantage so ARM could benefit themselves.
As the court has found, and I agree, "tough shit".
I'm not going to shed tears for any ruthless money grabbing Capitalist Bastard stopped in their tracks..
No but it's apparently impossible for people working on RISC-V to avoid poking the Torvalds bear.
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wjLCqUUWd8DzG+xsOn-yVL0Q=O35U9D6j6=2DUWX52ghQ@mail.gmail.com/
So your magic ISA is little endian but it's not guaranteed that an instruction to byte swap data to big endian exists? Yeah good luck with that.
I really don't know what the execs at ARM were thinking when they decided to go after one of their largest ARM licensees, I can only think they imagining the dollar signs in their yearly bonus should they have won the case.
All it was ever going to achieve even if ARM won, is to make Qualcomm and other licensees think more seriously about adopting RISC-V in their future SOC to get out from underneath ARMs thumb. So it was only ever going to be a short term win.
You say that as if any part of the chain could quickly replace ARM with RISC-V. They can't. Qualcomm can't make similarly fast chips with it; they would need to spend a lot of time designing them, which they don't have experience with. They couldn't just buy someone else who knows how to do that; the existing designers are good, but not that good. The people who buy ARM chips couldn't just pivot to RISC-V because the software they want to run on it doesn't support it. The people who write the software can't just recompile for that quickly. Any change of that nature would take a long time.
Which is why ARM thought they could get away with this. If people are really going to switch to RISC-V, then this is the peak of ARM's power because they can't switch for some time even if they tried their hardest. If people are not trying to switch, then ARM is even more powerful at the moment. This is still true now; if ARM canceled Qualcomm's license now, both would suffer, but Qualcomm would probably suffer more because somebody's got to sell CPUs for smartphones and they're still going to be ARM-based because the existing RISC-V chips are nowhere near fast enough and Android's ejected RISC-V from the main project until it settles down more, to say nothing of the many other ARM-only systems people spend lots of money building.
Their lawyers would have known the standard of proof requires they demonstrate harm to other licensees, and that the only way to do that would be to permit discovery of third party licensees. That was untenable for ARM because different customers have contracts with different terms and exposing all that in public and dealing with the fallout was apparently worse than going before a judge without the evidence required to prove their case.
