Qualcomm: Arm lawsuit motivated by greed, 'payback' for opposing Nvidia takeover

Qualcomm has painted Arm as a greedy, capricious bully that's fixated on extracting more and more licensing fees for its designs. The Snapdragon giant hit out at the Softbank-owned CPU designer in a court filing responding to Arm's lawsuit against Qualcomm. Late this summer, Arm sued Qualcomm, accusing the US chip titan of …

[Anonymous Coward]

Qualcomm argued that its Armv8 architectural license with Arm was "broadly overlapping" with the one Nuvia had, with pretty much the same rights.

<mumble> ... but way lower price.

I expect Qualcomm thought: We can buy NuVia, and get our money back from using the cheaper licenses in phone processors. When ARM sues we will just dissemble and prevaricate, and if the worst comes to the worst, we will be forced to pay what we agreed to.

It's a hard row being an IP vendor. Sooner or later (ok - sooner) your customer stops wanting to pay for something they have already gotten their hands on.

[pimppetgaeghsr]

Apparently Qualcomm wants to move to RISC-V. Maybe largely a bluff but I can't see anyone wanting to use ARM microcontrollers once RISC-V options mature. ARM is also being extremely pushy and playing hard ball with all their customers and this lawsuit is just the tip of the iceberg. Alas, what is a 30 year reputation when you need to pump up your EBITDA for Softbanks IPO exit strategy.

[VoiceOfTruth]

Good luck to Arm

Qualcomm is a US company suing in a US so-called court. Arm has about a 2% chance of an impartial decision.

[d.indjic]

Re: Good luck to Arm

Think ARM China. It gets even more interesting. Now Alibaba started shipping Risc-V laptops and Huawei will bend over backwards to get to the 6G. Good bye and thank you for all the fish, West.

[Lorribot]

Ah the joys of Licensing.

The licensee will rarely win as they didn't right or read the EULA and these things are never favourable to commonsense. Qualcomm has gotten very rich of using ARM IP. It could always design its own chips r move to RISC-v or some other IP, but i dare say that would be a tad difficult and very expensive, more than ARM licence fees.

[3arn0wl]

Cutting off their nose

Apparently, according to Calista Redmond, Qualcomm recently joined the RISC-V Foundation.

- that could just be a tactical bluff

- it could be that Qualcomm have seen the advancement and successful inclusion of RISC-V co-processors in tech or

- it might be that that they can see a way of using the Nuvia designs with RISC-V going forward.

But whatever the reason, it would seem that this relationship is sour, and Arm looks to be losing a very valuable customer. Meanwhile Qualcomm gets to throw mud at Arm leading up to Arm's flotation. A PR own goal from Arm, I'd say.

[aerogems]

Re: Cutting off their nose

That's actually a somewhat interesting prospect IMO. What doesn't seem to be in doubt at all is that Qualcomm has a license to use ARM designs, just whether they can use the Nuvia designs without renegotiating a contract with ARM. RISC-V is basically an open source ISA that anyone can use without needing to license anything.

So, what's saying Qualcomm couldn't just figure out a way to sandwich together a couple ARM cores with a couple RISC-V cores, and use that as a transition product to selling RISC-V based chips for data center customers? Sort of like years ago when Apple sold 486 add-on cards for their PPC Macs. Maybe even phone, and other embedded platform, developers at some point. Here's something that can run both ARM and RISC-V apps, so you can test all your apps on one system and then migrating to RISC-V is basically stopping the ARM process and starting the RISC-V process. Once the RISC-V cores have proven themselves, they could drop ARM and focus only on RISC-V in future products.

[Bartholomew]

Re: Cutting off their nose

> RISC-V is basically an open source ISA that anyone can use without needing to license anything

ARM is an ISA and a portfolio of chip designs and data interconnects that have been deployed to silicon a lot. They have designs and probably a few bulk discount deals with some major fabs.

If you look at any of the current generation of RISC-V SoC's they nearly all end up using AMBA AXI and/or AMBA APB buses in some places because all the currently available IP block that is what they support. And AMBA (Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture), is an open standard that was developed by ARM. There are other open on-chip interconnect options like Wishbone or TileLink, but they are not as widely deployed (yet).

RISC-V is an ISA and that is all. How you support everything that is required to make the ISA function is up to you. That could be low level building from the ground up with transistors, downloading a design that someone else has created (hopefully debugged) and published online or licensing IP blocks from professionals. The ISA alone, is a bit like being handed a free book with a list of chapters, but all the pages are blank for you to fill in. If you are starting from scratch it will take many iterations of silicon to removed all the major bugs (And each new mask costs a lot). You can only simulate so much, generally more is learned in the first millisecond of silicon powering up than all that was learned during simulation (because depending on the complexity simulation can be many orders of magnitude slower even when simulated by a large number of expensive FPGA chips). That is one of the major reasons why people license IP blocks, they have been deployed already and should function as expected. DDR external memory interfaces, PCIe buses are typically blocks that you would license from others anyhow. The big advantage of not using ARM cores is removing the limitations that Arm imposes on your design (specifically if you want to deviate, you need to pay them more. And if you want to license your modifications to others that is not allowed).

Short term ARM still has a large amount of added value to offer.

Long term RISC-V (IP) will eat up most of ARM's (current) business. And it is not that one ISA is better than the other, it is just economics. (The RISC-V ISA is mostly composed of the best of the best of 20+ year old expired patents). It will probably take about 10 more years for the RISC-V IP vendors to mature in their offerings enough to start to really eat away at ARM, and there is only so much pie so a series of mergers will start before then. There is also nothing to stop ARM or even Intel from licensing RISC-V IP blocks.

[nijam]

Re: Cutting off their nose

> The RISC-V ISA is mostly composed of the best of the best of 20+ year old expired patents.

Is that a polite way of saying it's a pile of obsolete shit?

[Bartholomew]

Re: Cutting off their nose

> Is that a polite way of saying it's a pile of obsolete shit?

Not at all, it would be like if you could cherry pick the best design features of every car that has ever existed, but were limited to cars older than 20 years ago. Not a lot has fundamentally changed on the outside and inside of a car in the last 20 years. They still typically have 4 wheels, they still typically have a round steering wheel, mirrors, seats, something that converts an energy source into mechanical power, energy source, glove box (say that out loud and think about it for a half a second), wind shields, doors, boot, bonnet/hood, ....

And the same is true of an Instruction Set Architecture, the fundamentals have not changed much in 20+ years (Two companies come to mind Mill Computing Inc with its Mill CPU architecture and Ascenium Inc with it's Aptos general-purpose processor without an instruction set, when it comes to trying to make major changes to CPU's). What has changed is how the instructions are processed and that is mostly decided by what is sitting behind or underneath the ISA carrying out the actual instructions. It is probably going to be something like a 13-stage, four-issue, out-of-order pipeline execution with a re-order buffer (ROB) and a register alias table (RAT) for branch misprediction recovery at the high end. And if you are licensing IP that is the kind of thing you would try and buy if you needed performance. And if you were trying to make your own totally from scratch, I tip my hat to you.

What the RISC-V ISA did was take a tiny bit from a Porsche, a tiny bit from a Jaguar, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Rolls Royce, Dodge Charger, Ford Gran Torino, Mustang Cobra II, Pontiac Trans Am, Batmobile, Subaru, Hyundai, Audi, Lexus, Mazda, BMW, DeLorean, Mini, Ford Model-T and somehow managed to merge them into something that was more than the sum of the individual pieces. If you dig very deep into the actual binary of the RISC-V ISA your jaw hits the floor at what they managed to do. Some decisions made about the ISA reduce the amount of transistors needed to decode instructions - a lot of thought by a lot of very smart people has gone into the ISA. RISC-V is impressive, and if you license IP then you can gain access to most of the patented innovations made in the last 20 years which are mostly behind or underneath the ISA.

[aerogems]

I generally find...

... that when the ad hominems come out, it's usually a pretty sure sign that the party knows it's up shit creek without a paddle and is just desperately flailing about in the hopes of getting lucky. As the old saying goes: If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the facts and law are against you, pound the table and yell like hell. Qualcomm seems squarely in that third category.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Must be a mistake

"Qualcomm has painted Arm as a greedy, capricious bully that's fixated on extracting more and more licensing fees for its designs."

Somehow "has painted Arm as" replaced the word "is".

[captain veg]

Re: Must be a mistake

In the land of the free, greed is not a crime.

-A.

[Will Godfrey]

Re: Must be a mistake

Qualcomm would know. They seem to have a bit of a reputation for gouging.

[systemBuilder22]

Re: Must be a mistake

Not exactly. Who wouldn't pay a 5% tax on their computer to make it run 3x faster? Qualcomm charges a 5% tax on every phone so the base station cells can carry 3x the calls ...

[Bartholomew]

Bet now.

The question probably boils down to who had access to the best lawyers when the contracts were drawn up and negotiated. And who has dealt with the most contracts of that type. If it goes to slogging this out in court over a number of decades (I'm thinking back to Intel licensing to AMD) my money has to be on Qualcomm because they have deeper pockets, but if it is a short legal battle with minimal appeals my money is on ARM.

ARM Revenue JPY ¥152.42 billion (2017) (~US$1.024 billion) ; Net income JPY ¥(31.79) billion (2017) (~US$0.213 billion) ; Total assets US$3.21 billion (2016)

Qualcomm Revenue US$33.57 billion (2021) ; Net income US$9.04 billion (2021) ; Total assets US$41.24 billion (2021)

There is no popcorn icon, so I'll have a beer while watching this unfold.

[Lordrobot]

A great way to lose your largest customers is to sue them.

There is not a single proprietary model that scales the test of time. ARM should have been grateful for the Qualcomm Licenses. There is a principle of Contract law that basically says, you can't change the terms of a contract. Qualcomm owns the CPU start-up, they own the start-up firm. Since there are no M1 chips for PCs, that would appear to be a start-up CPU. Further vague terms are always struck in contract disputes. Fancy licenses are a lot like Donald Trump's non-disclosure agreements. There is a point at which they are so absurdly broad, they get kicked out of court. "Oh but we meant..."

Arm is claiming that Qualcomm had to get new licenses when it bought the CPU start-up. But licenses were not transferred. The Startup CPU firm is wholly owned. ARM betting tough with licenses is something every customer loathes especially those that pay their licenses.

"One foolish stumble for ARM, one giant leap for RISC-V."

[Slipoch]

Re: A great way to lose your largest customers is to sue them.

the issue is the license is restricted to the Nuvia team and their specific dev, and qualcomm has been using it outside that team and outside that project.

This is also not the first trime qualcomm have decided they don't need to pay licensing, like when they joined Apple in refusing to pay for the Australian IP rights for WiFi.

[nijam]

Re: A great way to lose your largest customers is to sue them.

A great way to lose your business is to let your largest customer steal it.

[3arn0wl]

Between a rock and a hard place

Arm will probably be losing Qualcomm's business anyway - at least to some extent. This is just the expensive way to do it, both in terms of lawyer's fees and potential court costs, and in terms of damage to reputation as all their other customers look on and witness their behaviour.

Meanwhile RISC-V looks like an equally efficient, and increasingly mature alternative, with custodians who positively encourage creativity : a stark contrast to the authoritarian behaviour of Arm.

[maddoxx]

Qual is for torture, pain

at least in German

this might or might not explain

[Anonymous Coward]

Projecting much?

Qualcomm accusing someone of aggressive licensing practices? Pot, meet kettle.

[Jonathon Green]

“Qualcomm has painted Arm as a greedy, capricious bully that's fixated on extracting more and more licensing fees for its designs.”

Which of course Qualcomm would never dream of doing with its own IP…

[Steve Davies 3]

It might be nice

to see what is happening to the property market in San Diego right now.

If the people inside QC think they are going to lose then you might see a lot more properties come onto the market/or leases not being renewed.

People voting with their feet is a great way to find out what is happening without the company saying a word.

[pimppetgaeghsr]

Spiderman pointing at Spiderman.

[3arn0wl]

Arm Changes Business Model – OEM Partners Must Directly License From Arm

Latest in the Qualcomm / Arm spat:

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/arm-changes-business-model-oem-partners

Every chip design company will decide to accelerate their RISC-V projects on this news, surely.

[systemBuilder22]

Haha Q the joke's on you ...

I worked for Qualcomm. Qualcomm itself has a clause in its own licenses that if a company gets bought all the 3G, 4G, or 5G licenses are void and must be renegotiated with Qualcomm.

Qualcomm seems to have forgotten that this own contract language which they developed could be used against them by a company like arm which provides all the CPU intellectual property in a Qualcomm phone.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the only company that has gotten fatter and lazier over the past 10Y than ARM? Intel !!!

Why does everybody take out an architectural license ie Apple Qualcomm NVidia Nuvia and others? Because ARMs designs (IP cores) all lag the industry by about 5Y ....

When Qualcomm made the mistake of using an early ARM64 design out of marketing desperation when Apple A7 went 64-bit ... They got burned literally ... I mean the phones literally burned your hands they overheated so badly that the Qualcomm 810 chipset was a total market failure ... Samsung didn't even use it !!!