Arm Holdings Plc is canceling a license that allowed longtime partner Qualcomm Inc. to use Arm intellectual property to design chips, escalating a legal dispute over vital smartphone technology.
  • @[email protected]
    3•22 hours ago

    Additional sources: serve the home and TechTechPotato (Dr. Ian Cutress).

    This honestly seems like one of the most important recent stories in the whole tech industry. I don’t think it even matters how things eventually get settled for this move by ARM to have lasting consequences. Simply the threat will cause Qualcomm and many others to increase their efforts to explore and adopt alternatives like RISC-V.

    China is already invested into moving to RISC-V and Europe also has an interest in it, now you give huge companies like Qualcomm reason to incease their efforts? That is creating exactly the buy in needed to actually make substantial shifts like this happen.

    • Alphane MoonOPM
      2•22 hours ago

      Agreed, this does have the potential to create one of those historic moments in the semiconductor industry.

      If this does go through (and I personally believe it won’t and the recent reports are part of the negotiation process), I think ARM will kill the golden egg.

      • @[email protected]
        3•2 hours ago

        I definitely agree that it is part of a negotiation process for ARM, but do you think there’s a scenario where they settle and things go back to normal without changes? Seems like they are betting on being irreplaceable and want to squeeze out more profit because of it.

        I don’t have the technical knowledge to judge how hard it is to switch ISAs, but since Qualcomm with the Nuvia team seems to have managed to create a new core from the ground up that rivals or exceeds ARMs offerings, it presumable is a solveable problem.

        The root issue to me seems that while they have a vendor/customer relationship they are essentially also competitors in the design market. Ideally you’d want clear seperations and aligned goals like you have e.g. on the manufacturing side between ASLM, TSMC and chip designers like Apple/Qualcomm. No one can squeeze out too much profit from the others, because they are dependent on each other making progress. With ARM/Qualcomm you don’t have that, since ARM probably wishes Qualcomm would just go back to using their reference designs instead of doing their own.