Arm Sues Qualcomm and Nuvia For Breach of License and Trademark (reuters.com) 23
Chip technology firm Arm, which is owned by Softbank Group, said on Wednesday it has sued Qualcomm and Qualcomm's recently acquired chip design firm Nuvia for breach of license agreements and trademark infringement. From a report: Arm is seeking an injunction that would require Qualcomm to destroy the designs developed under Nuvia's license agreements with Arm, which Arm said could not be transferred to Qualcomm without Arm approval. Qualcomm acquired Nuvia for $1.4 billion last year.
The lawsuit represents a major break between Qualcomm and Arm, one of its most important technology partners that Qualcomm relied on for years after Qualcomm stopped work on designing its own custom computing cores. But the two companies have been at odds for years, with some inside Qualcomm complaining privately that Arm's slackening pace of innovation is causing Qualcomm's chips to fall behind Apple's processors in performance. Qualcomm bought Nuvia -- a firm founded by former Apple chip architects -- to reboot its efforts to make custom computing cores that would be different from standard Arm designs used by rivals such as Taiwan chip designer MediaTek.
The lawsuit represents a major break between Qualcomm and Arm, one of its most important technology partners that Qualcomm relied on for years after Qualcomm stopped work on designing its own custom computing cores. But the two companies have been at odds for years, with some inside Qualcomm complaining privately that Arm's slackening pace of innovation is causing Qualcomm's chips to fall behind Apple's processors in performance. Qualcomm bought Nuvia -- a firm founded by former Apple chip architects -- to reboot its efforts to make custom computing cores that would be different from standard Arm designs used by rivals such as Taiwan chip designer MediaTek.
WTF (Score:2)
Arm is seeking an injunction that would require Qualcomm to destroy the designs developed under Nuvia's license agreements with Arm, which Arm said could not be transferred to Qualcomm without Arm approval. Qualcomm acquired Nuvia for $1.4 billion last year.
uh, what? Regardless of who wronged who here, I feel like deleting some technology and inventions is a huge waste for humanity. There must be some other way to handle it, maybe put it in a trust or hand it over to the state for licensing?
Re: WTF (Score:1)
This wil be a quick decision I think. Just licensing chains alone will likely decide who keeps the code. Not that I have any knowledge of the actual licensing environment. Not any.
More likely a renegotiation tactic (Score:4, Interesting)
It's much more likely that Arm is using this to force Qualcomm to renegotiate the Nuvia-Arm agreement. I don't see a reason why Arm would want to stop Qualcomm from using these designs.
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I wouldn't be surprised if the aim of the final settlement is to try to force a continuing partnership where Arm benefits off of Qualcomm for the Nuvia developments.
Just thinking back to all of the other now-defunct architectures, Arm runs the risk of becoming nothing more than a second-rate microprocessor developer for mid-grade appliances, where they make money producing processors, but they do nothing revolutionary. Eventually developers accustomed to working with more leading edge stuff stop even consi
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It's always about wanting cross-licensing deals.
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There must be some other way to handle it, maybe put it in a trust or hand it over to the state for licensing?
Hmm, you want the State to punish them both for having had the argument?
Your conception of the value in a particular implementation of a licensed instruction set is perhaps a little bit weak. There is nothing novel or useful to the public here. There is no "innovation" involved. They licensed the innovation, and allegedly transferred it in violation of their agreements. Deleting their design does not delete the innovation. You can still buy ARM chips from any company that licensed it. And they're about the
Qualcomm's level of suck exposed (Score:1)
"some inside Qualcomm complaining privately that Arm's slackening pace of innovation is causing Qualcomm's chips to fall behind Apple's processors in performance"
Qualcomm is trying to blame someone else for its shitty chip performance. Apple's chips are faster because Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars on a team that makes better chips. Qualcomm's chips aren't faster because they just repackage the reference design.
It's telling that Qualcomm doesn't understand that.
Re: Qualcomm's level of suck exposed (Score:3)
Both Apple and Qualcomm have architectural licenses which means they can use or not use as much of ARM's reference designs as they want. And both make their own custom designs. It seems Qualcomm's argument seems to say they rely on ARM to keep up with Apple.
Qualcomm's problem is they have to make chips profitable to sell to others. That mean they are a little more generic. Apple designs only for themselves and can tweak each chip for specific purposes. Cost is less of a factor. For example Apple can add as
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Both Apple and Qualcomm have architectural licenses which means they can use or not use as much of ARM's reference designs as they want. And both make their own custom designs. It seems Qualcomm's argument seems to say they rely on ARM to keep up with Apple.
Qualcomm's problem is they have to make chips profitable to sell to others. That mean they are a little more generic. Apple designs only for themselves and can tweak each chip for specific purposes. Cost is less of a factor. For example Apple can add as much cache as they feel they need whereas Qualcomm has to balance that with cost considerations.
Qualcomm can absolutely do the same thing. Cache can be modular. If you want the extra cache, you produce the full module. Otherwise, you slice off the last segment of the chip and burn out a fuse. Or they can have slightly different variations depending on what you need, e.g. wrapping the core with different modular components for Wi-Fi, USB, etc.
Qualcomm's problem is that they have used patents to almost completely monopolize the cellular modem silicon market, and probably used bundling deals to convi
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Qualcomm can absolutely do the same thing. Cache can be modular. If you want the extra cache, you produce the full module. Otherwise, you slice off the last segment of the chip and burn out a fuse. Or they can have slightly different variations depending on what you need, e.g. wrapping the core with different modular components for Wi-Fi, USB, etc.
I was not arguing that Qualcomm does not have the ability. I was pointing out that Qualcomm has profit considerations that Apple does not have as Apple does not sell chips. Adding more cache makes the chip bigger which means fewer chips per wafer which is the basis of cost for a chip foundry. Qualcomm could also design more specialized chips for specific customers; however, would add a great deal of cost instead of making a more generic chip that sells to multiple customers. Apple is designing for themselve
Promoting RISC-V (Score:2, Interesting)
No matter what happens, ARM is just announced too the world that small design firms should be using RISC-V cores instead of ARM. The owners of small firms want them to be bought so that they can cash out, so if it's suddenly revealed that this will be impossible with ARM cores then the only logical course of action is to use something that can and is well supported (i.e. can run Linux). There are a lot of options but few are as modern as RISC-V. There are minimal open RISC-V cores and beefy closed RISC-V
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No matter what happens, ARM is just announced too the world that small design firms should be using RISC-V cores instead of ARM. The owners of small firms want them to be bought so that they can cash out, so if it's suddenly revealed that this will be impossible with ARM cores then the only logical course of action is to use something that can and is well supported (i.e. can run Linux). There are a lot of options but few are as modern as RISC-V. There are minimal open RISC-V cores and beefy closed RISC-V cores which are looking more attractive by the day.
RISC-V is not ready for prime-time yet.
As you said, there are other options. OpenSPARC and in particular OpenPower come to mind. Check:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
These guys started with RISC-V, but then went to OpenPower because certain instructions not present in RISC-V increased power consumption dramatically
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The LibreSOC project switched to OpenPower because the RISC-V group barely gave them the time of day, plus the NDA required to participate in the RISC-V consortium discusion (needed to integrate their extension with the larger RISC-V ecosystem), was in directly conflict of their open development goals and EU grant requirements, and not middle ground or more limited NDA was offered.
It was not a power or performance consideration.
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>It was not a power or performance consideration.
That was just a bonus :)
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On one hand, there is something to what you say, and on the other hand, they probably had a license agreement that said that the designs weren't transferrable... so this wouldn't automatically apply to all ARM designs.
Is Softbank Group Trying To Be Aquired by Qualcomm (Score:2)
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Qualcomm bought Nuvia. That means that Qualcomm now has legal rights to every thing Nuvia. The only reason I can think of for Softbank Group to do this is to try to force a buy out of ARM. They were desperate to sell off ARM before, then Nvidia was going to buy them, but they were blocked by multiple governments. I don't think there is anyway for them to win this fight, but they could draw it out long enough to make it expensive for Qualcomm. The only reason to do this would be to try to force Qualcomm to buy them out, trying to push for sooner rather than later.
And, in your line of reassoning, what is stoping those "multiple governments" to block the ARM-Qualcomm deal?
After all, those goverments alleged that letting Nvidia buy ARM would allow one of the users to control the architecture in detriment of the other users of the architecture...
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Re: Is Softbank Group Trying To Be Aquired by Qual (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple started way after Qualcomm... (Score:3)
So claiming ARM is hindering Qualcomm's performance is a joke. Qualcomm has been happy with making numbers that look high (higher MHz, dhrystones, etc) and now they're crying that their chips aren't competitive with places that are trying to get you more IPC and multithreaded performance on heavier (desktop or server level) workloads like SPEC.