If You Can’t Trust Your ARM, What Can You Trust?
Qualcomm and ARM are feuding again, with Qualcomm submitting secret legal complaints with a fair number of countries. As the submissions are secret the exact contents are unknown, but according to sources it is because of ARM’s plan to build some chips in house and not share 100% of the design with their customers. This is a bit of a change for ARM, as they have never been a hardware company before. Traditionally they designed their silicon and licensed out the technology for a fee. Their next generation compute subsystems reference designs will be built in house and ARM may limit access to the instruction set architecture and technologies behind the new silicon.
Qualcomm is likely hoping to build off of their recent legal win against ARM over their acquisition of Nuvia, another ARM licensee. ARM felt that Qualcomm using Nuvia’s ts IP in the Snapdragon X processors for PCs breached the contracts ARM had with both, but the courts did not agree. ARM intends to appeal that decision but for now it stands, and is why ARM feels this new legal proceeding is intended to enrich Qualcomm and has nothing to do with anti-trust behaviour.
We should know more once the court documents are unsealed and the details of the case revealed.
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