During Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the company took the wraps off of its new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. Legal issues with Arm have cast a shadow over its future. According to Qualcomm’s notice of legal action to the SEC, Arm has terminated the company’s architectural license. This license grants Qualcomm the ability to produce the Oryon CPU cores that power the new Snapdragon 8 Elite and the Snapdragon X chips included in Copilot Plus PCs.
All About the Qualcomm and Arm Scenario
Arm was approached by both PC World and BNN Bloomberg for a statement and declined to comment on the development of this story. This newly issued license cancellation adds to an existing dispute that has been the subject of an SEC legal warning from Qualcomm. Arm, based in the U.K. and known for licensing ARM processor designs used in nearly every smartphone and an increasing number of laptops, filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm in the fall of 2022, alleging contract and trademark infringement.
Arm is also looking for an injunction to ensure that Qualcomm obliterates the chip designs it developed using intellectual property from Nuvia, a company that Qualcomm acquired in 2021 to boost its ARRM-based CPU design efforts.
Arm says Qualcomm violated its license and claims pre-acquisition chip designs from Nuvia can’t be transferred without permission Arm rescinded Nuvia’s licenses in February 2023. That is leading to both companies pursuing strategies that BNN Bloomberg says are colliding more and more.
Rather, Qualcomm is ditching ARM designs in favor of its own rather unique-looking reimagining of the high-end for computing. At the same time, Arm is expanding into computing by offering comprehensive chip designs for companies to license, rather than just allowing them to create their own designs based on the ARM instruction set.
If Arm proceeds with the license termination, Qualcomm would lose the ability to utilize its own designs based on the ARM instruction set, although it could still license Arm’s chip blueprints, such as the Cortex cores. This could be a major setback for Qualcomm delaying and losing efforts being put into present projects. Qualcomm certainly has a serious heat source with this chip, and some early benchmarks show it could be far more competitive against Apple’s A-series chips than the previous Snapdragon processors with Cortexasist CPUs. The new Snapdragon X chips for PCs are similarly positioning themselves in competition against x86 processors from Intel and AMD, which have historically proven tougher to beat than Qualcomm’s prior PC efforts.
FAQs
Why is ARM terminating Qualcomm’s chip design license?
ARM is ending the license due to an ongoing legal dispute with Qualcomm, claiming breaches of the licensing agreement related to Nuvia’s chip designs.
What impact will this have on Qualcomm?
If the termination proceeds, Qualcomm will lose the ability to use its own designs based on ARM’s instruction set, potentially causing significant delays and setbacks in its chip development efforts.
