By the end of Day 3, it seemed quite clear that Qualcomm's legal team and position was far ahead of ARM's. I feel the following snippet sums up the whole week:
"Qualcomm’s counsel turned Arm’s Piano analogy on its head. Arm compared its ISA to a Piano Keyboard design during the opening statement and used it throughout the trial. It claimed that no matter how big or small the Piano is, the keyboard design remains the same and is covered by its license. Qualcomm’s counsel extended that analogy to show how ridiculous it would be to say that because you designed the keyboard, you own all the pianos in the world. Suggesting that is what Arm is trying to do."
This is really confusing me. Is Arm seriously claiming that all design work that makes use of their ISA is derivative work? I feel like I have to be misunderstanding something.
Wouldn't that be similar to the Google v Oracle Java API case except the claim would be even stronger - that all programs making use of the Java API were derivative works of the Java API and thus subject to licensing arrangements with Oracle?
Or similarly, a hypothetical claim by Intel that a compiler such as LLVM is derivative work of the x86 ISA.
That can't possibly be right. What have I misunderstood about this situation?
> Or similarly, a hypothetical claim by Intel that a compiler such as LLVM is derivative work of the x86 ISA.
Intel has been lenient toward compiler implementers, but their stance is that emulation of x86 instructions still under patent (e.g., later SSE, AVX512) is infringing if not done under a license agreement. This has had negative implications for, for example, Microsoft's x86 emulation on ARM Windows devices.
(I'm guessing Apple probably did the right thing and ponied up the license fees.)
Yeah, I did a double-take when I read that too - but that does seem to be the case. From a different article [^1]:
> "Throughout expert testimony, Arm has been asserting that all Arm-compliant CPUs are derivatives of the Arm instruction set architecture (ISA)."
> "Arm countered with an examination of the similarities in the register-transfer language (RTL) code, which is used in the design of integrated circuits, of the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite processors, the pre-acquisition Nuvia Phoenix processor, and the Arm ISA (commonly referred to as the Arm Arm)."
Were they trying to argue that the RTL is too similar to the pseudocode in the ARM ARM or something?? That is absolutely crazy. (Of course, [when we have a license agreement and] you publish a public specification for the interface, I am going to use it to implement the interface. What do you expect me to do, implement the ARM ISA without looking at the spec?)
edit: Wow, I guess this really is what they were arguing?? Look at the points from Gerard's testimony [^2]. That is absolutely crazy.
Is Arm seriously claiming that all design work that makes use of their ISA is derivative work?
I assume Arm has some patents on the ISA [1] and the only way to get a license to them is to sign something that effectively says all your work exists at Arm's sufferance. After that we're just negotiating the price.
[1] You and I hate this but it's probably valid in the US.
Wholeheartedly agree. I understand where ARM is coming from, but my god the legal team from both parties were night and day apart. And from evidences ARM isn't even asking for a lot more money. They are likely fighting this from principle, but their explanation were weak, very weak. ( They were even worst then Apple during the Apple vs Qualcomm case )
I thought the whole thing Qualcomm was way more professional. ARM's case was that what they think was written in the contract, what they "should" have written in contract and what Qualcomm shows clearly contradict.
It is more of a lesson for ARM to learn. And now the damage has been done. This also makes me think who was pushing this lawsuit. Softbank ?
I also gained more respect to Qualcomm. After what they showed Apple vs Qualcomm's case and here.
Side Note: ARM's Design has caught on. The Cortex X5 is close to Apple's Design. We should have news about X6 soon.
I thought the entire point of this was that Arm was trying to prevent Qualcomm from switching away from products that fall under the TLA. Isn't revenue from TLA fees a huge difference from that of ALA fees?
"I don't think either side had a clear victory or would have had a clear victory if this case is tried again," Noreika told the parties."
After more than nine hours of deliberations over two days, the eight-person jury could not reach a unanimous verdict on the question of whether startup Nuvia breached the terms of its license with Arm.
> Arm’s opening statement.. presented with a soft, almost victim-like demeanor. Qualcomm’s statement was more assertive and included many strong facts (e.g., Arm internal communications saying Qualcomm has “Bombproof” ALA). Testimonials were quite informative and revealed many interesting facts, some rumored and others unknown (e.g. Arm considered a fully vertically integrated approach).
> The most important discussion was whether processor design and RTL are a derivative of Arm’s technology.. This assertion of derivative seems an overreach and should put a chill down the spine of every Arm customer, especially the ones that have ALA, which include NXP, Infineon, TI, ST Micro, Microchip, Broadcom, Nvidia, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Apple, and Marvell. No matter how much they innovate in processor design and architecture, it can all be deemed Arm’s derivative and, hence, its technology.
Wow, this has been settled already? I mean, I am sure ARM will appeal.
ARM did massive damage to their ecosystem for nothing. There will for sure be consequences of suing your largest customer.
Lots of people that would have defaulted to licensing designed off ARM for whatever chips they have planned will now be considering RISC-V instead. ARM just accelerated the timeline for their biggest future competitor. Genius.
Your otherwise on point piece contains the common misconception that ARM began in embedded systems. When they started they had a full computer system that had very competitive CPU performance for the time:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
They pivoted to embedded shortly after spinning off into a separate company.
It would be more accurate to say that there haven't been any RISC-V designs for Qualcomm's market segment yet.
As far as I am aware, there is nothing about the RISC-V architecture which inherently prevents it from ever being competitive with ARM. The people designing their own cores just haven't bothered to do so yet.
RISC-V isn't competitive in 2024, but that doesn't mean that it still won't be competitive in 2030 or 2035. If you were starting a project today at a company like Amazon or Google to develop a fully custom core, would you really stick with ARM - knowing what they tried to do with Qualcomm?
Your statement that "RISC-V in 2024 is slow" gets followed by a crazy sequitur that this will continue to be the case for a long time.
Ventana announced their second-gen Veyron 2 core at the beginning of this year and they are releasing a 192-core 4nm chip using it in 2025. They claim Veyron 2 is an 8-wide decoder with a uop cache allowing up to 15-wide issue and a 512-bit vector unit too. In raw numbers, they claim SpecInt per chip is significantly higher than an EPYC 9754 (Zen4) with the same TDP.
We can argue about what things will look like after it launches, but it certainly crushes the idea that RISC-V isn't going to be competing with ARM any time soon.
How is Geekbench any good at comparing RISC-V to ARM? Geekbench isn't a native RISC-V application, let alone has the wherewithal to correctly report any basic information like frequency or core count. You haven't even prefaced these either, and drew conclusions from them.
Also, actually searching the chip in question is impossible.
If you're talking physical chips you can buy off the shelf, sure.
But if you're talking IP, which would be what matters for the argument being made (core IP to use on new design), here's where we at (thanks to camel-cdr- on reddit[0]):
What a disaster for ARM. Qualcomm building out new chips targeting the pc market should have been a victory lap for ARM, not the source of a legal battle with their largest customer. Now potential customers might be a little more wary of ARMs licensing practices compared to the free RISC-V ISA.
> Now potential customers might be a little more wary of ARMs licensing practices compared to the free RISC-V ISA.
This is unbelievably understated. If I were Qualcomm, I would put parts of the Nuvia team's expertise to work designing RISC-V applications cores for their various SoC markets.
As I said on another forum yesterday, Qualcomm almost always wins its legal battles - when they lose its not because they are wrong but usually only because their lawyers screwed up (Broadcom lawsuit of ~2012). It's kind of a Boy Scout Company in a legal sense and they are very careful. They retrained some of their best engineers as lawyers to help them succeed in court battles ...
ARM should be able to re-file the lawsuit and get financial damages out of Nuvia, which Qualcomm will need to pay. But I doubt the damages will be high enough to bother Qualcomm. I don't think ARM will even bother.
As far as I could tell, this was never about money for ARM. It was about control over their licensees and the products they developed. Control which they could turn into money later.
It always seemed like [from ARM's point of view]: "oh, you're going to sell way more parts doing laptop SoCs with the license instead of servers... if we'd known that before, we would've negotiated a different license where we get a bigger cut"
Seemed like ARM was desperate to let Apple and Apple alone make decent CPUs in something besides servers. Having an ok core on mobile or desktop was unacceptable.
This lawsuit will cast a cloud of darkness on any startup company that wants to build a new arm chip design! What a terribly stupid thing for ARM to do - they have basically pointed a gun at their own head and pulled the trigger!
My understanding was that the central issue was whether the Nuvia “modify” license “transferred” to Qualcomm. If so, wouldn’t that be a legal issue to be resolved by MSJ? Why was this tried to a jury?
Qualcomm already had a "modify" licence, back from when they were doing their own custom ARM cores.
So the actual central issue was if Qualcomm had the right to transfer the technology developed under the Nuvia architecture license to the Qualcomm architecture license.
Qualcomm for years has sworn they didn't transfer the existing Nuvia tech. It's the Nuvia team, and a from scratch implementation. Qualcomm was saying pretty strongly they didn't allow any direct Nuvia IP to be imported and to pollute the new design.
They saw this argument coming from day 1 & worked to avoid it.
But everytime this case comes up, folks immediately revert to the ARM position that it's Nuvia IP being transfered. This alone is taking ARMs side, and seems not to resemble what Qualcomm tried to do.
This lawsuit scared away any future startups from using ARM technology if they want the option to be acquired. This in turn means that all the awesome new chip IP is going to be designed for some other ISA and that's almost certainly RISC-V.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm's ALA expires in 2033. They will almost certainly have launched RISC-V chips by then specifically because they know their royalties will be going WAY up if they don't make the switch.
A lot of companies with great IPR have very terrible management, now ARM has joined that club! Pay their license fees religiously for almost 30 years and they turn around and sue you, GEEZ!
By the end of Day 3, it seemed quite clear that Qualcomm's legal team and position was far ahead of ARM's. I feel the following snippet sums up the whole week:
"Qualcomm’s counsel turned Arm’s Piano analogy on its head. Arm compared its ISA to a Piano Keyboard design during the opening statement and used it throughout the trial. It claimed that no matter how big or small the Piano is, the keyboard design remains the same and is covered by its license. Qualcomm’s counsel extended that analogy to show how ridiculous it would be to say that because you designed the keyboard, you own all the pianos in the world. Suggesting that is what Arm is trying to do."
Source: https://www.tantraanalyst.com/ta/qualcomm-vs-arm-trial-day-3...
This is really confusing me. Is Arm seriously claiming that all design work that makes use of their ISA is derivative work? I feel like I have to be misunderstanding something.
Wouldn't that be similar to the Google v Oracle Java API case except the claim would be even stronger - that all programs making use of the Java API were derivative works of the Java API and thus subject to licensing arrangements with Oracle?
Or similarly, a hypothetical claim by Intel that a compiler such as LLVM is derivative work of the x86 ISA.
That can't possibly be right. What have I misunderstood about this situation?
> Or similarly, a hypothetical claim by Intel that a compiler such as LLVM is derivative work of the x86 ISA.
Intel has been lenient toward compiler implementers, but their stance is that emulation of x86 instructions still under patent (e.g., later SSE, AVX512) is infringing if not done under a license agreement. This has had negative implications for, for example, Microsoft's x86 emulation on ARM Windows devices.
(I'm guessing Apple probably did the right thing and ponied up the license fees.)
Yeah, I did a double-take when I read that too - but that does seem to be the case. From a different article [^1]:
> "Throughout expert testimony, Arm has been asserting that all Arm-compliant CPUs are derivatives of the Arm instruction set architecture (ISA)."
> "Arm countered with an examination of the similarities in the register-transfer language (RTL) code, which is used in the design of integrated circuits, of the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite processors, the pre-acquisition Nuvia Phoenix processor, and the Arm ISA (commonly referred to as the Arm Arm)."
Were they trying to argue that the RTL is too similar to the pseudocode in the ARM ARM or something?? That is absolutely crazy. (Of course, [when we have a license agreement and] you publish a public specification for the interface, I am going to use it to implement the interface. What do you expect me to do, implement the ARM ISA without looking at the spec?)
edit: Wow, I guess this really is what they were arguing?? Look at the points from Gerard's testimony [^2]. That is absolutely crazy.
[^1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2024/12/19/arm-s...
[^2]: https://www.tantraanalyst.com/ta/qualcomm-vs-arm-trial-day-2...
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Well they did lose the case. Whatever they were contending was clearly incorrect.
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Actually Sun v Microsoft in the late 90s.
Is Arm seriously claiming that all design work that makes use of their ISA is derivative work?
I assume Arm has some patents on the ISA [1] and the only way to get a license to them is to sign something that effectively says all your work exists at Arm's sufferance. After that we're just negotiating the price.
[1] You and I hate this but it's probably valid in the US.
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Wholeheartedly agree. I understand where ARM is coming from, but my god the legal team from both parties were night and day apart. And from evidences ARM isn't even asking for a lot more money. They are likely fighting this from principle, but their explanation were weak, very weak. ( They were even worst then Apple during the Apple vs Qualcomm case )
I thought the whole thing Qualcomm was way more professional. ARM's case was that what they think was written in the contract, what they "should" have written in contract and what Qualcomm shows clearly contradict.
It is more of a lesson for ARM to learn. And now the damage has been done. This also makes me think who was pushing this lawsuit. Softbank ?
I also gained more respect to Qualcomm. After what they showed Apple vs Qualcomm's case and here.
Side Note: ARM's Design has caught on. The Cortex X5 is close to Apple's Design. We should have news about X6 soon.
> ARM isn't even asking for a lot more money
I thought the entire point of this was that Arm was trying to prevent Qualcomm from switching away from products that fall under the TLA. Isn't revenue from TLA fees a huge difference from that of ALA fees?
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And here is an update from [1] Reuter
"I don't think either side had a clear victory or would have had a clear victory if this case is tried again," Noreika told the parties."
After more than nine hours of deliberations over two days, the eight-person jury could not reach a unanimous verdict on the question of whether startup Nuvia breached the terms of its license with Arm.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-jury-deadlocked-arm-trial-a...
My personal first hint was when ARM, the plaintiff in a contract case, demanded a jury trial.
When your contracts are airtight, you usually want a bench trial. Then the defendant demands a jury.
For details beyond Bloomberg's three paragraph summary:
https://www.tantraanalyst.com/ta/qualcomm-vs-arm-trial-day-1...
> Arm’s opening statement.. presented with a soft, almost victim-like demeanor. Qualcomm’s statement was more assertive and included many strong facts (e.g., Arm internal communications saying Qualcomm has “Bombproof” ALA). Testimonials were quite informative and revealed many interesting facts, some rumored and others unknown (e.g. Arm considered a fully vertically integrated approach).
https://www.tantraanalyst.com/ta/qualcomm-vs-arm-trial-day-2...
> The most important discussion was whether processor design and RTL are a derivative of Arm’s technology.. This assertion of derivative seems an overreach and should put a chill down the spine of every Arm customer, especially the ones that have ALA, which include NXP, Infineon, TI, ST Micro, Microchip, Broadcom, Nvidia, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Apple, and Marvell. No matter how much they innovate in processor design and architecture, it can all be deemed Arm’s derivative and, hence, its technology.
https://www.tantraanalyst.com/ta/qualcomm-vs-arm-trial-day-3...
https://www.tantraanalyst.com/ta/qualcomm-vs-arm-trial-day-4...
Wow, this has been settled already? I mean, I am sure ARM will appeal.
ARM did massive damage to their ecosystem for nothing. There will for sure be consequences of suing your largest customer.
Lots of people that would have defaulted to licensing designed off ARM for whatever chips they have planned will now be considering RISC-V instead. ARM just accelerated the timeline for their biggest future competitor. Genius.
RISC-V is not anywhere near competitive to ARM at the level that Qualcomm operates.
I’ve written about that here: https://benhouston3d.com/blog/risc-v-in-2024-is-slow
Your otherwise on point piece contains the common misconception that ARM began in embedded systems. When they started they had a full computer system that had very competitive CPU performance for the time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
They pivoted to embedded shortly after spinning off into a separate company.
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It would be more accurate to say that there haven't been any RISC-V designs for Qualcomm's market segment yet.
As far as I am aware, there is nothing about the RISC-V architecture which inherently prevents it from ever being competitive with ARM. The people designing their own cores just haven't bothered to do so yet.
RISC-V isn't competitive in 2024, but that doesn't mean that it still won't be competitive in 2030 or 2035. If you were starting a project today at a company like Amazon or Google to develop a fully custom core, would you really stick with ARM - knowing what they tried to do with Qualcomm?
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Your statement that "RISC-V in 2024 is slow" gets followed by a crazy sequitur that this will continue to be the case for a long time.
Ventana announced their second-gen Veyron 2 core at the beginning of this year and they are releasing a 192-core 4nm chip using it in 2025. They claim Veyron 2 is an 8-wide decoder with a uop cache allowing up to 15-wide issue and a 512-bit vector unit too. In raw numbers, they claim SpecInt per chip is significantly higher than an EPYC 9754 (Zen4) with the same TDP.
We can argue about what things will look like after it launches, but it certainly crushes the idea that RISC-V isn't going to be competing with ARM any time soon.
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RISCV is an instruction set, but you compare ASICs
If qualcomm changes instruction decoding over you’ll likely see a dramatic difference
Not everyone is trying to make a chip for a phone. There are plenty of low compute applications which just need something.
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How is Geekbench any good at comparing RISC-V to ARM? Geekbench isn't a native RISC-V application, let alone has the wherewithal to correctly report any basic information like frequency or core count. You haven't even prefaced these either, and drew conclusions from them.
Also, actually searching the chip in question is impossible.
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But for many other customers, who might need something like an A0 core, it's a strong signal to consider RISC-V instead.
If you're talking physical chips you can buy off the shelf, sure.
But if you're talking IP, which would be what matters for the argument being made (core IP to use on new design), here's where we at (thanks to camel-cdr- on reddit[0]):
(rule of thumb SPEC2006*10 = SPEC2017)
SiFive P870-D: >18 SpecINT2006/GHz, >2 SpecINT2017/GHz
Akeana 5300: 25 SpecINT2006/GHz @ 3GHz
Tenstorrent Ascalon: >18 SpecINT2006/GHz, IIRC they mentioned targeting 18-20 at a high frequency
Some references for comparing:
Apple M1: 21.7 SpecINT2006/GHz, 2.33 SpecINT2017/GHz
Apple M4: 2.6 SpecINT2017/GHz
Zen5 9950x: 1.8 SpecINT2017/GHz
Current license-able RISC-V IP is certainly not slow.
0. https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1gpssxy/x8664_pat...
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What a disaster for ARM. Qualcomm building out new chips targeting the pc market should have been a victory lap for ARM, not the source of a legal battle with their largest customer. Now potential customers might be a little more wary of ARMs licensing practices compared to the free RISC-V ISA.
> Now potential customers might be a little more wary of ARMs licensing practices compared to the free RISC-V ISA.
This is unbelievably understated. If I were Qualcomm, I would put parts of the Nuvia team's expertise to work designing RISC-V applications cores for their various SoC markets.
If you bet the farm on hardware but the software ecosystem isn't there yet, then you sell no hardware and sink the company.
Software ecosystem either takes lots of time (see ARM) or you need to be in a position to force it (Apple & M chips).
RISC-V is still a long way off from consumer (or server) prime time
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As I said on another forum yesterday, Qualcomm almost always wins its legal battles - when they lose its not because they are wrong but usually only because their lawyers screwed up (Broadcom lawsuit of ~2012). It's kind of a Boy Scout Company in a legal sense and they are very careful. They retrained some of their best engineers as lawyers to help them succeed in court battles ...
Retrain engineers as lawyers is clever. Better than repurpose them as subpar managers.
Oh don’t worry, they have plenty of those too
How does one sign up for this retraining program?
https://archive.is/2uHTU
Does the fact that the "jurors weren’t able to agree on whether Nuvia breached the license" mean that the legal fight isn't over?
Or is that question irrelevant in light of the other findings, and the legal fight is actually over, with Qualcomm as the clear winner?
I suspect it's mostly irrelevant.
ARM should be able to re-file the lawsuit and get financial damages out of Nuvia, which Qualcomm will need to pay. But I doubt the damages will be high enough to bother Qualcomm. I don't think ARM will even bother.
As far as I could tell, this was never about money for ARM. It was about control over their licensees and the products they developed. Control which they could turn into money later.
It always seemed like [from ARM's point of view]: "oh, you're going to sell way more parts doing laptop SoCs with the license instead of servers... if we'd known that before, we would've negotiated a different license where we get a bigger cut"
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Seemed like ARM was desperate to let Apple and Apple alone make decent CPUs in something besides servers. Having an ok core on mobile or desktop was unacceptable.
This lawsuit will cast a cloud of darkness on any startup company that wants to build a new arm chip design! What a terribly stupid thing for ARM to do - they have basically pointed a gun at their own head and pulled the trigger!
My understanding was that the central issue was whether the Nuvia “modify” license “transferred” to Qualcomm. If so, wouldn’t that be a legal issue to be resolved by MSJ? Why was this tried to a jury?
Qualcomm already had a "modify" licence, back from when they were doing their own custom ARM cores.
So the actual central issue was if Qualcomm had the right to transfer the technology developed under the Nuvia architecture license to the Qualcomm architecture license.
I keep hearing these kinds of claims but...
Qualcomm for years has sworn they didn't transfer the existing Nuvia tech. It's the Nuvia team, and a from scratch implementation. Qualcomm was saying pretty strongly they didn't allow any direct Nuvia IP to be imported and to pollute the new design.
They saw this argument coming from day 1 & worked to avoid it.
But everytime this case comes up, folks immediately revert to the ARM position that it's Nuvia IP being transfered. This alone is taking ARMs side, and seems not to resemble what Qualcomm tried to do.
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To be precise, it now appears the dispute has moved as to whether Nuvia had the right to transfer things to Qualcomm.
It strikes me as a surprising diversion to this, and I wonder how prepared for this outcome the respective teams were.
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Nuvia never even had a finished product. Not sure what ARM thinks their losses are considering Qualcomm already had an architectural license...
ARM is (edit) figuratively blowing up their ecosystem for no reason; now everyone will be racing to develop RISC-V just to cut out ARM...
> ARM is literally blowing up their ecosystem for no reason
With explosives?
This went exactly as expected. ARM had no leg to stand on going in.
Arm will appeal. Regardless, Arm will tighten the screws on Qualcomm in their next round of licensing negotiations.
This lawsuit scared away any future startups from using ARM technology if they want the option to be acquired. This in turn means that all the awesome new chip IP is going to be designed for some other ISA and that's almost certainly RISC-V.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm's ALA expires in 2033. They will almost certainly have launched RISC-V chips by then specifically because they know their royalties will be going WAY up if they don't make the switch.
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Well yes Qualcomm is the CIA of course they won.
Haven't read deeply into this particular dispute but Arm suing their own customers doesn't seem good for business. Especially since they lost.
A lot of companies with great IPR have very terrible management, now ARM has joined that club! Pay their license fees religiously for almost 30 years and they turn around and sue you, GEEZ!
Softbank likely played a role in Arm's change of business model, away from IP licensing towards selling complete complete chips.