Comment by jasoneckert
1 year ago
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"
Arm had already done that.
The Nuvia ALA (architecture license agreement) specified much higher royalties, i.e. a much bigger cut for Arm, than the Qualcomm ALA.
The official reason for the conflict is that Qualcomm says that the Qualcomm ALA is applicable for anything made by Qualcomm, while Arm says that for any Qualcomm product that includes a trace of something designed at the former Nuvia company the Nuvia ALA must be applied.
The real reason of the conflict is that Qualcomm is replacing the CPU cores designed by Arm with CPU cores designed by the former Nuvia team in all their products. Had this not happened, Arm would have received a much greater revenue as a result of Nuvia being bought by Qualcomm, even when applying the Qualcomm ALA.
That’s the model when you’re in the IP business - nothing new here.
This is what you use to fund the next generation of said IP. There is no magic.
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I'm not sure why it seemed that way to you, server market >> consumer laptops (c.f. $INTL).
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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.