Comment by tiahura
1 year ago
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?
1 year ago
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.
>Qualcomm was saying pretty strongly they didn't allow any direct Nuvia IP to be imported and to pollute the new design.
Which is the part that is questionable and I guess no way to prove unless we continue with the trial. The Nuvia core is said to be perfect on A0, and no one in the industry has ever done anything perfect on A0, especially with something as complex as modern CPU design.
One could argue all the previous Nuvia Design IP were in the Nuvia's team's head memorised. They are basically recreating the same work done in Nuvia at Qualcomm. And that is I guess grey areas.
What did Qualcomm get from buying Nuvia it wouldn't have gotten from just hiring all Nuvia employees?
Edit: I guess it wouldn't be that simple to do
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I thought that the gen 1 oryon cores were using Nuvia source, but the gen 2 cores were from scratch implementation.
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.
My memory is that before the lawsuit, Qualcomm were using both arguments, "we have the right to transfer the licence, and even if we didn't, we have our own license".
The first argument was always the weaker argument, the license explicitly banned licence transfers between companies without explicit prior permission. Qualcomm were arguing that the fact they already had a licence counted as prior permission.
But ARM bypassed that argument by just terminating the Nuvia licence, and by the time of the lawsuit qualcomm was down to the second argument. Which was good, it was the much stronger argument.
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