Comment by wmf
1 year ago
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.
Qualcomm already had a license for ARMs patents. An older licence with much better terms.
ARM has unilaterally cancelled both the Nuvia architecture license agreement (ALA) and the Qualcomm ALA.
Because all Arm ALAs are secret, we do not know if Arm has any right to do such a unilateral cancellation.
It is likely that the ALAs cannot be cancelled without a good reason, like breech of contract, so the cancellation of the Qualcomm ALA must be invalid now, after the trial.
The conflict between Arm and Qualcomm has started because the Qualcomm ALA, which Qualcomm says that it is applicable for any Qualcomm products, specifies much lower royalties than the Nuvia ALA.
This is absolutely normal, because Qualcomm sells a huge number of CPUs for which it has to pay royalties, while Nuvia would have sold a negligible number of CPUs, if any.
Arm receives a much greater revenue based on the Qualcomm ALA than what they would have received from Nuvia.
Therefore the real reason of the conflict is that Qualcomm has stopped using CPU cores designed by Arm, so Arm no longer receives any royalty from Qualcomm from licensing cores, and those royalties would have been higher than the royalties specified by the ALA for Qualcomm-designed cores.
When Arm has given an architectural license to Nuvia, they did not expect that the cores designed by Nuvia could compete with Arm-designed cores. Nuvia being bought by Quacomm has changed that, and Arm attempts now to crush any competition for its own cores.