Discussion ARM vs Qualcomm: The Lawsuit Begins

[KompuKare]

Forbes article contains more details:

Arm Squares Off Against Qualcomm: Day 1

After eight months, both companies let the negotiations lapse and discontinued communication until Arm notified Qualcomm of the intent to terminate the Nuvia license

www.forbes.com

This part stuck out to me:

They wanted the Nuvia engineers to sit around and do nothing for 3 years? Are they mad?

Well, they could spend those 3 years working a design for..

A brilliant plan to force those engineers to work on something else for the next three years. Like perhaps a high-performance RISC-V processor for smartphones, tablets, laptops etc.

Exactly what I was going to say!

 

[FlameTail]

Exactly what I was going to say!

The RISC-V software ecosystem is far from being mature. Qualcomm cannot realistically switch to RISC-V CPUs for mobile/compute SoCs anytime soon.

Qualcomm needs ARM.

 

[Panino Manino]

In the end nothing of any of this would have happen if Qualcomm had not violated contracts and being dishonest trying to be smarter than the law and the competition who they tried to hurt.

Even if ARM goes to far and implodes it's bussinnes I still hope they wing and humble Qualcomm.

 

[FlameTail]

Next step for Qualcomm would be to acquire Ahead Computing, and get sued by Intel!

FYI, Ahead Computing is a RISC-V startup composed of ex-Intel engineers who worked on the Advanced Architecture Development Group (AADG) at Intel, also informally called the Royal Core Project.

 

[FlameTail]

Qualcomm vs. Arm trial, Day 1 – Opening statements and surprising revelations – Tantra Analyst

Qualcomm is one of the largest customers of Arm. However ever since Qualcomm announced that it is acquiring Nuvia, the two companies have been at odds regarding

www.tantraanalyst.com

This article is also a good read, in addition to that Forbes one.

 

[LightningZ71]

ARM is walking a risk path with their scorched earth policy here. If they do follow through with the license termination, they almost instantly nuke about a quarter of the smartphone and tablet market, a chunk of the automotive market, and most of ARM's premium laptop market (Mediatek's chromebook SoCs are a joke). That's a lot of lost revenue that's not going to get made up for a long time and a strong risk of shareholder backlash. In addition, that will certainly set a precedent for other ARM vendors to more strongly consider an alternative, such as RISC-V, for future investments. I get that RiscV is still not fully fleshed out as compared to ARM, but it's usable if an industry group can get together and make a solid roadmap.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

In the end nothing of any of this would have happen if Qualcomm had not violated contracts and being dishonest trying to be smarter than the law and the competition who they tried to hurt.

It's entirely possible that the court finds that Qualcomm never violated any license.

The case they are presenting to the court is that their existing ALA covers acquired NUVIA technology. At least one internal ARM email from Paul Williamson they managed to scare up during the discovery agrees with this.

 

[gdansk]

It's entirely possible that the court finds that Qualcomm never violated any license.

It seems unlikely. This is being tried in the US, the world's premier IP-maximalist that still hasn't decided if mere API headers can be perpetual intellectual property.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

It seems unlikely. This is being tried in the US, the world's premier IP-maximalist that still hasn't decided if mere API headers can be perpetual intellectual property.

But it's not about that. Qualcomm had an ALA from ARM. Their claim is that this ALA covers the IP they acquired from Nuvia. ARM publicly disagrees with that. Now they have presented as evidence internal emails between ARM's top licensing people that argue that the ALA covers the IP in question.

All the general stuff about copyright maximalism or how IP works in general is irrelevant to this case. It ultimately hinges on which claim is true: The ARM claim that Nuvia IP is not covered by the existing Qualcomm ALA. Or the Qualcomm claim that it is.

This, in turn, depends on little else than the actual wording of that ALA, which we do not know.

 

[Doug S]

The RISC-V software ecosystem is far from being mature. Qualcomm cannot realistically switch to RISC-V CPUs for mobile/compute SoCs anytime soon.

Qualcomm needs ARM.

Well, (very) hypothetically, if they were barred from working on ARM ISA CPUs that doesn't mean their only choice would be another compute ISA. Had they done something that competes as well with Nvidia Blackwell as Oryon does with Apple's stuff (meaning it is not equal, but it is reasonably close) then Qualcomm would have the world beating a path down to their door if they undercut Nvidia's pricing by say 20%, and still be far more profitable than they could ever hope their mobile/PC ARM efforts will be.

Obviously there's no reason to believe the Nuvia team would be as good designing high performance AI as they are designing high performance CPUs, or that Qualcomm management would have thought that's the best use of their time (or that much of the Nuvia team wouldn't have left Qualcomm dissatisfied in not being able to do the sort of work they want to do) but there may be an alternate timeline or two where Qualcomm's market cap is pushing the trillion dollar level thanks to ARM.

 

[The Hardcard]

The RISC-V software ecosystem is far from being mature. Qualcomm cannot realistically switch to RISC-V CPUs for mobile/compute SoCs anytime soon.

Qualcomm needs ARM.

PowerPC is an ISA with established, mature tools. It is pretty much royalty-free and open sourced. Except for apparently the hypervisor.

I don’t know if any of the Nuvia team joined Apple from PA Semi, but any who did would have ISA experience from PWRficient.

Whenever I see talk of high performance open source, it seems like a design team could have a Power core up and running before the needed work on RISC-V is completed. I don’t know if technical or legal devils in the details or if the idea of Power just lacks excitement and enthusiasm.

 

[gdansk]

Whenever I see talk of high performance open source, it seems like a design team could have a Power core up and running before the needed work on RISC-V is completed. I don’t know if technical or legal devils in the details or if the idea of Power just lacks excitement and enthusiasm

Just look at the active work on compilers. No reason to use Power over RISCV. Power doesn't even have a "we're more unified argument" like ARM does.
Much like MIPS it is declining for a reason.

 

[jdubs03]

https://www.reuters.com/legal/arm-qualcomm-lawyers-grill-ex-apple-exec-chip-design-battle-2024-12-17/

The pertinent portion:

In U.S. federal court in Delaware on Tuesday, attorneys for both sides pressed Gerard Williams, a former Apple engineer who founded Nuvia in 2019, over whether Nuvia's cores were ultimately derivatives of Arm's technology or whether Arm's technology played only a trivial role in Nuvia's work.

Arm's attorney pressed Williams to acknowledge that the licensing contract at the heart of the dispute covered Arm technology and "derivatives" and "modifications" made from it.

Williams repeatedly said he did not believe the contract meant that all of Nuvia's work was a derivative or modification of Arm's technology, but acknowledged that was what the words on the page appeared to say.

Daralyn Durie, the Arm attorney, pointedly asked Williams to agree that "maybe you wouldn’t say that, but that’s what the contract says."

“I wouldn’t say that," Williams responded, "but I’m not a legal expert.”

Durie immediately said she was finished with her questioning.

The exchange with Durie followed questioning by Qualcomm's attorney, who guided Williams to describe how little Arm technology was in Qualcomm chips that power phones, laptops and cars.

Williams said his team of developers started with Arm architecture and was asked to estimate the amount of Arm's technology in Nuvia's final designs. "One percent or less," Williams responded.

Analysts have told Reuters that Qualcomm pays Arm about $300 million per year, and evidence introduced at trial on Monday showed Arm executives believed they were missing out on $50 million per year in additional revenue because of Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia.

 

[FlameTail]

Summary of Day 2:

Qualcomm vs. Arm trial, Day 2 – Is processor design derivative of Instructing set architecture (ISA)? – Tantra Analyst

www.tantraanalyst.com

Arm Squares Off Against Qualcomm: Day 2

There are only a few companies that have ALAs allowing for the development of custom Arm-compliant CPU cores.

www.forbes.com

 

[FlameTail]

There were three expert witnesses today, two from Arm and one from Qualcomm. The first was Dr. Robert Colwell. He tried to say that processor designs are dependent on Arm ARM, but buckled during cross-examination because of inconsistencies in responses.

Yesterday it was William Abbey buckled during the cross examination. Is ARM slipping?

 

[Doug S]

Yesterday it was William Abbey buckled during the cross examination. Is ARM slipping?

All I can say is that depending on the author the language and interpretation is HEAVILY slanted, because I see other stories suggesting things are going rather badly for Qualcomm. I suspect neither interpretation is without bias, and neither is accurate but I have no way of knowing.

Truth is no one on the outside has access to the exact language of the documents, and that's what this case will hinge on. Not "gotcha" moments during cross examination. It is a case about contracts.

 

[lakedude]

Truth is no one on the outside has access to the exact language of the documents, and that's what this case will hinge on. Not "gotcha" moments during cross examination. It is a case about contracts.

Yes we don't have the exact language and yes it should be about the contracts, but...

No contract I ever saw was perfectly written and none cover every eventuality. There is a good chance that the language is ambiguous and subject to interpretation.

This would open a window from black and white into a murky gray zone where who the jury believes, who they like, and even who they think is the most attractive could all play into it.

 

[GTracing]

The more I read about this case, the more I'm on Qualcomm's side. ARM is arguing that all of Nuvia's work has to be destroyed because Nuvia had an ALA with ARM. That leads to some troubling questions.

• Let's say a vendor wants to switch to RISC-V and re-use stuff from their custom ARM core. Is that not allowed? Is that IP "locked" to ARM forever?
• What if Qualcomm had decided to delete all the HDL and start again after the acquisition. The core would still have have been largely the same. Would that violate the ALA?
• Let's say ARM is right. What if Nuvia found some novel ways to do specific things really well. Are they unable to use that after the merger? Do they have to find a way to implement the same idea, but make it look different?
• AMD's original Zen architecture was developed with their custom K12 ARM architecture. It's rumored they shared a backend. If ARM cancelled AMD's ALA, would they have to destroy all of their work on Zen?

 

[Panino Manino]

The more I read about this case, the more I'm on Qualcomm's side. ARM is arguing that all of Nuvia's work has to be destroyed because Nuvia had an ALA with ARM. That leads to some troubling questions.

I still side with ARM, because when Nuvia signed that contract it accepted all the terms ARM gave them.
ARM probably knew Nuvia would probably be acquired, so they gave the license with the assumption that what Nuvia developed wouldn't be acquired for cheap by others and gave them favorable terms because would be good for ARM brand to have Nuvia putting in the market a good product.

But both Nuvia and Qualcomm "betrayed" ARM not honoring their contracts.
As much as you may dislike ARM you have to be fair and honor your word.

 

[GTracing]

I still side with ARM, because when Nuvia signed that contract it accepted all the terms ARM gave them.
ARM probably knew Nuvia would probably be acquired, so they gave the license with the assumption that what Nuvia developed wouldn't be acquired for cheap by others and gave them favorable terms because would be good for ARM brand to have Nuvia putting in the market a good product.

But both Nuvia and Qualcomm "betrayed" ARM not honoring their contracts.
As much as you may dislike ARM you have to be fair and honor your word.

I'm not convinced that that's what Nuvia's ALA says. Nuvia apparently had to destroy anything that was "derivative or modification of Arm's technology". That sounds like a blanket statement to protect ARM's IP. I imagine that every ALA granted by ARM has a similar clause. The idea that the whole entire CPU core is derivative of ARM's work is a massive stretch in my opinion.

I agree that ARM knew that Nuvia was going to be acquired, which is why they made the license non-transferrable. Cancelling the license is totally within ARM's rights, commanding Nuvia to destroy all their IP is not.

 

[Raqia]

I still side with ARM, because when Nuvia signed that contract it accepted all the terms ARM gave them.
ARM probably knew Nuvia would probably be acquired, so they gave the license with the assumption that what Nuvia developed wouldn't be acquired for cheap by others and gave them favorable terms because would be good for ARM brand to have Nuvia putting in the market a good product.

But both Nuvia and Qualcomm "betrayed" ARM not honoring their contracts.
As much as you may dislike ARM you have to be fair and honor your word.

Contracts can be illegal and inconsistent; furthermore, a separate, prior contract governed Qualcomm's ability to implement the ARM ISA. It is never as cut and dry as accepting the terms in the US.

I think the trial is absurd given that a uArch implementing the ARM ISA is quite distinct from the ISA itself. Indeed, Jim Keller indeed said that the K12 ARM design would mostly overlap with the Zen design except for the decoders:

In the talk, available online via YouTube, Keller discusses how when planning the Zen 3 core – now at the heart of AMD's "Milan" Epyc processor chips – he and other engineers realized that much of the architecture was very similar for Arm and X86 "because all modern computers are actually RISC machines inside," and hence according to Keller, "the only blocks you have to change are the [instruction] decoders, so we were looking to build a computer that could do either, although they stupidly cancelled that project."

Former AMD chip architect says it was wrong to can Arm CPU

Cancelled the K12 CPU? Big mistake. Huge, says Jim Keller

www.theregister.com

Implementations can be miles apart from standards. As Qualcomm put it during the trial: it's like the specifications of a house for some HOA vs. the actual work of building the house. Or... the NHTSA homologations for a road legal vehicle vs the design and manufacture of the vehicle. It is easy to mislead an unsophisticated Jury regarding the terms of an IP contract in a highly technical field (cf. the QCOM vs Apple & the rest of the world shenanigans...) and this is what ARM is hoping to do.

I do think there's more to this move behind the scenes once ownership changed to Softbank and they failed to sell to nVidia amid a chorus of objections, one of them coming from Qualcomm. Their contracts were not sufficient to justify the valuation when they acquired and they started to look for other avenues to alter contracts. Hell, they'd spend plenty of lawyer fees to take GW III out of work for a couple of day to hobble competition (never mind the ban of 3 years for the Nuvia team from working on ARM designs that they had suggested during negotiations...)

 

[GTracing]

Contracts can be illegal and inconsistent; furthermore, a separate, prior contract governed Qualcomm's ability to implement the ARM ISA.

I mean, I'm on Qualcomm's side, but you can't just handwave Nuvia's ALA away by saying that it could be illegal. Qualcomm didn't contest that point in the trial. If the ALA was "inconsistent and illegal", then that would mean Nuvia developing Phoenix was illegally. Qualcomm's ALA is likely similar and would be "inconsistent and illegal" as well.

 

[Raqia]

I mean, I'm on Qualcomm's side, but you can't just handwave Nuvia's ALA away by saying that it could be illegal. Qualcomm didn't contest that point in the trial. If the ALA was "inconsistent and illegal", then that would mean Nuvia developing Phoenix was illegally. Qualcomm's ALA is likely similar and would be "inconsistent and illegal" as well.

The "illegal" part is mostly to make a point about contracts. For this case, I think the bigger issue is whether Qualcomm's existing contract applies here and whether the terms of ARM's contract with Nuvia were adhered to.

Given that the Phoenix uArch is the basis for Qualcomm's design which is very much separate from the ISA and that Qualcomm made efforts to respect the Nuvia agreement with ARM by redesigning the relevant portions of the CPU, I don't think there is much for ARM to go on. The encodings are just circumstantial details for the ISA, the essential behavior of registers, flags, instructions, and memory will very much resemble other ISAs but is ultimately divorced from the specific design decisions that go into modern, high performance implementations.

Besides, ARM is arguing that ALL of Nuvia's work should be destroyed when the uArch ultimately has little to do w/ what ARM contributes to the processor design and implementation; this cannot sit well w/ any company who has an architectural license and created their own implementation or created a uArch which they made compatible with the ARM ISA.

 

[FlameTail]

I hope everyone here has read atleast these 4 articles, so we are all on the same page;

Arm Squares Off Against Qualcomm: Day 1

After eight months, both companies let the negotiations lapse and discontinued communication until Arm notified Qualcomm of the intent to terminate the Nuvia license

www.forbes.com

Qualcomm vs. Arm trial, Day 1 – Opening statements and surprising revelations – Tantra Analyst

Qualcomm is one of the largest customers of Arm. However ever since Qualcomm announced that it is acquiring Nuvia, the two companies have been at odds regarding

www.tantraanalyst.com

Arm Squares Off Against Qualcomm: Day 2

There are only a few companies that have ALAs allowing for the development of custom Arm-compliant CPU cores.

www.forbes.com

Qualcomm vs. Arm trial, Day 2 – Is processor design derivative of Instructing set architecture (ISA)? – Tantra Analyst

www.tantraanalyst.com

Some stuff might have been uploaded to Courtlistener too, but I haven't checked.

 

[The Hardcard]

The "illegal" part is mostly to make a point about contracts. For this case, I think the bigger issue is whether Qualcomm's existing contract applies here and whether the terms of ARM's contract with Nuvia were adhered to.

Given that the Phoenix uArch is the basis for Qualcomm's design which is very much separate from the ISA and that Qualcomm made efforts to respect the Nuvia agreement with ARM by redesigning the relevant portions of the CPU, I don't think there is much for ARM to go on. The encodings are just circumstantial details for the ISA, the essential behavior of registers, flags, instructions, and memory will very much resemble other ISAs but is ultimately divorced from the specific design decisions that go into modern, high performance implementations.

Besides, ARM is arguing that ALL of Nuvia's work should be destroyed when the uArch ultimately has little to do w/ what ARM contributes to the processor design and implementation; this cannot sit well w/ any company who has an architectural license and created their own implementation or created a uArch which they made compatible with the ARM ISA.

I don’t think there would be concern about current licenses. However, most innovative startups are bought by the major players, who all seem to have ARM licenses, and even if they don’t, they are going to want to make sure there are no potential roadblocks to running with the companies they buy and the IP that they want to use.

That is going to make it a lot harder for future Nuvias to get venture capital to see through new concepts. Those financiers will want the startup to be sellable, and the threat of extortion makes ARM designs less marketable. If they don’t think RISC-V is yet ready to do what they want and Power or MIPS are just that unpalatable, they might be just assed out of their vision.