The purpose was clearly to try to pressure Qualcomm into a settlement. Because Qualcomm knew they were in the right, they didn't want one, and so rode out the whole process.
Discovery would have brought the terms of those very private contracts into the light of day. Having their clients with perfect visibility into what other clients were paying would have been a massive problem for them.
If you ask me, this has Apple's finger prints all over it.
Apple has tremendous influence over ARM, being a founding partner with many pieces of ARM architecture (ARMv8, SME) either originating from Apple or developed very closely with Apple. (I think it would have been pretty damning to Apple to see ARM's licensing structure with it...)
Apple was against GW III leaving from the start and sued him when he did. After dropping the personal lawsuit against GW III (non-competes are unenforceable in CA), Qualcomm was hit with this frankly meritless lawsuit from ARM --this hobbled development of the first SDX Elite by several months and brought it into competition with the M3 rather than the M2. Qualcomm needed to stay the course and initiate a counter-suit to ensure that it wasn't muscled out of product competition due to completely asymmetric terms for licensing.
The suit is consistent with Apple's attempts in the past decades to write the rules themselves in order to not properly compensate the innovators who directly contribute to their product success --just ask the devs who got Sherlocked, GTAT, Imagination, Dialog, Qualcomm, Massimo etc. They also directly contributed to the ascent of authoritarian China in moving their supply chains and associated know-how there.
Fortunately, Qualcomm stayed the course not only with the legal battle but also with product development. Apple indeed had much to fear with the competitive advantage that Oryon cores equipped SoCs afforded the Android ecosystem --Qualcomm was able to integrate a modem into their latest phone SoC and STILL keep rough parity A19's on the CPU side (despite having 12 MB L3 vs 16) due to Oryon's excellent PPA.
This is Qualcomm's fu to them for their blatant misrepresentation of the modem's role and licensing terms in cellular technologies with Apple's very public campaign during their dispute. Qualcomm by comparison did not attempt to thwart Apple's development of Apple own cellular implementation as I think Apple did with CPUs. Apple is talking a big game about its future cellular accelerators, but Srouji himself called it the most complex project his team has ever undertaken. I have my doubts they do as well in cellular as Qualcomm did with CPUs (Qualcomm is not standing still with their implementations...), and it would be poetic justice for them to come crawling back to Qualcomm for 6G.
Apple bought Infineon from Intel to shore up their cellular modem development and word is they actually almost had to scrap it all and start from scratch. Also, this lawsuit was only in the past 2 years or so. That settlement with Apple occurred in like 2018. Also ARM is owned by SoftBank. If anyone has influence with litigation matters, it’s going to be them. In fact Apple isn’t even listed as having any significant stock ownership. Google does, NVidia does. And in any case it went nowhere except for clearing up the case law for this particular situation.
So Apple had really nothing to gain here in the end. Gotta drum up a conspiracy theory instead of just using Occam’s razor to say hey ARM wanted more licensing revenue.
Also Oyron is very power hungry in comparison. So might want to take that “P” out of PPA.
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poke01
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Raqia likes to paint Apple in a bad light. Apple had nothing to with this lawsuit or influence on ARMs license arguments, otherwise Qualcomm would 100% mention Apple today in their press release if Apple was involved here.
poke01
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Yeah modems are hard. Intel couldn’t even make a competent modem.
poke01
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Google worked with ARM to enable MTE extension in 2019. Shocker, looks like a lot of companies work with ARM.
Documentation – Arm Developer
developer.arm.com
It's more that people generally have this delusional image of Apple as some miraculous company that can do no wrong and have some god-like un-toucheable skills in SoC design. The truth is they trade blows and sit behind the advantages (and disadvantages) of their ecosystem and brilliant marketing.
Most people don't understand the issues behind their cellular dispute against Qualcomm at all and regurgitate the lines that Tim Cook et al. fed the public. They also cheer when they run-over smaller companies whose employees and investors worked hard on and invested in the IP that contribute to the success of the iPhone.
As an Apple investor, I struggle with their behavior, and I think it will catch up with them in the long run.
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HOw can apple make them with Intel's team half of Intel's failure are due to them tying their silicon to their nodes
poke01
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Yeah I doubt this, you’re not even active in the Apple threads. Mostly come online when Qualcomm releases a new product, your behaviour indicates your a Qualcomm investor.
poke01
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Apple wanted cheaper fees, Qualcomm said no. Qualcomm won dispute and Apple licensed their designs till 2026.
It sounds to me you’re upset that Apple is moving to their own modems next year.
What?
Yeah, Apple got some good CPU engineers. Look at the M5 analysis when it comes out.
Again, Qualcomm had to buy some of Apples ex-engineers to get competitive cpu performance.
Yes, also a Qualcomm investor, but my position is smaller. It's not really worth discussing the nuances of Apple products with most Apple fans --this forum is sufficiently technical but still infused with cult-like intensity for Apple.
poke01
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I guess you are filling the other void with being cult-like for Qualcomm.
The majority of people in this forum like good CPU architectures and love modular hardware which Apple doesn’t offer.
But coming to the point, you coming in a thread about ARM vs QC and bringing baseless speculation about how Apple is involved in this case is the same as being obsessed with Apple but in a negative light.
More like Apple wanted to violate its valid contract with a supplier through tortious interference and deprive a smaller supplier of the value of $60B worth of investments over a decade. They use flimsy but very public legal threats to sway public opinion
No, just their incredibly arrogant and abusive behavior.
They just one year declared that their GPU was an "Apple" GPU without reaching a licensing agreement with Imagination over their IP. People of course clamored over their "innovations" w/o acknowledging that they totally screwed Imagination over.
They're good and I'm very interested in their designs, but they're not as god-like as people make them out to be. I'm not invested in an emotional attachment from the warm-fuzzy-hip public image of a company with their hardware as some seem to be here. Those Nuvia engineers didn't want to be at Apple and GWIII was attacked by the company following their departure.
I don't think it's baseless --it's just plainly obvious Apple is historically a standout for abusive behavior if you bother to read past the headlines and actually research these companies and the suppliers that go into those products. Tim Cook has publicly said that they shouldn't follow the rules and that they should write them --even if it means robbing others blind of their work. They don't care about others' valid claims to IP be it systems or devs.
It's of note that their contract manufacturers used identical language as Apple in their lawsuits with Qualcomm. It's nothing new for Apple to manipulate other suppliers to file lawsuits that benefit themselves.
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Also x86 with their basebands... I don't think the size of the decode portion of an x86 CPU is considered trivial at these scales.
It might be a relative of this thing:
Intel Quark - Wikipedia
I also don't think that rewriting an RTOS for a baseband in x86 is trivial either.
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That's an old article from back when Apple was buying modems from Intel and thus had no control over what ISA was used in the baseband. There's no way they're using x86 in the C1, especially since they basically had to scrap everything Intel did and start over.
The hardware is easy (relatively speaking) it is the software that's a nightmare. That's because for an industry that runs on ITU "standards" like LTE, 5G, etc. there is a massive amount of grey area and wiggle room in those standards and different base stations vendors and different cellular providers all have their own wrinkles that a phone must properly handle. Qualcomm has been in it from the start so they have been adding checks and special cases to their baseband code since forever, leaving an Everest sized hill to climb for a competitor starting from scratch. That's probably why Samsung has never taken their modem worldwide and instead goes to Qualcomm in large regions despite having their own SoC line and even their own fabs the whole time they've been making smartphones.
I wonder how much of that cruft you can be rid of if you drop support for 2G & 3G. Yes I know they are still used outside of the US in many places, but much of that support is simply because many areas have wide deployment of IoT devices like alarms and utility meters on older tech that would be expensive to replace. I have to wonder how much area there is in the world that's covered ONLY by 2G or 3G but is without LTE or 5G coverage, so that a LTE/5G only phone would not work. I guess a lot more than I would have assumed, otherwise Apple wouldn't have gone to all that extra effort to support those outdated standards.
poke01
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This is getting ridiculous. This is Intel’s modem. Not Apples. No x86 is used in Apples C1 modem it’s been stripped and checked.Also x86 with their basebands... I don't think the size of the decode portion of an x86 CPU is considered trivial at these scales.
It might be a relative of this thing:
Intel Quark - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I also don't think that rewriting an RTOS for a baseband in x86 is trivial either.
poke01
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Didn’t Apple again sign a deal with Imagination in 2020?
The guys at Beyond3D didn’t find any malice when Apple first dropped Img tech.
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