Report: Arm cancels Qualcomm’s architecture license, endangering its chip business

Any company that makes Arm chips must license technology from Arm Holdings plc, the British company that develops the instruction set. Companies can license the instruction set and create their own CPU designs or license one of Arm's ready-made Cortex CPU core designs to incorporate into their own chips.

Bloomberg reports that Arm is canceling Qualcomm's license, an escalation of a fight that began in late 2022 when Arm sued Qualcomm over its acquisition of Nuvia in 2021. Arm has given Qualcomm 60 days' notice of the cancellation, giving the companies two months to come to some kind of agreement before Qualcomm is forced to stop manufacturing and selling its Arm chips.

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"This is more of the same from ARM—more unfounded threats designed to strongarm a longtime partner, interfere with our performance-leading CPUs, and increase royalty rates regardless of the broad rights under our architecture license," a Qualcomm spokesperson told Ars. "With a trial fast approaching in December, Arm’s desperate ploy appears to be an attempt to disrupt the legal process, and its claim for termination is completely baseless. We are confident that Qualcomm’s rights under its agreement with Arm will be affirmed. Arm’s anticompetitive conduct will not be tolerated.”

Qualcomm bought Nuvia to assist with developing high-performance Arm chips that could compete with x86 chips from Intel and AMD as well as Apple Silicon chips in iPhones and Macs—Nuvia was founded by people who had headed up Apple's chip design team for years. Arm claimed that the acquisition "caused Nuvia to breach its Arm licenses," and Arm demanded that Qualcomm and Nuvia destroy any designs that Nuvia had created pre-acquisition.

This apparently didn't happen; Qualcomm's flagship Oryon CPU cores are at the heart of the just-announced Snapdragon 8 Elite processor for flagship phones and the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chips that have been shipping in Microsoft's latest Surface devices and many other Windows PCs that launched this summer.

Qualcomm's shift to using Nuvia's designs means that Arm could make less money from the partnership than it used to. Since 2015, Qualcomm's flagship chips had all used versions of a CPU architecture called Kryo, a "semi-custom" design that was largely based on Arm's Cortex CPU cores. Arm offers multiple licensing programs, but generally companies only pay for "the IP included in the final SoC design," so a company licensing both the Arm instruction set and Arm CPU designs is obviously more attractive for Arm than a company that simply uses the instruction set in its own custom CPUs.

This article was updated with a statement from Qualcomm.

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