Qualcomm has a long history of being a patent license nazi, demanding exorbitant license fees, Arm does not. So I have no doubt which side I believe more in this.
Now that you mention it, this is probably the first time ARM has licensing issue ever.
This isn’t the first time ARM has gone to court over licensing. In fact, the last time was against Qualcomm and its fees dealing with its Nuvia.
That’s what THIS fight is about. Qualcomm bought Nuvia and in a nutshell they believe that they acquired Nuvia’s ARM license with that purchase, now they’re starting to sell chip designs that were done by Nuvia using their ARM license. ARM disagrees that Nuvia’s license transferred to Qualcomm and so here we are.
The reason ARM is freaking out about this is because ARM sells functional designs and that’s what Qualcomm is starting to do with what they bought from Nuvia. Historically ARM has sold designs and Qualcomm sold chips but now ARM wants to start selling chips and Qualcomm wants to start selling designs.
ARM may still be the good guy but they are not what / who they used to be. Softbank, the Japanese owner of ARM, has been losing its ass on tech investments and they want $$$. This is why ARM did their IPO last fall.
Both ARM and Qualcomm now have the same fiscal pressures so they’re going to start acting in a similar fashion.
This definitely smells of Qualcomm being cheap. It’s got to be so bad that Arm has finally had enough. Wild.
Sounds like Qualcomm finally got a taste of FAFO
Just in case there are others who suffer a brain fart like me, who had to look it up:
FAFO = Fuck Around & Find Out.Oh good cause I was thinking “first in, first out” and thought ARM had sex with Qualcomm
I’m not a huge fan of Qualcomm as a company, but what the hell will be in my next flagship phone I’m planning to buy next summer? Some weird chinese chipset? Or crappy Google CPU?
Dimensity 9400 is spectacular. the 9300 was very good too, but the new 9400 is amazing. It fully matches Snapdragon 8 Elite (Gen 4)
It even beats it narrowly on battery, which used to be the strongest point of Snapdragon over Dimensity.https://nanoreview.net/en/soc-compare/qualcomm-snapdragon-8-gen-4-vs-mediatek-dimensity-9400
but what the hell will be in my next flagship phone I’m planning to buy next summer
Probably a Snapdragon X Elite Extreme Ultra Mega Pro XxxxX or whatever their naming scheme is now.
The odds that ARM will get an injunction preventing Qualcomm from selling chips is basically zero. The courts are rarely going to torpedo an entire company over a dispute like this when the facts are very much in dispute and very… subjective.
This is a scenario where nothing changes until the case ends and then either ARM has to build another moneybin to store their settlement, or literally nothing happens.
Google’s fine. They’re using ARM cores that are built on Samsung’s shittier manufacturing process. Next year they’re going TSMC which should improve power consumption dramatically. The lauded Dimensity 4000 also uses ARM cores, just newer and built on TSMC’s process. By the same token, newer Google SoCs should experience similar performance as they update the cores and manufacturing.
MediaTek 9400 fits within 10% of Snapdragon 8 Elite, so if you don’t intend to load a custom ROM, I’d say there are options.
I’m never on stock ROM. That’s the problem
