In August this year, Arm announced that it had not filed a lawsuit against mobile processor manufacturer Qualcomm and its subsidiary Nuvia, accusing the two companies of violating the license agreement signed with Arm and infringing Arm's patents. Recently, Qualcomm filed a counterclaim against Arm, saying that Arm's allegations have no legal basis. Recently, according to Dylan Patel, an analyst at SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor industry analysis agency, the document from Qualcomm against Arm shows that Arm requires that after 2024, external GPUs, NPUs or ISPs will no longer be allowed in SoCs based on Arm's public CPUs.
According to the updated Qualcomm counterclaim document, after 2024, Arm will no longer license its CPU to semiconductor companies such as Qualcomm under the Technology License Agreement (TLA). Instead, Arm will only authorize it to equipment manufacturers. Arm allegedly told OEMs that the only way to obtain Arm-based chips is to accept Arm's new license terms. But Qualcomm said Arm lied to Qualcomm's OEM partners on Qualcomm's licensing terms.
In addition, Qualcomm also said that Arm told OEMs that chip design manufacturers will not be able to provide other parts of Arm-based SoCs, but will directly provide GPUs, NPUs, and ISPs under Arm's new license.
Simply put, after 2024, if chip design manufacturers want to use Arm's public CPU architecture, they must abandon their self-developed or other third-party GPU, NPU, and ISP, and uniformly adopt GPU, NPU, and ISP provided by Arm.
Currently, Qualcomm, Apple , etc., all have self-developed GPUs, NPUs, and ISPs. Although chip manufacturers such as MediaTek , Huawei , Zhanrui basically use Arm's public version GPUs, they also have self-developed NPUs and ISPs. Therefore, for these chip design manufacturers with self-developed GPUs, NPUs, and ISPs (for example, Qualcomm has self-developed Adreno GPUs, NPUs, and Spectra ISPs), after 2024, if you want to continue to use Arm's public CPU to design SoCs, and if you need GPUs, NPUs, ISPs and other IPs, you can only choose the public GPUs, NPUs, ISPs and other IPs provided by Arm.
Of course, if the chip design manufacturer uses the CPU developed by the Arm instruction set architecture, it seems that it will not be affected by this. However, Arm previously only authorized the Armv8 instruction set. Since the release of the new 64-bit ARMv9 instruction set, no chip design manufacturer has announced that it has obtained authorization.
Arm has not yet responded positively to this message.
Editor: Xinzhixun-Longkejian
