Today, the reputable Bloomberg agency shared interesting information that the British company Arm may deprive the American chipmaker Qualcomm of a license to develop Arm-compatible processors.
According to Arm, back in 2022, Qualcomm violated a number of terms of the agreement under which it has the right to use the Arm architecture, and now within eight weeks Qualcomm must eliminate these violations or lose its license to develop chips compatible with Arm.
In turn, Qualcomm stated that Arm is trying in this way to solve the problem that arose back in 2022, regardless of the interests of its long-time partner. Moreover, Arm’s voiced threats regarding the revocation of licenses in Qualcomm itself are called groundless.
However, the history of the conflict between Arm and Qualcomm began back in 2021, when the latter bought the processor developer Nuvia. According to Arm, the terms of this deal violated the contract with this developer, since after the acquisition of Nuvia, Qualcomm should have renegotiated the terms of this agreement.
By the way, it was specialists from Nuvia who developed the latest Oryon architecture, based on Qualcomm’s most advanced single-chip systems used in both laptops and smartphones, including the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite chip introduced yesterday.
Arm believes that Qualcomm does not have the right to use Nuvia’s developments, since it revoked licenses from the latter back in February 2023, which does not allow Qualcomm to continue selling processors using architectures developed at Nuvia before concluding a deal with Qualcomm.
It is worth noting here that at this stage of development, Qualcomm is still heavily dependent on Arm and they will not be able to do without each other yet.