www.bnnbloomberg.ca
That's my understanding as well. My issue is whether or not that justifies this level of contention between the two parties? Maybe? Part of this animosity feels like fallout from Qualcomm going against the Nvidia acquisition of ARM - would ARM be pushing this so hard if Qualcomm hadn't objected? Truthfully that acquisition would've been a tough sell to regulators regardless of Qualcomm's objections. They certainly didn't help, but, to me, its approval always felt unlikely and even more so after the forceful rejections from multiple regulatory agencies. Even if Qualcomm's objections had mattered, that would be a poor reason to go after a customer and maybe I'm doing a disservice to ARM here. Maybe this fight is important enough intrinsically that a move of this extremity is justified. And to a certain extent I can understand it: when your entire business is licenses, you can't have people cheating on them. Although if Qualcomm has cheated here, and obviously that would need to be proved in court, then this also feels pennywise pound fucking stupid on their part. They already pay architectural licenses to ARM to make custom cores, they paid for Nuvia, paying the extra to fold Nuvia's license with their own would probably have been small potatoes compared to the possibility of losing their license completely, especially on top of everything they already paid. Of course they may have felt they already paid, Nuvia already paid, so why should they pay again? (everyone who has ever done business with Qualcomm licenses laughs heartily)
It's just the rapidity and extent with which this relationship fell apart does feel like there's acrimony beyond this individual business dispute. Previously Qualcomm and ARM weren't inseparable (obviously not given our current state!), but certainly seemed to be on very good terms. That said, you're right, I acknowledged in my previous post that maybe regardless of that ARM would feel it has to play hard ball given the importance of maintaining fair licensing structures. It's just also though such a drastic step as canceling the license could also have a chilling effect on those other licensees even if they agree that Qualcomm tried to pull a fast one. It's also just hard to judge because at least from what I've read, the amounts of money we're talking about haven't been publicly stated. That would provide rather crucial context to why both sides didn't come to an accord.
I think Arm regards Qualcomm as a long-term threat. Qualcomm supplies its chips for pretty much every high-end product out there, including its CPUs/GPUs (other than to Apple). It all happens to be Arm for now, but in the future it might not be. And QC’s customers wouldn’t likely care enough to stop buying QC’s chips, especially because they all need to buy the radio chips anyway and there aren’t a lot of fantastic alternatives. I think Arm regards QC as having too much market power, and is thinking long-term strategy here.
I agree, and would go further - the time isn't even close to being ripe. If QC's management is realistic, RISC-V should be counted as having hugely negative value relative to arm64 over the next 5 years or so, even though it costs nothing to license.