Nuvia: don’t hold your breath

[dada_dave]

Qualcomm wins a legal battle over Arm chip licensing

The jury delivered a win for Qualcomm with a split verdict.

www.theverge.com

Qualcomm won. But jury couldn’t reach a verdict on Nuvia. So I dunno.

I suppose the verdict isn't hugely surprising, especially the part where the jury couldn't decide. The behavior of both companies seemed to be at odds with common sense and at times even their own interests. Some of ARM's demands and positions seemed unreasonable, but then so did Qualcomm's. As a layman, I just didn't understand ARM's trial strategy here and as lawyer you didn't seem to either. With such a verdict will there likely be retrials or appeals?

As a sidebar: I felt the whole argument over how much silicon/RTL was reliant on ARM technologies to be an odd issue to fight over in the first place. It's an ARM CPU core. Many of those other functional blocks in the 99% are great for performance, but you can still build a CPU without them technically. So even if one agreed that ARM's tech was restricted to just the decoders and that you could swap those ARM decoders out for any other decoder based on any other ISA - like say x86 (ha!) - that the CPU would continue to function exactly as it did before, the CPU cannot function without decoders. And as you said, to get access to those that means an ARM license. The relevant question to me was therefore just whether Nuvia breached its agreement and whether Qualcomm had the right to develop ARM cores under its license - which for the latter yeah it clearly does, so really I guess it was only the first question that was relevant and finding in favor of Qualcomm on the latter seems more than reasonable. That the jury couldn't decide on the former also seems reasonable given from what I could tell given the seemingly confusing Nuvia ALA but that had little to do with what percentage of the silicon/RTL was based on the ISA or ARM ARM. Because it isn't 0%. So fighting over that is just a distraction. Reading back over my own paragraph, I guess that's a long winded version of your snooty waffle argument.

As a sidebar to the sidebar: I was amused that the Qualcomm CEO said they'd be happy to go back to paying for ARM's off-the-shelf designs if they were competitive.

Cristiano explained that Arm’s lagging behind Apple in performance was the main reason for buying Nuvia, and he would be happy to get TLA from Arm if it provided high-performance cores even now.

Wish granted!

Okay sure the Oryon-L is slightly better, but the ARM X925 core is definitely competitive! Think he's going back to paying the TLA for ARM cores? Nah me neither ...