A licensing dispute between Arm and Qualcomm around its Oryon cores is coming to an end for now. Qualcomm wins its battle.
Arm quits its legal battle against major customer Qualcomm. Since 2022, the two sides have been embroiled in a dispute over an architecture license. Arm demanded money and a new license; Qualcomm did not think that was an issue.
Nuvia
The case has its origins in Qualcomm’s 2022 acquisition of Nuvia. Nuvia worked on ARM-based CPU cores aimed at servers, and had an architecture license agreement(ALA) to do so. Specifically, this meant that Nuvia did not use designs developed by Arm, but built its own compute cores that were compatible with the ARM architecture.
Qualcomm was impressed by Nuvia’s work and bought the company. The acquisition paid off. Nuvia’s work evolved into the Oryon arithmetic cores that today power the excellent Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors for laptops. The Snapdragon 8 Elite chips also use the architecture. Qualcomm believed it had taken the ALA from Nuvia with it.
Arm did not think that was correct. According to the company, the ALA belonged to Nuvia, and Qualcomm had to renegotiate with Arm for a new ALA after the acquisition. The company demanded that sales of Nuvia-based chips stop, and sought to point all relevant designs toward Arm. An initial lawsuit last year turned in favor of Qualcomm, which has consistently maintained that Arm’s role in the whole story is minor.
Filed with the case
Now it appears that Arm has resigned itself to the standoff. The company still does not agree, but is leaving the lawsuit as it is. Arm noted that profit in a lawsuit was not assured, and that Qualcomm already pays a lot of licensing fees annually. In the long run, even a win for Arm would do little to change the total license cost.
Qualcomm itself confirms that the legal battle is over. Both companies shared that information on the sidelines of their quarterly results. Arm does not rule out starting other cases based on Qualcomm’s alleged breach of contractual obligations, but for now, the legal battle is briefly concluded. Consequently, the Oryon cores may continue to exist.