The Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus are Qualcomm’s first chipset offerings touting the company’s custom Oryon cores, which were supposedly developed completely in-house, as the company decided to follow Apple’s route of presenting the masses with a solution that is void of technologies from other companies. However, ARM would disagree, which is why the British chip designer and the San Diego firm are locked in a legal skirmish. During a U.S. federal court trial in Delaware, a former Apple executive was questioned as to how much of ARM’s technology was used in silicon, like the Snapdragon X Elite, and the individual stated that it was less than one percent.
The development of Qualcomm’s custom Oryon cores was only possible with the Nuvia acquisition, which developed solutions from scratch and without using ARM’s IP, or at least very little of it
At the trial, Reuters reports that Gerard Williams, an ex-Apple engineer who founded Nuvia in 2019 and one of the lead designers of Oryon, was pressed by lawyers from both Qualcomm and ARM on whether the previous company’s custom cores featured ARM IP or not. ARM’s attorney wanted Williams to acknowledge that the licensing contract covered technology that belonged to the British company, and modifications were made to the Nuvia cores. As reported by Tom’s Hardware, Williams responded by saying that less than one percent of them featured ARM technology.
In 2021, Qualcomm acquired Nuvia for $1.4 billion as the chipset manufacturer wanted to jumpstart its efforts to develop in-house cores to better compete with Apple and enter the notebook space to take away the market share from Intel and AMD. Later, ARM asked Qualcomm to renegotiate the terms of the license, which Qualcomm rejected, stating that its Architecture License Agreement, or ALA, covers the subsidiary Nuvia. Naturally, ARM believed that Qualcomm breached its contract and demanded that the latter get rid of all Nuvia designs, which was followed by a lawsuit.
Reuters were informed by analysts that Qualcomm pays around $300 million to ARM as part of its licensing fee. Unfortunately, at the trial, there was evidence presented that showed that $50 million in annual revenue was missing because of the Nuvia acquisition. The report concludes by saying that a jury verdict could come as soon as this week, with the possibility that Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon will take the witness stand.
News Source: Reuters
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