Arm's latest threat vs Qualcomm brings up some eerie Intel memories from way back when:
Intel this week announced that it would terminate AMD's license to produce x86 processors due to AMD's spinoff company, Globalfoundries.AMD spun off its manufacturing division and would thereby use the new company to manufacture its own products as well
www.tomshardware.com
Standard time to halt licensing an ISA to a competitor: 60 days
n = 2
To be honest, ARM is also acting in bad faith.
It seems to me that they won't just be satisfied with extracting more $$$ from Qualcomm. Instead, they have a vested interest in destroying the Oryon CPU project.
Re: vested interest to destroy Oryon:
To be fair, Arm did grant NUVIA an ALA for Phoenix, even when Phoenix was a plain Neoverse competitor. Arm did the same for Ampere, Fujitsu, etc. Arm Ltd. gains financially and technically with ALAs.
2018: Arm launches Neoverse (with its own good, but not top, uArches) TLAs
2019: Arm grants NUVIA (a team that consistently out-designed Arm's 1T perf) a datacenter ALA
I don't think Arm have a vested interest to destroy Oryon, even if Arm competes with it. The ideal win-win is to re-negotiate NUVIA's & Qualcomm's ALAs, which QC & Arm were allegedly trying before the lawsuit. Now, perhaps those were not reasonable negotiations: we'd need to read the ALAs & the negotiation discussion notes—what the Judge will likely do much better than we can, but I still want to read it myself, haha.
I'm not yet worried about Oryon dying; no doubt it'd be a great loss, especially one as performant & efficient as Oryon, for its IP to be destroyed with no derivatives. Why?
IANAL, but the key is that ALAs are private contracts; so even
after Judgment (and now more likely after Judgment IMO), both Arm & Qualcomm can write up a
new contract even after party 1 wins and party 2 loses. The Judge (and Jury) is only interpreting the contract - parties can agree to throw
that contract away later.
So a post-Judgment (or even post-Appeals) settlement is very much possible. Judgements can be unconditional surrender, whereas settlements—even post-Judgment—let everyone claw back a bit more.
Re: Arm in bad faith
IANAL, under any means.
I'm unsure if it is bad faith
or Arm is following the ALA contract (which is still redacted / private). Licenses (as Qualcomm
intimately knows) can have termination clauses with certain conditions. Arm & Qualcomm are less like Intel & AMD above, which had lots of cross-licensing. Here,
only Arm is the licensor and Qualcomm is
only a licensee: Arm does have the
right to cancel Qualcomm's ALA—with certain conditions fulfilled.
Importantly, one legal argument
that Qualcomm used is that Arm's refusal to act against Qualcomm & Arm's continued cooperation with Qualcomm is an admission Qualcomm is following the contract:
With ARM’s Knowledge And Assistance Owed To Qualcomm Under Its ALA, Qualcomm Continued Its Work Developing CPU Cores After The Acquisition Closed
211. ... During the verification process, ARM knew that it was interacting with former NUVIA employees, and knew that Qualcomm was seeking to verify core designs that included technologies Qualcomm had acquired from NUVIA.
216. In or around late 2021, Qualcomm also introduced the Compute SoC into the parties’ weekly discussions. Like the parties’ discussions concerning the in-development Phoenix Core for the Server SoC, these discussions were transparent, and ARM was aware that these discussions included Qualcomm engineers formerly at NUVIA and related to Qualcomm’s ongoing development of the technologies it had acquired from NUVIA.
So Arm—sending a notice—that it's cancelling Qualcomm's ALA (beyond the clear juxtaposition post-QC Summit / near trial) is also Arm perhaps trying to defuse that Qualcomm argument: "Qualcomm can't claim we're working with Qualcomm and Arm doesn't have a problem with the licenses. We definitely are not working with Qualcomm and Arm definitely has a problem with the licenses."
EDIT: clarity, spaces