ARM based AI PCs from Qualcomm are currently (measured by volume of units shipped) the market leader in AI augmented computing.Qualcomm is clearly the largest Intel competitor in the AI augmented segment. Nuvia (now swallowed up by Qualcomm in a stock trade deal) was a very small independent firm that designed ARM chipsets. Qualcomm and ARM have been in court seeking a resolution over Nuvia based items, these were items that were based on finished existing Nuvia designs (or items it had completed by the Nuvia engineers that Qualcomm merged/hired).
Less than 1% of the existing current Qualcomm design features fall under this disagreement.
Gist of the conflict was that Qualcomm's ARM fees are much less than Nuvia's old license fees and ARM supposedly lost millions in revenue due to Qualcomm's take over of Nuvia.
ARM had used British courts to back them, saying that Qualcomm was in violation of their Nuvia-ARM licensing agreement and that resulted in ARM saying it was going to pull Qualcomm's decades old design license in three months time.
ARM was wrong, the US court system has rebuked them for even bringing the case to trial as by the terms of ARM's development license there was no issue to adjudicate. The jury was however not able to say conclusively if Nuvia had or had not violated their lesser ARM design license as judged by the British court, resulting in a hung jury.
My read on this is Qualcomm is a major ARM maker and ARM is now itself trying to market its own chipset designs that will cover the same turf as Qualcomm's new quite good and quite powerful and
very much finished (as in shipping for 6 months now) CPU designs.
This smells quite badly to a US court, enough to get ARM a rebuke in writing by the US court.
ARM using legalities to attack one of their own licensee's existing and shipping product streams is potentially going to cost ARM a whole lot more under a Trump administration than anything ARM had counted upon getting out of the initial lawsuit going into this mess .......Qualcomm could make a counter-case that ARM has indeed illegally copied several Qualcomm/Nuvia patented features in their ARM designs if ARM continues to push the idea that Qualcomm has no ongoing design license agreement with ARM. Key to that theoretical argument is that ARM's proposed new offerings include Qualcomm features that ARM "developed" after Qualcomm had already commercialized them.
https://wccftech.com/arm-wants-a-retrial-against-qualcomm/..... cast your mind back to when AMD and Intel were in court for the same sort of tit-for-tat stuff over 64 bit x86 build rights (property of AMD) vs 32 bit x86 build rights (Intel licensed this to AMD for yearly fee). The courts finally said this was actually a cross licensing situation and AMD and Intel both could use the combined tech free of fees after Intel was forced to return the XX million dollars AMD had paid for "licensing fees".
This wasn't a smooth thing, as AMD and Intel wound up back in court over new tech that came out later on until the court wrote an adder to the original judgement that said this arrangement applied to all future iterations of x86 tech going out into the future and slapped a large fine on Intel to get them to understand not to do this "sue AMD" bullshite again,
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