From PC World: Arm Ltd. has notified its licensee Qualcomm, informing the company that its architectural license will be terminated in 60 days — the agreement that allows Qualcomm to manufacture the Oryon CPU cores at the heart of the Snapdragon X Elite chip and Copilot+ PCs.
PCWorld has independently confirmed an earlier Bloomberg report that Arm is canceling the architectural license agreement, the agreement that allows Qualcomm to manufacture custom cores, like the company’s Oryon processor. Qualcomm called the cancellation notice “more unfounded threats” and that it looks forward to a trial in December that is set to resolve the issue.
In the fall of 2022, Arm sued Qualcomm, seeking an injunction that would have forced Qualcomm to destroy the chip designs that a company called Nuvia developed. Qualcomm bought Nuvia in 2021, in a bid to beef up its own Arm-based CPU designs. Arm, in turn, argued that it should have been allowed to approve the deal and cancelled Nuvia’s licenses in 2023, according to Bloomberg. Since then, the suit has quietly simmered without any real action or rhetoric by either side, even as the two sides nailed down a court date in December.
Now, the stakes have been raised significantly. Arm designs its own CPU cores, known as Cortex, and licenses them to companies like Qualcomm, Mediatek, and others. That license remains in place. But Qualcomm is entertaining partners, analysts and media at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui, where the company launched its next-generation Oryon core that the company claims is actually faster than Intel’s Lunar Lake chip. Embarrassing? Very much so.
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