Snapdragon, developed by Qualcomm, is one of the most popular and advanced processors commonly found in Android devices. It is built on UK-based Arm Holding’s instruction set architecture (ISA).
Qualcomm licences the ARM instruction set and uses standard ARM cores in its Snapdragon chips. However, Bloomberg recently reported that Arm Holdings is terminating a licence that permitted Qualcomm to utilise Arm’s ISA.
As revealed in a document obtained by Bloomberg, Arm has given Qualcomm 60 days’ notice to cancel their architectural licence agreement.
This move would have serious repercussions for Qualcomm, considering the American semiconductor giant sells millions of Snapdragon processors annually, which are integral to a diverse array of devices, such as smartphones and tablets.
The Arm-Qualcomm Dispute
The dispute between Qualcomm and Arm dates back a couple of years. In 2021, Qualcomm acquired Nuvia– a company that designs CPUs based on the ARM architecture.
Then, Arm asserted that these licences could not be automatically transferred to Qualcomm without its consent. The UK-based company alleged that Qualcomm utilised Nuvia’s designs without securing the necessary permissions, thereby breaching the terms of the original licence agreements. As a result, in 2022, Arm took Qualcomm to court.
However, Incore Semiconductors CEO G.S. Madhusudan believes it’s a lose-lose situation for both companies, as Qualcomm is one of Arm’s largest customers, and its Snapdragon processors rely on Arm’s architecture. This creates a sense of fear across the industry, he opines, adding that similar concerns arose when NVIDIA attempted to acquire Arm.
“Back then, people questioned whether NVIDIA would restrict Arm’s licences to others. In the recent case, the heightened fear may lead companies that were previously undecided about using Arm to start exploring alternative architectures,” he told AIM.
Moreover, it is very likely that Qualcomm might have to pay significant damages to Arm Holdings, though a licence cancellation is unlikely at this time. However, if such a cancellation does occur, Qualcomm could be forced to design all future processors using a different architecture.
Can Qualcomm turn to RISC-V?
While smartphones based on Intel’s x86 architecture are available, this architecture is still limited to personal computers. However, another architecture that has gained prominence in the last couple of years is RISC-V, and it is open source.
A study from SHD Group suggests that there are 10 billion RISC-V cores in the market and the number is expected to rise up to 18 billion RISC-V chips by 2030.
Interestingly, Qualcomm also leverages RISC-V for many of the internal cores which are part of its processors. In a blog post dated September 2023, Qualcomm revealed that they have shipped in excess of 650 million RISC-V cores.
Last year, Qualcomm also revealed that it is collaborating with Google to develop a RISC-V Snapdragon processor that will power Google’s next-generation Wear OS solutions.
Madhusudan pointed out that RISC-V is strong in the edge and embedded space. Even though it will eventually make its way into the High Performance Compute (HPC), data centre and smartphone market, it will require some time.
“Despite being a strong advocate for RISC-V, I think Qualcomm and Arm will patch up eventually. However, RISC-V will get there,” he opined.
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