ARM torpedoes Windows on ARM: Demands destruction of all PCs with Snapdragon X
heise.de
heise.de
Now of course, ARM is not happy about that. They spent resources to help Nuvia develop the core for servers. Now Qualcomm is using the Nuvia core to compete with stock ARM Cortex designs in phones, laptops, and servers.
ARM makes money from ISA and stock-ARM core licensing. They make way more money if you use their stock cores than if you only use their ISA. Oryon would only be using the ISA. Apple SoCs also use only the ISA.
Not only does ARM lose money from Qualcomm switching from Cortex cores to Oryon cores, they now have a legitimate competitor for Cortex SoCs other than Apple.
Qualcomm was also the the strongest lobbyist against the Nvidia/ARM deal. They don't want the competition from stock ARM cores backed by Nvidia. They don't want to compete with a combined Nvidia+ARM. They just want to compete with stock ARM cores with their Nuvia cores.
Other ARM vendors like Mediatek, Samsung have no ability to create better cores than Nuvia's cores. They can only rely on stock ARM core designs. Therefore, Qualcomm's Nuvia-derived cores should always be the high end* while other ARM vendors can only fight in the mid-range, which have much lower margins. Had Nvidia acquired ARM, Qualcomm would have been competing against ARM + Nvidia IP + Nvidia money.
I actually bought some Qualcomm stocks because I saw how Qualcomm outmaneuvered ARM.
*Assuming that stock ARM cores won't surpass Qualcomm's Nuvia-derived cores
The legal complaint of ARM has been that the license they had granted to Nuvia was limited in scope, i.e. it allowed Nuvia to only design a core for server CPUs, so as soon as Nuvia has repurposed that core, the existing ARM license has been lawfully terminated.
Moreover, ARM has argued that even if the buyer of Nuvia, Qualcomm, has an ARM license for CPUs that can be used in laptops, this license is not applicable to the Nuvia cores, because a significant part of their design has already happened under the Nuvia license, so it has become illegal after that license had been terminated.
So ARM wants that Qualcomm should either buy a new, more expensive license, or destroy all the design work leading to the Nuvia cores and start a new cleanroom design of laptop cores, to be used perhaps in their 2029 laptop products.
Without access to the text of the secret contracts between ARM and Qualcomm and between ARM and Nuvia, it is impossible to decide which of the legal arguments of Qualcomm or of ARM are a complete BS.
Normally such contracts should have been unambiguous enough that such a legal fight should have never been possible, but it seems that at least one of the parties has concluded that it is possible to twist the meaning of the contracts according to their business interests.
In any case, conditioning a design license in function of the application domain seems abusive. What could be acceptable would be only a per-device royalty fee that is computed differently depending on the application domain.
The licenses provided Nuvia access to specific Arm architecture, designs, intellectual property, and support in exchange for payment of licensing fees and royalties on future server products that include processor cores based on Arm’s architecture, designs, or related intellectual property.
Arm provided preferential support for Nuvia’s development efforts, with Arm seeking to accelerate research and development in next-generation processors for data center servers to support that sector’s transition to Arm technology.
Arm does indeed provide significant technical support to the companies that buy Arm IP, as it is normal for any vendor, but that does not apply to companies like Nuvia.
For companies which buy ISA licences, there is very little need for technical support, at most some clarifications about how to implement the compliance tests. There are only a handful of companies with ISA licenses, which have only very infrequently needs for technical support, so even if a single Arm employee is assigned for this task there is no need for "preferential support" in order to respond immediately to any support request.
"Arm seeking to accelerate research and development in next-generation processors for data center servers to support that sector’s transition to Arm technology" just means that Arm has continued to act as a competitor for Nuvia, in developing their own Neoverse server cores and related infrastructure.
It is true however that only because the Arm CPUs have a minor share of the server market for now, the progress for one of them can still have a synergetic effect on the others, instead of an antagonistic effect, so there is a little truth in the claim of Arm that they have worked "to support that sector’s transition to Arm technology", but in any case that does not mean that Arm has spent any cent with the support of Nuvia.
All the text that is public about the Arm-Qualcomm conflict is useless, because it avoids to quote the relevant paragraphs of the contracts between Arm and both companies, which would have clarified instantly which party is right.
It's probably not a great long-term plan: such actions are likely to hasten work on RISC-V alternatives at Qualcomm and all the other manufacturers witnessing the attempt.
Qualcomm does not have any pull to make Google to make RISC-V Android a first class citizen. Nor do they have any pull to make Microsoft develop Windows RISC-V. They also don't have a presence in servers so they can't make Linux and server software like Kubernetes/Postgres/Redis/etc. optimize for RISC-V.
The actual entities that have this kind of power is Apple, AWS, Microsoft, and Google and some Chinese tech giants.
You can debate what "first class" means, but RISC-V was announced as an official Android platform in 2023, and runs in emulators today:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-announces-off...
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023/10/android-and-risc-v...
I understand that in the Nuvia case they were not developed from scratch. I just don’t understand why Apple and Qualcomm don’t just remove ARM licensed tech from their chips and maintain ISA compatibility with clean room implementations.
What is stopping that?
Edit: the answer can be found in the court documents, here Qualcomm's Sept 22 answers to Arm's claims: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.798... ; the gist is that Arm claims Nuvia's licencing fee was higher than Qualcomm's because it was negotiated with the intent of making server chips. Qualcomm admits as much:
> Defendants further admit that NUVIA and ARM intended the licensing fees and royalties set forth in the NUVIA ALA to apply to future server products, not products for other markets
What stock Cortex designs in laptops and servers? If ARM had provided good chips for those uses, none of this would have been a big deal!
What’s with the heavy handed pro-Qualcomm/anti-ARM bias in this news piece?
My interpretation is obvious breach of contract by Qualcomm. Seems very cut and dry from the facts laid out in this very same article.
I have no skin in this race, just thought it was odd.
Pro shiny new devices and moving Windows into an ARM future, vs. Anti throwing away loads of work/tech over IP squabbles/greed (whoever is responsible for it)?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semiconductor-shorta...
Not to mention the planned obsolecence of non-upgradeable machines with near-unreplaceable battery packs (a very popular 'dark pattern' these days in device design, clearly aimed at encouraging people to replace the entire device more frequently)
It's not quite that simple.
Qualcomm has a separate license from ARM that allows doing all the things they are currently doing with Nuvia IP. ARM claims that this license does not cover Nuvia IP, and that since Nuvia broke the terms of their license, all that IP needs to be destroyed. Qualcomm claims that they bought the IP separately from any license, and that they can just continue using it under the terms of their own license, and that no term in that license prevents Qualcomm from using the Nuvia IP under it.
The issue is at least murky enough that no court has granted ARM an injunction over it.
And maybe the nuvia license gives more favorable royalties than the Qualcomm one?
Very informative, thanks!
So, my guess is that Qualcomm will try to eventually fix this by throwing money at it and striking some deal with ARM. The question is just going to be how much. ARM is just twisting their arm (no pun intended) with this. But I agree that at face value they are well within their rights to escalate this. And given that their core business is selling ARM licenses, making sure that they get their money from Qualcomm kind of is their core business.
I’d be inclined to say the opposite based on the German article linked in this articles. Qualcomm has its own architecture license in addition to the now expired Nuvia one and can’t really figure out what arm is objecting to precisely aside from wanting money
https://www.heise.de/news/ARM-verklagt-Qualcomm-wegen-Lizenz...
RISC-V immediately comes to mind as a long term alternative. Thank you ARM and Qualcomm.
It is as desktop as running a Linux distribution inside Virtual Box.
That happens to be build using gcc, glibc and wayland. If you enable "developer mode" you get access to a subset of coreutils like "cp". You also get "chromebrew" which allows you to install the rest.
I think it's fair to say it's GNU/Linux stripped back to the bare essentials, with a custom desktop and a few GUI apps added. And the ability to add a fair chunk of the stripped stuff back. https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/guide...
> could be Zirkon or a BSD tomorrow if Google felt so inclined, with the ability to run GNU/Linux workloads inside of a VM.
Yes, well Windows could also be a Zirkon or a BSD tomorrow, with the ability to run Windows workloads inside of a VM.
Archive link: https://archive.is/kGByU.
> Felix Mikolasch, Data Protection Lawyer at noyb: “It seems that the LfD's decision has already been overtaken by the latest version of the "Pay or Okay" banner. We will of course go back to the LfD and continue to fight this practice.”
Yes they're asses...
> There's no privacy-preserving way to read the article.
.. but, viewing with incognito mode should destroy the cookies on exit, and if you're worried about IP tracking, VPN?
I was disappointed to find this out after navigating through text written in an unfamiliar language and a complicated cookie dialog comparable to this [1]. German cookie dialog on an English article, is that even legal?
The laptops are supposed to make their retail debut in the next day or two.
I think a court would be crazy to accept the demand from the headline which doesn't benefit either litigant.
Now Qualcomm bought Nuvia, but ARM says it can’t use Nuvia's core with its own arch license - it must pay a second time.
Qualcomm bought a company because they had a license arm wouldn’t sell them. It comes down to subtleties in the contracts.
I know they were making their own cores several years ago but for a bunch of design cycles they used ARM reference cores. during that time they were still an architectural licensee? Or they let it lapse and then re-licensed just before/after the Nuvia acquisition?
> Qualcomm bought a company because they had a license arm wouldn’t sell them.
These statements aren't different. You're disagreeing by slightly rewording what I wrote.
Qualcomm bought Nuvia not because they wanted the license Nuvia had, because that license was server-only, with a "don't compete with our stuff on mobile" carveout, but because they wanted the IP. The license that Qualcomm has is strictly better than what Nuvia had, and no-one wants the Nuvia license.
No, Qualcomm bought a company because they developed a core that’s better than anything ARM or Qualcomm had in it’s portfolio.
Acquisitions and mergers happen all the time. How it happened and there was not a clause in the licencing agreement to explicitly cover these cases?
They probably pay 7-figures for some of their legal team that failed to see this coming.
There were license clauses, the two companies disagree about what they meant, they're currently suing each other over them. This article is about that lawsuit and recent developments.
ARM granted Nuvia the license for server applications. Typically that license transfers, but ARM is taking umbrage with Qualcomm using the Nuvia developed tech (licensed for server applications) and applying it to consumer / handheld.
Clearly the "off the shelf" processor designs ARM is producing aren't getting anywhere near the performance that Apple is getting from their own designs. Qualcomm are trying to compete by using the Nuvia design, and ARM aren't happy.
I have to wonder what value ARM are actually adding here. They want more money (doesn't everyone), but if they're unable to actually design performant processors then all they're really licensing is the instruction set. How long until the manufacturers realise that they can switch to RiscV and not pay ARM anything?
SiFive announced P870[0] last October[1]. It competes with ARM's absolute best.
Ventana Veyron V2 and Tenstorrent Ascalon/Alastor are other already announced, highly competitive, very high performance microarchitectures.
The high performance chips are coming. RISC-V is inevitable.
0. https://www.sifive.com/cores/performance-p870-p870a
1. https://www.sifive.com/press/sifive-announces-differentiated...
I think ARM on Windows will die eventually - what does it bring to the party ???. Looking at Lunar Lake which is very much like the M series there is still much life left in that old dog :).
But how many people need more than 5? They exist. But at that point the factors of price, performance, and compatibility are very relevant.
Reminds me of the state of phones now. Early smartphones had pathetic battery life. Now it's reached the point I don't care because the battery life of all the phones exceeds the daily use. Other factors now dominate.
Of course, it's also another reason to abandon windoze...
Intel and AMD managed to sort out that bullshit decades ago, Intel even copied AMD's x64 extensions as Itanium fell flat.
It's not like ARM has something competitive with Intel in performance on their own - everyone but Apple and Annapurna/Amazon uses stock cores and they frankly suck. And instead of entering negotiations to copy from what either Apple or Amazon did with ARM to bring the entire ecosystem forward, they attempt to shoot Qualcomm. (The fact that Qualcomm itself sucks as a company makes all of that even more absurd)
The problem is, the ARM world never got away from crappy BSPs or managed to get any kind of standardization. Anyone reasonably skilled can get at least a basic "hello world" running that uses BIOS routines to draw characters on a screen and it will work on any x86 compliant machine, no matter its age - there is no equivalent that will work on ARM devices. None at all. Every tiny device, from embedded gadgets to full blown phones, has to have its own kernel build. What a mess that is.
So I agree with this topic: arm ecosystem has to get its act together to further adoption.
Booting via UEFI on arm is also supported by alma, fedora and ubuntu server.
Embedded stuff mostly uses u-boot true. But u-boot itself is actually fine for this type of device. I recently did an evaluation of several system on modules. They all came with their own usually different version of u-boot. For the purspose of the evaluation I ddin't care I just pointed them at my kernel + DT and it booted.
The "decades old" part really depends. At work I've just finished updating our u-boot 2020.10 to 2024.04.
But embedded and PC / Server are fundementally different in terms of use case. On a PC / Server the user expects to install an OS of his choice. Embedded isn't like that, the definition of embedded it pretty much "single use case device" so being able to install a generic Linux distro and run libre office isn't a use case many care about, particularly if it would increase the hardware costs.
Phones are a different case to embedded, here it *would* be useful to install a generic OS (though probably not the same distributions as on PCs). For that a standarised bootloader / OS interface would be useful but it deosn't have to be UEFI / ACPI, u-boot distroboot would be sufficient https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/develop/bootstd.html
And that's not really much different in principle to APCI (which is really "DT on steroids"). The main difference is that with ACPI the device manufacturer ships the tables whereas with DT they have usually have to be provided by others.
PCs haven't standardised everything at the hardware level for years. The original PC had standard IO addresses but this only covers a few things like keyboard, display, serial ports. Modern PCs, especially laptops, have all sorts of "non standard" chips hanging off I2C busses.
There are 2 reasons it "just works" on PCs 1) ACPI tables descibe it (just like DT) 2) There are compatibility tests needed to get the Microsoft hardware certification to run Windows
But it goes beyond the kernel to the full OS distribution. All PCs have pretty much the same use cases and similar UI capabilities. Sure some may be more powerful etc but they're all pretty much the same idea. So on a PC it makes snese to pop in a USB key with a "generic" Linux distribution an install it. It probably doesn't make as much sense to want to install the exact same distribution on your PC, phone, TV and router. This means that, given the OS is going to be customised anyway there just isn't as much demand for a fully plug and play system.
We haven't seen independent reviews of these Qualcomm chips yet, but not even 3 years later and it sure looks like the entire PC market is about to leapfrog Apple. Intel's Lunar Lake looks like it's getting pretty close too.
Being a fanboi for a particular company/tech helps no-one except shareholders. Capitalists don't need to invest in competing if there's no-one competing with them.
I suspect this is more of an ambit claim from ARM to extract better terms from Qualcomm
How? There is barely any software for Windows that is made for ARM, much less drivers for all the various kinds of gadgets people have or the various anticheat crapware, and without a solid runtime translation layer similar to Rosetta and backing for it in hardware (memory access orders, other acceleration stuff) any Windows effort will fall flat on its face as it did some years ago.
It's perfectly reasonable to be sceptical of Qualcomm's claims, but you can get a feel for how confident a company is in their product by how they approach marketing - and we are seeing a level of confidence here from Qualcomm and Microsoft that we have not seen with previous Windows on ARM pushes.
I am personally inferring from this that the products are probably pretty good, but this is speculation. I won't be ordering one until I see some test results from independent reviewers.
More than enough crap these days wants that for DRM reasons as well. We don't own anything any more these days.
Gamers are what gave Steam the financial incentive to get Proton to an entirely new level. And a platform that brands itself as the future must have gaming support.
Is that pronounced “fan-BWAH”?