Or is that question irrelevant in light of the other findings, and the legal fight is actually over, with Qualcomm as the clear winner?
Or is that question irrelevant in light of the other findings, and the legal fight is actually over, with Qualcomm as the clear winner?
ARM should be able to re-file the lawsuit and get financial damages out of Nuvia, which Qualcomm will need to pay. But I doubt the damages will be high enough to bother Qualcomm. I don't think ARM will even bother.
As far as I could tell, this was never about money for ARM. It was about control over their licensees and the products they developed. Control which they could turn into money later.
The Nuvia ALA (architecture license agreement) specified much higher royalties, i.e. a much bigger cut for Arm, than the Qualcomm ALA.
The official reason for the conflict is that Qualcomm says that the Qualcomm ALA is applicable for anything made by Qualcomm, while Arm says that for any Qualcomm product that includes a trace of something designed at the former Nuvia company the Nuvia ALA must be applied.
The real reason of the conflict is that Qualcomm is replacing the CPU cores designed by Arm with CPU cores designed by the former Nuvia team in all their products. Had this not happened, Arm would have received a much greater revenue as a result of Nuvia being bought by Qualcomm, even when applying the Qualcomm ALA.
This is what you use to fund the next generation of said IP. There is no magic.
This is why companies are pushing toward RISC-V so hard. If ARM's ISA were open, then ARM would have to compete with lots of other companies to create the best core implementations possible or disappear.
The number of servers with Arm-based CPUs is growing fast, but they are not sold on the free market, they are produced internally by the big cloud operators.
Only Ampere Computing sells a few Arm-based CPUs, but they have fewer and fewer customers (i.e. mainly Oracle), after almost every big cloud operator has launched their own server CPUs.
So for anyone hoping to enter the market of Arm-based server CPUs the chances of success are extremely small, no matter how good their designs may be.