Arm sues Qualcomm and its subsidiary Nuvia for infringement, which may impact Qualcomm's return to the server processor market

According to foreign media reports, Arm, a semiconductor IP company under Japan’s SoftBank Group, said on August 31 local time that the company had filed a lawsuit against mobile processor maker Qualcomm and its subsidiary Nuvia, accusing the two companies of infringing Arm. patent.

The report pointed out that the lawsuit this time focuses on Nuvia, a chip startup that Qualcomm will acquire in 2021. According to the indictment in the U.S. District Court of Delaware, Nuvia used Arm's patented designs in chip designs, but these designs cannot be transferred to Qualcomm for use without permission. Arm said Nuvia's license to Arm's patented designs was terminated in February 2022 after negotiations between the two parties failed to reach a resolution.

Arm said in a statement that as Qualcomm attempted to transfer Arm's license to Nuvia's patent rights without Arm's consent, and Nuvia's license was terminated in March 2022, Arm made multiple A sincere effort to communicate to find a solution. However, the incident has not been properly resolved in the end, so this lawsuit was filed.

Qualcomm and Arm are the two most influential semiconductor chip design companies in the world, and Qualcomm is one of the important suppliers of smartphone processors and baseband chips. Even so, Qualcomm, like many other companies in the chip industry, continues to rely on Arm for processor IP. For a long time, Arm has continued to create many CPU/GPU core IPs, which are provided to thousands of chip design manufacturers for application. Therefore, the confrontation between Qualcomm and Arm, the market is expected to have an impact on the industry, so it is under close observation.

As we all know, Qualcomm abandoned its Arm server processor business as early as 2018, stopping development of its 48-core Centriq 2400 for data centers. Subsequently, Huaxintong, an Arm server chip company jointly owned by Qualcomm and Guizhou Province, was also closed in 2019.

However, in recent years, with the success of many Arm server chip manufacturers such as Ampere, Huawei, and Feiteng in the market, Qualcomm has also restarted its layout in the Arm server market.

In March 2021, Qualcomm officially announced that its subsidiary Qualcomm Technologies has completed the acquisition of NUVIA, a start-up chip design company, for US$1.4 billion, and NUVIA is focusing on high-performance Arm server chips.

According to data, NUVIA was established in February 2019. Although the company was established less than two years ago, the company has three former Apple generals, including former CPU chief architect Gerard Williams III, John Bruno, Manu Gulati, etc. From Apple A7 (Cyclone core) to A14 (Firestorm core) processors are all led by the team led by Williams. In the early years at ARM, Williams also participated in the definition of Corex-A8/A15. John Bruno, Manu Gulati, etc. worked at Apple before 2017. They were able to work under Williams, and then they both joined Google.

It is worth mentioning that after Williams left Apple, the latter was furious, and the two sides even went to court. Apple accused Williams of having no professional ethics, and began planning a new company, NUVIA, while in office. NUVIA also benefits from such a technical team that has accumulated a lot of experience in high-performance processors, system-on-chip (SoC), and power management for computing-intensive terminals and applications. some results.

In 2020, the GeekBench 5 test results of its Phoenix prototype processor announced by NUVIA showed that the single-core far surpassed the Snapdragon 865, Apple A12X and Apple A13, with a power consumption of less than 4.5 watts.

The goal of NUVIA's creation is to create high-performance ARM server chips to compete with x86 rivals such as Intel Xeon and AMD Xiaolong, which is a relatively short part of Qualcomm's current business. And Qualcomm already leads the way in mobile graphics processing units (GPUs), AI engines, DSPs and dedicated multimedia accelerators.

Therefore, Qualcomm's acquisition of NUVIA is also considered to be Qualcomm's plan to re-enter the Arm server chip market. In August this year, Bloomberg also reported that Qualcomm was preparing to re-enter the Arm server chip market.

Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, said Qualcomm was looking for customers for a new product it launched following its acquisition of chip startup Nuvia in early 2021.

Amazon AWS has shown interest in Qualcomm's latest offering, Bloomberg said, meaning the chipmaker already has a working chip to at least show to potential customers. However, AWS has launched its self-developed Graviton series server chips based on the Arm architecture and provided server instances.