Arm will cancel Qualcomm’s license to make the Snapdragon X Elite

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. 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.

The Arm-Qualcomm agreement covers both the existing Oryon core inside the Snapdragon X Elite as well as the second-generation Oryon core that Qualcomm showed off this week at its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, said a source with knowledge of the situation on Wednesday.

Specifically, the agreement being cancelled by Arm is an Arm v8 architectural license. Qualcomm never signed an Arm v9 architectural license, said the source, but does have an existing license to Arm v9 fixed cores, which should include Arm CSS for Client and Arm’s Cortex cores.

The license agreement, explained

Arm licenses its intellectual property to companies like Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, and Mediatek, among others, in multiple ways. In years past, companies like Qualcomm signed deals to take Arm cores (like the Cortex) and plug them within its own designs.

In this case, the basic core licenses would require the licensee to leave the Cortex CPU unchanged. If a rival signed a similar agreement, the two CPU cores would compete directly against one another. While the licensees usually had some flexibility — the Cortex clock speeds could be adjusted, for example — finished products based upon these core licenses could end up being quite similar.

An Arm architectural license, however, affords the licensees vastly more flexibility. That license has allowed Apple, for example, to design a wholly custom chip like the M3 while maintaining architectural compatibility with the Arm instruction set. With an architectural license, chip designers can exercise their own creative freedom and potentially exceed the limits of what Arm engineers could come up with in their fixed Cortex cores.

Why Arm sued Qualcomm

The two matters came to a head a few years ago when Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 series chips for PCs failed to keep up with x86 processors from both AMD and Intel. Qualcomm bought Nuvia in 2021 in a bid to beef up its own Arm-based CPU designs, as Nuvia owned an architectural license that it was using to manufacture Arm chips intended for servers.

Qualcomm believes that it bought the rights to the license and Nuvia’s intellectual property, but Arm disagrees and argues that the wording of the license gave it control over whether it could be transferred.

In the fall of 2022, Arm sued Qualcomm, seeking an injunction that would force Qualcomm to destroy Nuvia’s chip designs. Arm, in turn, cancelled Nuvia’s licenses in 2023, according to Bloomberg. Since then, the suit has quietly simmered without any real action from either side, even as the two sides nailed down a court date in December and Qualcomm kept shipping products based upon Nuvia’s designs.

The stakes have now been raised

This week, 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.

Qualcomm issued a statement calling the action a “desperate ploy.”

“This is more of the same from Arm — more unfounded threats designed to strongarm a longtime partner, interfere with our performance-leading CPUs, and increase royalty rates regardless of the broad rights under our architecture license,” Qualcomm said in a company statement emailed to PCWorld by a company representative. “With a trial fast approaching in December, Arm’s desperate ploy appears to be an attempt to disrupt the legal process, and its claim for termination is completely baseless. We are confident that Qualcomm’s rights under its agreement with Arm will be affirmed. Arm’s anticompetitive conduct will not be tolerated.”

Arm fired back in a statement on Wednesday.

“Following Qualcomm’s repeated material breaches of Arm’s license agreement, Arm is left with no choice but to take formal action requiring Qualcomm to remedy its breach or face termination of the agreement,” the company said. “This is necessary to protect the unparalleled ecosystem that Arm and its highly valued partners have built over more than 30 years. Arm is fully prepared for the trial in December and remains confident that the Court will find in Arm’s favor.”

Right now, the Oryon cores governed by the license, for both the smartphone and the PC, are what’s at the heart of the Arm-Qualcomm legal dispute. Now those cores are in jeopardy because of Arm’s action, setting up either a heated negotiation process or an even more fervent battle in court in a few months.

This story was updated on October 23 with new details in the fourth paragraph, as well as some editing throughout to clarify the background of the Arm-Qualcomm dispute and what’s at stake. A second update was filed at 12:20 PM PT with a statement from Arm.