Arm Qualcomm lawsuit will involve multiple companies' mobile phone chips

According to Taiwanese media "Economic Daily", Qualcomm will not be able to continue to provide Arm-based chips from 2025. This move may make mobile phone chip manufacturers face setbacks in new product development, or products will no longer have differentiated competitive advantages.

It is reported that after Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, a CPU company, Arm terminated Nuvia’s license earlier this year and asked Qualcomm to immediately destroy and stop using Nuvia’s related designs based on these protocols. According to Qualcomm's latest counterclaim to the court, the company's Arm license agreement will end in 2024.

SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor industry analysis organization, pointed out that Arm intends to restrict customers from using self-developed GPU, NPU and other architectures, and links the CPU license agreement with these component license agreements, and Arm will not extend this agreement. This means that Qualcomm and other semiconductor manufacturers will not be able to provide OEM customers with SoC components other than CPUs.

According to industry analysts, once Arm begins to adopt the new standard, the global mobile phone chip manufacturers will be affected. Not only Qualcomm, but also all independent mobile phone chip manufacturers may be hindered in the development of new products, as well as Samsung and other major brand manufacturers that originally designed their own mobile phone chips. It is reported that Qualcomm, Samsung and other manufacturers in the current stage of mobile phone system single chip, only the CPU adopts the Arm public version architecture, while the GPU architecture is independently developed by the manufacturers or uses Adreno GPU, Imagination GPU and AMD GPU.

If Arm prohibits customers from using other GPU architectures, it is equivalent to requiring customers to choose side stations, either using all Arm architecture chips, or developing their own CPU chips. The mobile phone chip factory may face the risk of abandoning the existing architecture and redesigning it completely, resulting in a longer or even unsmooth new product development schedule, or adopting all Arm architectures, but this move will also reduce the product differentiation of each chip factory.