From the Court: Qualcomm v. Arm
Some new documents have come out, so far it looks like Qualcomm has asked for discovery on Amlogic [NEW], Mediatek and Broadcom's TLAs, based on the protective orders all three companies have requested from the court.
Qualcomm is arguing the documents that it seeks are critical to their claims that Arm’s October 2024 quote for Arm CPUs and peripheral IP violated the Qualcomm TLA and the covenant of good faith and fair dealing.
Based on some deposition documents which seem to be redacted somewhat poorly, we learn what the process is for Arm with regard to licensing cores. Along with that the codenames for those cores (which has been redacted for a while, but was missed in the newest documents).
Based off the depo documents core renewal works something like this:
- Qualcomm comes and asks Arm to license cores "Hunter", "Hayes", "Yamin"
- Arm is supposed to follow their procedure which is: "total financial considerations of likely situated partners" where they " ...looking at similar cores, licenses, and then they make a comparison of the request to those likely situated partners and they make an assessment analysis based on that to look at what we would end up quoting to Qualcomm for both the booking fee and the royalties."
- Arm is supposed to follow an MFN-procedure where they:
look at the royalty rates for certain licensees for those Arm IPs, and the price book information on the license fees and royalty rates in the price book for those IP.
- They're supposed to find the lowest royalty rate for likely situated partners.
This may be called the "Beset Previous Deal"
- Then I guess they send out a quote, based on all the data of likely situated partners, core configuration, ip book value, and probably expected volume.
Then based off the depo (oops looks like they may have arbitrarily just made some numbers up) And this is why Qualcomm's external attorneys will probably get the unredacted TLA documents.
Now, Lets discuss the "Hunter", "Hayes", "Yamin" cores that Qualcomm wanted to license, and see what products Qualcomm has for these cores. This will help us understand the potential monetary damage Arm has caused.
Hunter - Official Cortex-A designation: Cortex-A720
Hunter represents Arm’s 2023-era high-efficiency “big” core in the Total Compute Solutions 2023 lineup. It’s paired with the Cortex-X4 “super-big” core in flagship SoCs.
- Snapdragon 6 Gen 4
- Snapdragon 7s Gen 3
- Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3
- Snapdragon 8s Gen 3
Hayes - Official Cortex-A designation: Cortex-A520
Hayes is the refresh of the “LITTLE” core family for power-efficient tasks in 2023. It succeeds the Cortex-A510 and brings roughly ~22% efficiency gains.
- Snapdragon 6 Gen 4
- Snapdragon 7s Gen 3
- Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3
- Snapdragon 8s Gen 3
Yamin - Official Cortex-A designation: Cortex-A715
Yamin corresponds to the successor of the previous A710-class cores in Arm’s “Armv9.2” generation. It slots between the X-series “super-big” cores (X4/X5) and the tiny efficiency-focused A520.
- Snapdragon 8 Gen 1
- Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1
If you look at the products these affect its the exact non-premium cpus that Mediatek is king at selling. While Qualcomm is attempting to ship to the mid-premium, mid-tier and low-tier to compete with Mediatek Arm comes along and stifles that competition by allegedly providing a term sheet that is anti-competitive and against provision 8.1b of the TLA. |
