Regarding the acquisition of NUVIAThe controversy surrounding the Arm licensed instruction set architectureQualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon during the court confrontationdisplayThe purpose of acquiring NUVIA is to acquire its independent architecture design capabilities in processors, not to obtain its instruction set architecture. It also emphasizes that it is still paying high licensing fees to Arm.
The current Arm licensing model is divided into two categories: instruction set and Arm-proposed microarchitecture design. Regardless of whether an Arm-proposed microarchitecture design is adopted, or whether an independent architecture is derived or customized from an Arm-proposed microarchitecture, the Arm instruction set can drive the processor. Licensees can also add customized instruction sets based on the Arm instruction set to match their own architecture design processors.
Qualcomm currently adopts a licensing model, mainly licensing the instruction set architecture with Arm, combined with independent architecture design. Therefore, Cristiano Amon explained that the main purpose of acquiring NUVIA is to obtain its independent architecture design capabilities, thereby reducing the reliance on Arm to provide micro-architecture design for many years, thus reducingUp to $14 billionThe company can also reduce its micro-architecture licensing fees and leverage NUVIA's technical resources to create more efficient processor products.
In addition, Cristiano Amon also emphasized that even after acquiring NUVIA, Qualcomm will still pay high instruction set architecture licensing fees to Arm. He also emphasized that there are currently no plans to introduce its own instruction set, and claimed that it still maintains a deep cooperative relationship with Arm.
When NUVIA founder Gerard Williams was questioned in court, he also emphasized that although Qualcomm's subsequent Oryon CPU design still operated on the Arm instruction set, it had already adopted a large amount of independent architecture design in the microarchitecture design. In fact, the use of Arm's microarchitecture design accounted for less than 1%, which means that this product design did not make extensive use of Arm microarchitecture, and there was no intention to circumvent microarchitecture licensing fees.
However, Arm believes that Qualcomm's acquisition of NUVIA does not constitute a legitimate license inheritance, and therefore requires Qualcomm to renegotiate the license with Arm. However, Qualcomm claims that it continues to pay instruction set architecture licensing fees, but does not directly or fully use Arm's licenses for microarchitecture design. It believes that Arm hopes to increase its fees by doing so.
