Back in October, during the Snapdragon Summit, news broke that ARM was going to terminate its licensing agreement with Qualcomm. This was because ARM said Qualcomm was in breach of the licensing deal, and they were going to court. On Wednesday, Qualcomm’s CEO, Cristiano Amon said that ARM has withdrawn the threat to terminate Qualcomm’s license agreement with the chip provider.
Amon stated on a conference call, “ARM recently notified us that it was withdrawing its October 22, 2024 notice of breach, and indicated that it has no current plan to terminate the Qualcomm architecture license agreement.”
Back in December, Qualcomm won key aspects of a trial that was part of the underlying dispute, with a jury finding Qualcomm’s personal computer chips being properly licensed under its agreement with ARM.
Qualcomm also announced that Snapdragon has about 10% market share of the $800+ Windows laptops in US retail. That’s quite a feat, given that we’re only a few generations into Snapdragon on Windows.
This could have spelled disaster for Qualcomm
If Qualcomm lost its licensing agreement with ARM, that could have been disastrous for the company. You see, ARM basically licenses designs for chips, including the CPU and GPU cores. So the design of the Oryon cores of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, actually come from ARM. As you might expect, ARM does license its designs out to just about everyone, with the exception of Huawei, due to them being on the United States blacklist now.
Losing the licensing from ARM would be disastrous for Qualcomm, but perhaps not as bad as it has been for Huawei. Since Qualcomm has been making chips for many decades, and does have a huge market share in the mobile world. Huawei had also been making its Kirin chips for quite some time, but they were nowhere near as successful as Snapdragon. Keep in mind, Qualcomm has a ton of patents for 4G LTE and 5G. It also makes modems, ISP’s, and loads of other components for a system-on-a-chip.
The good news, however, is that Qualcomm doesn’t have to worry about losing this licensing from ARM.
