Qualcomm wins court case: Snapdragon X cores do not violate license

Qualcomm and its subsidiary Nuvia have won a court case against Arm. The case relates to Oryon cores, which form the basis of Snapdragon X processors.

Details of the court case

A Delaware court ruled that neither Nuvia nor Qualcomm had violated Arm's license agreements. The judge dismissed the latest lawsuit, and the request for a new trial was also rejected. At the first trial, the jury was unable to reach a consensus on Nuvia.

The issue concerned the Oryon cores for Snapdragon X based on the Arm v8 architecture. Arm maintained that after acquiring Nuvia, Qualcomm had to re-sign an agreement with them to revise certain licensing terms. Qualcomm, in turn, believes that the architecture agreement also extends to subsidiaries.

According to a leading Qualcomm developer who worked on Oryon, Qualcomm's development contains one percent or less of Arm technology. That same developer, Gerard Williams III, was a co-founder of Nuvia. The company was founded to create energy-efficient, high-performance processor cores for data centers. The strategy was to develop proprietary designs, so the team designed from scratch and made almost no use of Arm's intellectual property.