Arm and Qualcomm are currently involved in a dispute. Lawsuit Reveals Arm Apparently Changes Its Terms
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As SemiAnalysis notes:“At least as early as October 2022, ARM told one or more longtime Qualcomm customers that unless they accepted a new direct license from ARM under which they would pay royalties based on original equipment manufacturer (OEM) product sales, they will not be able to receive ARM-compatible chips from 2025.”
In addition to moving to a direct licensing modelbetween device makers and OEMs, which excludes Qualcomm and other semiconductor companies by not licensing processors, Arm is alleged to have told OEMs that it will "require licensees to obtain other technologies (specifically ARM GPUs and NPUs) only from ARM".
SemiAnalysis interpreted this as:"Arm effectively ties its other intellectual property (IP) to the CPU IP," which could interfere with, for example, Samsung's work on AMD GPUs for Exynos or Qualcomm's Adreno. In Google's case, this Arm change could prevent future chips from including Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) – custom NPUs responsible for running and accelerating machine learning functions, 9to5google reports.
If this happens, Google could theoreticallyreturn to the Pixel Visual/Neural Core model with a separate coprocessor for the camera and other machine learning tasks. However, this approach will not be as integrated, and the company deliberately abandoned it in favor of Tensor.
Qualcomm argues that Arm will not be able to change the existing license for several years and that it "has no right to demand additional royalties from Qualcomm customers."