Just several months after leaving Qualcomm, distinguished CPU and system architects Gerard Williams, John Bruno, and Ram Srinivasan, who are celebrated for their high-performance processors developed at Apple, Nuvia, and, more recently, Qualcomm, established a new CPU startup — Nuvacore — that promises no less than to 'rewrite the rules of silicon.' The new general-purpose CPU core set to be developed by Nuvacore is projected to excel in all data center AI workloads, and the motto of the new company is 'Engineered for Altitude.'

"For decades, the semiconductor industry has been dominated by an 'old guard,' titans of tech that design for the ground, iterating on yesterday's architecture," a statement by Nuvacore reads. "But as artificial intelligence and core infrastructure demands skyrocket, iteration is no longer enough."

Based on the description on Nuvacore's website, the company is developing a new general-purpose CPU core designed from scratch for data center and AI infrastructure, and the key focus of the all-new design is maximizing performance and area efficiency. The new high-throughput core will be optimized to efficiently sustain long-running, compute-intensive tasks, including always-on workloads such as advanced AI systems and agentic computing. The startup is funded by Sequoia Capital.

One would notice that all modern server CPUs are explicitly designed for 24/7 operation, high utilization, and long-running workloads. Sustained quality-of-service (i.e., performance and latency), reliability, and efficiency under continuous load are compulsory characteristics in the data center. However, Nuvacore positions its upcoming design as one optimized for AI-heavy, continuously saturated environments, not just general-purpose server CPUs.

Whether that translates into something materially different from existing CPUs is an open question, as the statement itself looks more like marketing than a fundamentally new characteristic of a data center processor. Perhaps, the design will be very clean and feature optimizations for working alongside AI accelerators, and/or special features to handle vast amounts of data common for AI systems.

One thing Nuvacore does not disclose is the instruction set architecture of its upcoming CPUs. Arm is certainly among the options, particularly because many hyperscalers use custom Arm-based processors for their emerging AI workloads.

Gerard Williams III is renowned for his high-performance breakthrough 64-bit Arm-based CPU cores for Apple iPhone and iPad, as well as Mac computers spanning from the Cyclone generation in 2013 (Apple A7, iPhone 5S) all the way to the Firestorm generation (M1-series CPUs, A14 application processors). At Apple, Gerard Williams worked closely with John Bruno, who was responsible for system architecture; Ram Srinivasan, a specialist in system-on-chip architecture; and Manu Gulati, who was the lead SoC architect for multiple iPhone and iPad generations from 2009 to 2017.

Having developed multiple generations of successful client platforms, Williams, Bruno, and Gulati founded Nuvia to develop high-performance Arm-based data center-grade CPU cores. Nuvia was acquired by Qualcomm in 2021 with the aim of using its technologies primarily for client applications, though it is highly likely that eventually architectures developed by the ex-Nuvia team will be used for the company's data center products.

Now, Williams, Bruno, and Srinivasan plan to develop an all-new clean-sheet general-purpose CPU design specifically for 'intense, continuous demands of advanced AI systems and agentic computing.' Perhaps it is about time now that most hyperscalers have their own custom silicon programs aimed at developing compute platforms aimed specifically at diverse AI workloads. All of these companies, already investing tens of billions of dollars in their AI infrastructure, will be tremendously interested in getting their hands on a clean-sheet CPU core design better tailored for AI than general-purpose competitors.

This week, Qualcomm secured a final legal win against Arm in a high-profile licensing dispute around CPU cores developed by Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired in 2021. A U.S. District Court has now rejected all of Arm's claims, affirming Qualcomm's right to use Nuvia's technology under its architecture license agreement (ALA). Without any doubt, this is a big legal win for Qualcomm. However, this win could have reverberations throughout the entire industry, as it could set a precedent that allows architecture licensees to develop custom CPUs in whichever way they deem necessary.

Origins

The legal conflict between Arm and Qualcomm began shortly after Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, a startup focused on high-performance Arm-compatible CPU designs for the HPC segment, and promised to build CPUs for consumer PCs based on Nuvia's IP.

Arm claimed that the transfer and use of Nuvia's designs under Qualcomm's umbrella required renegotiation of Nuvia's original architecture license agreement (ALA), as Nuvia had only planned to use the cores in the data center space, whereas Qualcomm had much broader plans for the IP. Qualcomm, on the other hand, maintained that its own existing ALA was sufficient to incorporate Nuvia's work and continue development and deployment of custom cores based on the Arm instruction set architecture. Arm then revoked Qualcomm's ALA in October 2024, citing a violation of the agreement for not renegotiating it after acquiring Nuvia.

Arm opposed Qualcomm's use of Nuvia’s CPU IP across broader market segments, which would include everything from entry-level consumer devices to high-end servers, because it threatened Arm's control over licensing boundaries and its ability to extract additional royalties. Arm likely viewed the transfer of that IP to Qualcomm, followed by its broad deployment across various markets, as a breach of scope, as the original Nuvia agreement had narrower terms.

Furthermore, Qualcomm used Arm's off-the-shelf Cortex cores under a technology license agreement (TLA) license. This provides Arm more control, as well as a per-core license. This clearly hurt Arm's bottom line, as ALA royalties are considerably lower than TLA royalties.

If Qualcomm can freely use Nuvia's custom Arm v8 cores across segments under an existing ALA, it would theoretically enable other licensees to do the same thing. Companies would be able to acquire CPU startups that receive an ALA on certain conditions, then roll them into their own ALA if they have one, and sidestep core-level royalties.

By allowing Qualcomm to integrate Nuvia's custom cores under an existing architecture license, Arm risked weakening its tiered licensing model and losing leverage over other major partners that considered similar custom silicon strategies. Perhaps Arm also viewed Qualcomm's move as a competitive threat to its own Neoverse core roadmap, Neoverse CSS roadmap, and ultimately its processor or custom processor roadmap. Therefore, blocking this reuse was an attempt to preserve both licensing revenue and product relevance in high-performance markets.

In December 2024, a jury sided unanimously with Qualcomm, finding no breach of the Nuvia ALA and confirming the legitimacy of Qualcomm's use of the technology. On September 30, 2025, the U.S. District Court in Delaware reaffirmed that position, dismissing Arm's final remaining claim and denying a request for a retrial. The judgment, now final, delivers Qualcomm a complete legal triumph and blocks Arm from any further recourse in the case. Furthermore, Qualcomm's countersuit against Arm is still pending and expected to go to trial in March 2026.

A green light for Qualcomm's expansion

When Nuvia first introduced its Oryon/Phoenix processor core in 2020, it demonstrated considerably higher performance efficiency than Apple's A13, AMD's Zen 2, and Intel's Sunny Cove, as well as other relevant CPUs over time. After several delays, when the Oryon-based Snapdragon X Elite CPUs hit the market in 2024, they demonstrated competitive performance. However, the Snapdragon X2 Elite processors look considerably more promising, and the launch of the next generation coincides with the legal win.

"This decisive legal victory is monumental for Qualcomm, clearing the path to fully integrate and scale the acquired Nuvia assets under Qualcomm's existing Architecture License Agreement (ALA)," said Neil Shah, VP of Research at Counterpoint Research. "This win provides Qualcomm with significant momentum, enabling them to accelerate the deployment of custom Nuvia-based CPU cores across a much broader spectrum of applications from PCs, smartphones, and automotive to high-performance computing domains like AI servers and even humanoid robotics."

With a better CPU and presumably system-on-chip design, ALA licensing fees, and without legal obstacles and risks, the company can now scale Nuvia cores for a wide range of client (and eventually data center) product categories, including automotive, PCs, and smartphones.

Furthermore, now that it is perfectly legal for Qualcomm to use Nuvia-designed cores, PC OEMs may be more willing to integrate Snapdragon X2 Elite CPUs into their systems, especially considering that Windows on Arm is attempting to gain more traction. Ultimately, this supports Qualcomm’s efforts to challenge the x86 incumbents in the laptop market.

Keeping in mind that Qualcomm also has competitive neural processing units (NPUs) for AI, the company may also introduce new product categories that take advantage of the highly efficient Oryon CPUs and sophisticated NPUs.

And Arm-based custom silicon

Qualcomm's sweeping legal victory against Arm marks an important moment in the semiconductor industry, reaffirming the rights of architecture licensees to develop and scale custom CPU designs without renegotiating terms, which somewhat reshapes the balance of power between IP holders and their partners.

One of the most immediate effects of the ruling is a renewed sense of legal clarity for holders of Arm architecture licenses. Qualcomm’s position that an ALA provides broad design rights, including the freedom to integrate acquired IP, has now been upheld at the highest level. This has implications not just for Qualcomm, but for other major licensees. Companies such as Amazon, Broadcom, Google, MediaTek, and Nvidia have all used custom or semi-custom Arm-based cores in their products.

The precedent set here assures licensees that they can pursue internal development and even acquire CPU startups without facing retroactive restrictions or new licensing demands from Arm. In an era where companies are increasingly seeking to differentiate their silicon at the architectural level, this kind of legal certainty is vital.

Arguably, the verdict also preserves the original intent of the ALA license: to empower chipmakers to innovate freely within the Arm ecosystem and retain Arm as the owner of the ISA. In particular, under a standard ALA license with Arm, licensees can design their own CPU microarchitecture from scratch that runs a specific Arm ISA (e.g. Arm v9), and add internal optimizations, such as specialized execution pipelines, custom data paths, or micro-op fusion techniques, as long as these do not break ISA compatibility. They could even implement custom accelerators or extensions, provided they do not interfere with standard ISA behavior and are not exposed to software that expects strict Arm compliance.

They still will not get as much freedom as they get with RISC-V, as the process of adding to the Arm ISA is complex and takes years. However, companies like Apple canned its custom AMX instruction set with the M4 chipset in favor of ARM's SME.

What about Arm and Qualcomm's relationship?

While Qualcomm has prevailed in the legal fight with Arm, the impact on the latter has yet to be determined. Arm still controls the dominant ISA used across mobile and embedded platforms worldwide, which is gradually expanding into the PC space. Its core IP, software stack, and ecosystem partnerships remain extremely valuable and widely used. But this case has damaged its reputation with one of its largest customers, specifically Qualcomm, which has long been a flagship licensee.

"While Arm's decision to pursue legal action was an understandable measure to protect its business, it was an unfortunate necessity that strained its relationship with a premier customer and partner," Shah said. "Despite this, Arm unequivocally retains the industry's leading low-power architecture, coupled with a robust software and tools ecosystem for computing. Moving forward, Arm must seize the opportunity to mend fences and rebuild trust with Qualcomm.

To avoid a further erosion of trust, Arm may need to shift away from legal enforcement and instead re-establish its relationship with Qualcomm. But the path toward reconciliation remains rocky, as Arm itself is moving toward designing its own CPUs. In fact, this move could make other partners gravitate towards custom designs or alternative architectures.

There's also the question of Qualcomm's countersuit against Arm, which accuses the British company of contract breaches and customer interference. Depending on how that case unfolds in March 2026, the relationship could deteriorate further.

This ruling could define the future of Arm

Qualcomm, along with its subsidiary Nuvia, have finally won the legal battle against Arm Holdings, which had accused the chip-maker of violating license agreements tied to its chip designs. A U.S. District Court judge in Delaware ruled that neither Qualcomm nor its subsidiary breached any of Arm’s architecture license agreement (ALA), dismissing the lone remaining claim in the case and also rejecting Arm's request for a new trial.

The latest ruling follows Qualcomm’s trial victory from December 2024, where the company was found innocent. However, at the time, the jury was unable to agree on whether Nuvia violated its licensing terms with Arm.

The dispute centered on Qualcomm’s use of Oryon cores for its Snapdragon X range of client processors based on Arm’s v8 architecture, created by Nuvia for server-grade chips.

Arm claimed that Qualcomm was supposed to renegotiate licensing terms following its acquisition of Nuvia. Additionally, Arm demanded that the designs be scrapped for allegedly breaching Nuvia’s original Arm licenses. Qualcomm, however, maintained that its existing Architecture License Agreement (ALA) for Arm’s instruction set architecture already extended to designs developed by its subsidiaries, including Nuvia.

Following the verdict, Ann Chaplin, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Qualcomm, said “With the Court’s decision today, Qualcomm and its subsidiary Nuvia have achieved a full victory. This decision follows Qualcomm’s December 2024 jury trial win and is a full and final judgment in Qualcomm’s favor. Our right to innovate prevailed in this case and we hope Arm will return to fair and competitive practices in dealing with the Arm ecosystem.”

It is interesting to note that the Qualcomm Oryon general-purpose cores found inside Snapdragon X processors are based on Arm’s Armv8 instruction set architecture (ISA). However, it incorporates “one percent or less” of Arm’s own technology according to Gerard Williams III, one of the lead developers of Oryon and former Apple chip designer.

Williams co-founded Nuvia in 2019 with the aim of building high-performance, energy-efficient custom CPU cores for datacenters, known as Phoenix. To do so, the company secured two licenses from Arm, including a Technology License Agreement (TLA) to modify existing cores and an Architecture License Agreement (ALA) to design custom ones. Since Nuvia’s strategy was to pursue custom designs from the outset, the team developed its cores from scratch, relying minimally on Arm’s physical IP.

Qualcomm has stated that a separate lawsuit against Arm is still ongoing. The case involves claims of breach of contract, interference with customer relationships, and conduct aimed at hindering innovation while promoting Arm’s own products over those of long-standing partners. The company added that it expects the trial to begin in March 2026.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said during the company’s 1Q25 earnings conference call that Arm “has no current plan to terminate the Qualcomm Architecture License Agreement.” This announcement came soon after it won over Arm in a legal battle over the custom core designs that Nuvia made. When Qualcomm bought Nuvia for its CPU designs and used it as part of the Oryon CPUs found in its Snapdragon chips, Arm was up in arms, saying that Nuvia cannot transfer its designs without prior approval, reports The Register.

This has led to a massive legal feud between the two companies, with Arm terminating Qualcomm’s license and demanding that Nuvia’s blueprints be destroyed. Arm says that it’s missing out on $50 million of annual royalties because Qualcomm did not renegotiate Nuvia’s license after the acquisition; however, the Snapdragon designer argues that its Oryon CPU cores use less than 1% of original Arm tech, saying that it’s almost entirely custom.

Despite Qualcomm’s victory, Arm is still asking for further clarification on the legalities of the deal, especially as the jury is hung on whether Nuvia was in breach of its contract with the company. Because of this, there’s a chance that Arm would ask for a retrial, at least for this issue.

Nevertheless, Arm’s legal defeat to Qualcomm has no expected effect on the company’s bottom line and revenue forecast. Arm CFO Jason Child said the company assumed it wouldn’t win the lawsuit and would continue receiving royalties from Qualcomm from its existing ALA and other licenses. “The primary reason for the lawsuit was very much around defending our IP and that’s important,” Child said. “But from a financial perspective, we had assumed that we’ll continue to be receiving royalties at basically the same rates that they’ve been paying for in the past and will continue to pay.”

Even though Arm was unsuccessful in forcing Qualcomm to renegotiate its contracts, it still benefits from the latter’s success. During its last quarterly earnings announcement, the Snapdragon maker said that its revenue jumped by 18% yearly, leading to a 15% growth in its net income. It also claimed it cornered 10% of the U.S. Windows PC retail market for $800 and up devices. Arm’s revenue for this period also increased by 18% year over year, showing how closely the two companies are connected.

Qualcomm has hired Sailesh Kottapalli, a former chief architect of Xeon server processors at Intel, to lead the development of the company's data center CPUs, reports CRN. Kottapalli spent 28 years at Intel and worked on various projects, including x86 and Itanium, as well as CPUs and GPUs. More recently, he was responsible for multiple generations of Xeon processors. 

"As we head into 2025, I am excited to share that I have joined Qualcomm," Kottapali wrote in a post on LinkedIn. "The opportunity to innovate and grow while helping to scale new frontiers was immensely compelling to me, a once-in-a-career opportunity that I could not pass on. The start of this new chapter also coincides with the closing of a previous one at Intel that lasted 28 years. This experience was tremendously gratifying, and I would like to acknowledge it." 

Kottapalli joins Qualcomm as a senior vice president and will lead the company's data center CPU efforts. Qualcomm's upcoming server CPUs are expected to use cores developed by engineers from Nuvia, a company Qualcomm acquired for $1.4 billion in 2021. Nuvia originally designed its Arm-based Phoenix (now called Oryon) cores with data centers in mind, but Qualcomm uses them for Snapdragon X system-on-chips (SoC) for consumer PCs, which upset Arm and led to litigation between the two companies. 

This is not Qualcomm's first foray into server CPUs. The company previously attempted to enter the market with Centriq but abandoned those efforts in 2018 and laid off its development team. This new initiative marks a return with a stronger focus and expanded resources. 

It should be noted that a wider range of data center software now supports the Arm instruction set architecture. Furthermore, as Amazon expands its Graviton-based offerings, the data center industry's confidence in Arm processors increases, so Qualcomm has every reason to assume that demand for its upcoming server processors will be higher than it was back in the day. To some degree, the hire of Sailesh Kottapalli serves the same purpose as people tend to trust server industry veterans. 

Just yesterday we also learned that Qualcomm is looking for an SoC Security Architect for its Data Center Team.

Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon told the company board that purchasing Nuvia outright would save it as much as $1.4 billion per year in payments to Arm. This admission was revealed during the Arm vs. Qualcomm trial, where the former claimed that the Snapdragon X chips the latter released earlier this year were infringing on its patents. According to Reuters, Amon testified that he used this reason to justify the acquisition of Nuvia, which cost Qualcomm $1.4 billion in 2021.

Qualcomm owned a huge share of the smartphone processor market in the late 2010s, yet the company believed it was falling behind Apple’s Bionic chips in terms of performance due to its reliance on Arm designs. Aside from that, Amon wanted to take on Intel’s dominance in laptops and mobile computing. But Qualcomm had no alternative to Arm at that time.

When former Apple engineers who worked on smartphone processors founded Nuvia in 2019, the Qualcomm CEO saw a solution. At first, Amon tried to convince Nuvia to build computing cores for the company. When that failed, he decided that the next best thing was to simply buy the startup.

This strategy was reportedly a tough sell to the Qualcomm board, especially as Nuvia didn’t have a product at that time and was mostly focused on developing chips for servers. So, to acquire the talent and designs that Nuvia had, Amon told the company board that this move would potentially save Qualcomm $1.4 billion yearly in royalties to Arm. This theoretical number was based on the assumption that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X processors would take a massive chunk of the laptop market at its launch. In reality, Qualcomm sold only 720,000 units in the first full quarter it went on sale; barely 0.8% of the entire market.

Arm argues that it is missing out on $50 million in annual revenue because Qualcomm failed to renegotiate its contract with the company after it acquired Nuvia. Arm reasons that Qualcomm should destroy all Nuvia designs that were built before its acquisition. On the other hand, Qualcomm asserts that its architecture license agreement with Arm fully covers everything it acquired under Nuvia and that Arm is only making this move because it plans to design its own chips in competition with its clients, including Qualcomm.

Arm is understandably aggressively defending its technology, as its core business relies on licensing agreements. If Qualcomm could save at least $50 million annually because of its Nuvia purchase, other Arm clients could potentially copy this move, severely threatening Arm’s business model. Still, there’s no guarantee which side the court will take. Closing arguments for the case are happening today, so both Arm and Qualcomm are holding their breath for the future of Snapdragon X.

The Qualcomm Oryon general-purpose cores found inside Snapdragon X processors are based on Arm's Armv8 instruction set architecture (ISA), but they use very little technology developed by Arm, says Gerard Williams III, one of the lead developers behind Oryon and a variety of Apple's processors.

"One percent or less," said Williams when asked to estimate the amount of Arm technology in the final design developed by Nuvia. The news came in a new report from Reuters.

Qualcomm's Oryon originates from Nuvia, a company that Gerard Williams III co-founded with his partners in 2019. Nuvia's original focus was to design high-performance, energy-efficient CPU cores (codenamed Phoenix) for datacenters.
The partners acquired two non-transferrable licenses from Arm: the Technology License Agreement (TLA) and Architecture License Agreement (ALA), the former to rework its existing cores and the latter to design custom cores. Since the goal was always to go with custom cores, the team developed its cores from scratch without using Arm's physical IP, or at least using very little of it. 

Indeed, licensees of Arm's ISA can design proprietary microarchitecture designed from scratch, so long as it correctly implements Arm’s instructions. Because Nuvia's engineers designed their own pipelines, execution units, cache systems, and other CPU internals, the final core did not incorporate Arm's proprietary circuit blocks or off-the-shelf designs. As a result, while Nuvia's cores are Armv8 cores, they probably share very little of the actual 'Arm-designed' technology beyond the instruction set and baseline specifications.

After Nuvia was acquired by Qualcomm in 2021 for $1.4 billion. Qualcomm said that Nuvia's cores will (at least initially) be used for PCs rather than for datacenters, Arm asked Qualcomm to renegotiate the terms of the license, something that Qualcomm refused to do asserting that its own ALA covers its subsidiary Nuvia. 

Arm claimed that Qualcomm breached its agreement by failing to renegotiate the licensing terms following the Nuvia acquisition. As a result, Arm demanded that Qualcomm to destroy all Nuvia designs developed prior to the merger. In 2022, Arm took further action by revoking Nuvia's licenses and this October it informed Qualcomm of the termination of its Architecture License Agreement (ALA). 

The current legal dispute between Arm and Qualcomm is about whether Nuvia's architecture license and the custom designs derived from it could be transferred or used by Qualcomm following its acquisition of Nuvia. Arm's attorney emphasized the explicit terms of the licensing agreement, pressing Williams to admit the contract defined everything that resulted from Nuvia's work as 'derivatives' or Arm's TLA. Meanwhile, Qualcomm's attorney directed Williams to elaborate on Nuvia's innovations and the limited role Arm's TLA played in its development. 

The jury's decision that is expected soon could define the future of licensing practices and IP ownership in the semiconductor industry.

The litigation between Arm and Qualcomm began this week and the companies exchanged the first salvo of shots in the courtroom. As expected, Arm accused Qualcomm of breaching the contract by releasing its Snapdragon X processors for PCs with general-purpose cores designed by Nuvia, while Qualcomm accused Arm of competing with its own customers by offering complete chip blueprints for client and datacenter processors, reports Reuters.

The dispute began after Qualcomm acquired Nuvia for $1.4 billion in 2021 and proceeded with the development of its custom Armv8.2-based cores that are now used inside the Snapdragon X processors. Arm contends that Qualcomm breached its agreement by failing to renegotiate terms following its acquisition of Nuvia, as these designs require adherence to Nuvia's higher royalty rates.

As a remedy, Arm is demanding the destruction of all Nuvia designs developed prior to the merger. Qualcomm, however, argues that its architecture license agreement (ALA) fully covers Nuvia's designs. This difference in royalties has reportedly cost Arm an estimated $50 million in annual revenue, which is a lot of money for the company.

Qualcomm argues that Arm's actions are motivated by plans to compete with its customers, now that it offers CPU compute subsystems for client and datacenter processors and other use cases. In court, Qualcomm presented internal Arm documents suggesting the company considered designing its own chips, which would make it a major competitor for its own clients, including Qualcomm. René Haas, chief executive of Arm, dismissed these claims, stating that while Arm explores various business opportunities, for now it has no intentions of selling actual hardware, such as processors.

Haas also defended letters Arm sent to dozens of Qualcomm's clients, including Samsung (which uses Qualcomm-designed processors inside its smartphones and PCs), warning them about the potential fallout from the dispute. Qualcomm's attorneys described these letters as misleading, asserting they were designed to disrupt Qualcomm's relationships with its customers. Haas maintained that the letters were necessary to address questions from industry partners concerned with the litigation's implications.

Arm licenses its CPU and GPU cores as well as instruction set architecture to hundreds of clients worldwide. Allowing Qualcomm to sidestep higher royalty rates could undermine its business model, which is why it had to act aggressively. Haas described the situation as unprecedented, emphasizing that the company is focused on protecting its long-term business interests.

Qualcomm currently pays Arm approximately $300 million annually in fees, according to Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon. Therefore, it's crucial for Arm to ensure that Qualcomm adheres to its licensing policies. If other CPU designers follow Qualcomm, Arm's business could be hurt badly.

Shortly after the report about the cancellation of Qualcomm's Arm architecture license agreement (ALA) was published, the companies involved traded further accusations. Arm has confirmed that it decided to terminate Qualcomm's ALA to 'protect the unparalleled ecosystem,' whereas Qualcomm accused Arm of anticompetitive conduct.

"Following Qualcomm's repeated material breaches of Arm's license agreement, Arm is left with no choice but to take formal action requiring Qualcomm to remedy its breach or face termination of the agreement," a statement by Arm reads. "This is necessary to protect the unparalleled ecosystem that Arm and its highly valued partners have built over more than 30 years. Arm is fully prepared for the trial in December and remains confident that the Court will find in Arm's favor."

Arm gave Qualcomm a 60-day notice to comply with the requirements, or face termination of its Arm architecture license, which enables Qualcomm to create custom chips using Arm's instruction set architecture. If the issue is not resolved, Arm will require Qualcomm to stop selling several products, including Snapdragon X Elite processors for client PCs that contain Oryon general-purpose processor cores originally developed by Nuvia (now part of Qualcomm).

This action follows a legal dispute in which Arm accuses Qualcomm and Nuvia of breaching licensing agreements and misusing its trademark after Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in 2021. The trial is set to begin this December. Arm claims that Qualcomm failed to renegotiate the ALA terms post-acquisition and is demanding the destruction of Nuvia's pre-merger designs which are de-facto on the market already. Qualcomm, however, argues that its existing Arm architecture license already covers Nuvia's work. That said, Qualcomm accuses Arm of anti-competitive misconduct.

"This is more of the same from Arm — more unfounded threats designed to strongarm a longtime partner, interfere with our performance-leading CPUs, and increase royalty rates regardless of the broad rights under our architecture license," a statement by Qualcomm reads. "With a trial fast approaching in December, Arm's desperate ploy appears to be an attempt to disrupt the legal process, and its claim for termination is completely baseless. We are confident that Qualcomm's rights under its agreement with Arm will be affirmed. Arm's anticompetitive conduct will not be tolerated."

Arm Holdings has decided to terminate its architecture license agreement (ALA) with Qualcomm as part of its legal battle against Qualcomm that began two years ago, reports Bloomberg. The cancellation could have a substantial impact on Qualcomm's business, particularly in its emerging business of processors for laptop PCs. 

Arm has given Qualcomm a 60-day notice of cancellation for its architectural license, which allows Qualcomm to build custom chips based on Arm's ISA. If Qualcomm fails to resolve the issue, Arm will demand it halts sales of numerous products, including processors for client PCs. While all of the company's processors for PCs and smartphones rely on the Arm instruction set architecture (ISA), many of them rely on Arm's off-the-shelf technologies that are licensed on different terms than the ISA. These products, represent a significant portion of its $39 billion in revenue. 

Arm initiated legal action against Qualcomm and Nuvia, accusing the companies of violating licensing agreements and infringing on its trademark after Qualcomm took over Nuvia in 2021. Arm argues that Qualcomm has violated its agreement by not renegotiating terms after the acquisition, demanding that Qualcomm destroy any Nuvia designs created before the merger. Qualcomm counters that its existing agreement already covers Nuvia's developments. 

In 2019, Arm granted Nuvia two licenses: the Technology License Agreement (TLA) and Architecture License Agreement (ALA) one to modify its existing cores and another to design custom cores. These licenses were granted on the condition that Nuvia would develop datacenter-grade products and were non-transferable without Arm's approval, which Qualcomm did not obtain when it acquired Nuvia in 2021. As a result, Arm terminated Nuvia's licenses in 2022, but Qualcomm argued that its ALA also covered its subsidiary, Nuvia too. Qualcomm has subsequently released processors based on Nuvia's Phoenix (Oryon) cores, which Arm believes breach the contracts and infringe trademarks. 

The companies are now preparing for a trial to resolve these claims. Yet, Qualcomm has filed its own countersuit, arguing that it acted within its rights.  

Qualcomm's dependency on Arm technology is significant. Even if the company retains access to Arm's standard designs under the TLA deal, the loss of its architectural license could lead to delays and major disruptions in product development.

GPU performance numbers of Qualcomm's highly-anticipated Snapdragon X Elite processor in the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark have been published in the benchmark's database (via @BenchLeaks). While the results do not look bad for a pre-production mobile processor, they don't exactly generate excitement.

Apparently, Qualcomm's Adreno GPU in the Snapdragon X Elite X1E80100 processor only scores 1.300 points in Min_1080p preset level with an average framerate of 13.7 FPS in a 2880x1800 resolution in AOTS. Meanwhile, Qualcomm's Adreno GPU in the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 GPU scores 1,800 points in Min_1080p preset level with an average framerate of 19.7 FPS in 2560x1440 resolution. Of course, we are dealing with pre-production silicon and pre-production drivers (probably not optimized for AOTS), but the results somewhat contradict to the picture that Qualcomm demonstrated just a few months ago. 

The main selling point of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processors for laptops is going to be its Oryon general-purpose CPU cores developed by Nuvia, a company founded by former Apple engineers that Qualcomm acquired in 2021. However, graphics performance of the upcoming system-on-chip (SoC) will be equally important for some who decide to go with the new Windows-oriented Arm-based chip. 

Based on performance numbers that Qualcomm demonstrated back in October, the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors indeed feature a decent GPU that is better than the GPU in Apple's M2 and AMD's Ryzen 9 7940HS based on the Aztec Ruins and Wildlife Extreme benchmarks. Yet, at least based on these benchmarks, the Adreno GPU cannot really beat its predecessor in the AOTS benchmark. 

For now, we would refrain from drawing any conclusions about the GPU inside the Snapdragon X Elite X1E80100processor because we are dealing with pre-production silicon and software and because it is possible that this particular version of the SoC has a cut-down GPU.

Qualcomm is working hard with multiple PC makers in a bid to release notebooks based on system-on-chips (SoCs) with its Oryon general-purpose cores, developed by Nuvia, sometime next year. Although the SoC itself seems to work fine, there is a design decision that may severely affect the appeal of the platform: Qualcomm wants its partners to use its own smartphone-oriented power management ICs (PMICs) with its next-gen processors, reports SemiAccurate.

Qualcomm's SoCs use proprietary power management protocols that necessitate using the company's own PMIC. On one hand, this allows the company to keep its power management trade secrets private, but it also means the company will (or at least should) earn more money. For now, Qualcomm's PMICs are all designed for smartphones, which is logical as smartphone chips represent the lion's share of the company's revenue. But Qualcomm insists on using these smartphone PMICs in laptops. While these PMICs might be efficient for smartphones, they are not optimized for the power requirements of mobile PCs.

Not only does the use of these PMICs necessitate using a number of them to handle a PC-class SoC, they also require the use of printed circuit board (PCB) with a 0.6mm pitch HDI, common in high-end cell phones, but rarely used for PCs. While they are used for smartphones because they are small and allow for installing plenty of components on a tiny board, scaling them up for laptops results in exorbitant costs. This decision has been a source of frustration for many OEMs that work with Qualcomm on PCs, who view it as an unnecessary expense introduced solely because of Qualcomm's bundled PMICs. Some reportedly even threatened to abandon their Oryon-powered projects. 

While normally PC makers would buy SoCs and PMICs from Qualcomm and then simply not use the latter, they cannot do so here because of proprietary power management protocols. In an attempt to mitigate the rising tensions and financial implications, Qualcomm has reportedly resorted to compensating the OEMs. Interestingly, the compensation offered was reported to be more than the cost of the PMICs, indicating a financial loss for Qualcomm. Meanwhile, it is unclear whether the company followed the same PMIC-related strategy with its existing Snapdragon platforms aimed at Windows-on-Arm machines. 

SemiAccurate goes as far as saying that Qualcomm's insistence on using specific PMICs has escalated costs and created tensions with key partners. While it looks like the SoC works right and is expected to achieve the desired performance metrics, the cost-efficiency of Qualcomm's Oryon-based platform remains uncertain. This naturally increases the appeal of AMD- and Intel-based laptop platforms in 2024, so it now remains to be seen whether Qualcomm will be able to gain a significant share of the PC market any time soon.

System-on-chips based on Arm instruction set architecture now command a 14% market share, but they are poised to at least double their share in several years, reports Counterpoint Research. Analysts note two main advantages that Arm-powered SoCs have over their x86 counterparts for now: lower overall power consumption and customization enabling richer features and higher performance. 

Arm-based SoCs will command a 15% notebook processor revenue share of this year, but their share could increase to 25% in 2027. Meanwhile, Intel's share will decrease from 68% this year to 60% in 2027, whereas AMD's share will drop from 16.7% to 14.4%. 

Nowadays, the vast majority (90%) of Arm-based notebooks come from Apple, limiting their growth as Microsoft's Windows is the world's most popular operating system. However, Counterpoint believes that once Qualcomm develops competitive Arm SoCs compatible with Windows, Arm's market share in the PC world will increase. 

Arm-based SoCs have several benefits over x86 CPUs, such as reduced power consumption and better thermal management. Designed with energy efficiency in mind, these SoCs can be tailored to specific power needs, making them perfect for mobile devices and laptops where battery life is vital. Also, Arm-based SoCs can integrate a larger number of high-performance CPU cores and tightly integrated memory, something that not all x86 CPUs can offer. In addition, custom cores in these SoCs provide advanced features that off-the-shelf x86 processor cores do not offer these days, leading to enhanced hardware and operating system integration, the analysts note. 

Also, Counterpoint mentions the built-in AI capabilities of Apple's SoCs and believes that those capabilities can be used for such workloads as image and video encoding and compression, noise cancellation, image recognition and vocal enhancement. 

Counterpoint Research believes large PC vendors can introduce custom Arm SoCs tailored to their needs and featuring differentiation. For example, lower-power Arm processors can be used to build tablet-notebook hybrids that are lighter and longer lasting compared to today's 2-in-1 and convertibles. 

As more makers with knowledge of Arm SoCs enter the market (e.g., smartphone suppliers), they contribute their know-how in Arm-based hardware and software, further enhancing the appeal of Arm-based PCs. The growing availability of native Arm-based applications will also improve user comfort and familiarity with the platform. The shift towards Arm-based PCs is anticipated to persist, and their market share is projected to rise substantially in the upcoming years. 

What is noteworthy is that for now, Counterpoint Research makes no predictions about Arm adoption by desktops. While Arm SoCs have an indisputable advantage for laptops, desktops have different requirements. For example, they take advantage of high performance, and power consumption is not always crucial for desktops. Therefore, whether Arm will gain a significant share of the desktop space remains to be seen.

A 'Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Next Gen' processor has appeared in Geekbench’s online result browser. The listing was unearthed by Windows on Arm (WoA) developer Gustave Monce. Subsequent raw data digging performed by Kuba Wojciechowski revealed that this 'Next Gen' part is the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 (if a genuine result). This Qualcomm processor, codenamed Hamoa, is notable as it is expected to be the product which debuts the Nuvia team's CPU cores for a significant boost in performance.

We've previously discussed the impact Nuvia’s CPU core designs are expected to have on the world of PCs powered by the Arm architecture. To recap: the Nuvia team is headed up by three senior Apple execs who departed the Cupertino company after the first Apple Silicon (M1) projects had been successfully delivered. 

Before they were bought up by Qualcomm, Nuvia published a series of slides touting the astounding performance of their CPU cores. You can look back at previous articles for the chart(s) but to quickly summarize: they showed the expected performance per watt of the Nuvia CPU cores cast a very long shadow on the contemporary x86 competition (AMD, Intel), as well as Apple’s best Arm architecture SoCs at the time. 

In a nutshell, Qualcomm’s release of Nuvia core CPUs for Windows PCs should have a similar disruptive impact as the launch of the original Apple Silicon (M1) — but on the more expansive world of Windows PCs.

Circling back to today’s Geekbench leak, let's take a look at the CPU information section, to start. According to this data, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 is a 12-core SoC with a hybrid 8+4 core configuration. Previous leaks indicate, more specifically, that there are eight performance cores and four efficiency cores. 

The data shows the SoC’s base frequency was 2.38 GHz. Previously, we heard the P-cores could boost to around 3.4 GHz, with the E-cores somewhat slower at around 2.5 GHz. An 'Adreno' GPU is mentioned in the system information, but it does not otherwise improve on earlier reports, which pointed to the presence of an integrated Adreno 740 GPU.

These Geekbench results — assuming they're genuine — are, unfortunately, nothing to get excited about. Monce reckons this is partly due to the chip under test being an "early engineering sample." Other reasons for the clock/performance shortfalls could be the influences of early firmware and driver software. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (3.0 GHz octa-core) easily beats this Gen 4 chip in both the 1T and nT Geekbench tests.

While it's great to see indicators that suggest Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 chips are 'in the wild,' it's hard to believe the hype. We hope things will change (and that leaks will be more revealing and impressive) in upcoming months. Remember, there's still plenty of time for optimization, as Qualcomm and partners aren't expected to launch products until the end of 2023 or in early 2024.

Although unit shipments of PCs decreased by around 15% in 2022 compared to the prior year and are expected to drop further in 2023, sales of Arm-based notebooks increased last year and will increase again this year, reports Counterpoint Research. Apple dominated the Arm-based laptop market last year with a 90% share, but as MediaTek and Qualcomm introduce their latest Arm system-on-chips for Windows PCs, such processors will gain even more share and will be in 25% of notebooks by 2027, the report says. 

Counterpoint Research predicts that Arm-powered laptops will "show a comparatively resilient demand throughout the coming quarters" due to success of Apple's MacBooks, a vanishing performance gap with x86 CPUs and strong ecosystem support. Indeed, while the whole PC market contracted by 28.1% in Q4 2022 compared to the same quarter a year before, unit shipments of Apple's PCs declined by 2.1%, according to IDC. Meanwhile, the company's PC shipments increased by 2.5% year-over-year in 2022 and commanded 9.8% of unit shipments, based on data from IDC.  

Given Apple's focus on laptops as well as steady demand for Arm-powered Chromebooks, 13% of mobile PCs sold last year used an Arm-based SoC, says Counterpoint. The share of notebooks with Arm inside is expected to increase to 15% this year, according to analysts. 

But while Apple's success with its Arm-based Macs is indisputable, most people use Windows machines, so once companies like MediaTek and Qualcomm introduce  their new Arm-powered SoCs for Windows in 2024, migration of mobile computers to Arm from x86 CPUs will accelerate. As a result, the share of Arm-based laptops will increase to 21% already in 2025 and then to 25% in 2027, predicts Counterpoint.  

Indeed, Qualcomm has very high hopes for its Snapdragon SoCs featuring Qryon general-purpose cores designed by Nuvia. These processors are now sampling with PC OEMs and the company claims that they intend to use these chips for laptops aimed at both consumer and enterprise users. 

"Our next-gen PC platform, with integrated custom Qualcomm Oryon CPUs and upgraded AI engine, has sampled on time and is exceeding our internal KPIs, delivering disruptive CPU performance per watt across tiers," a recent statement by the company reads. "We are now engaged with major PC OEMs, with multiple platform design wins across their product roadmaps for consumer and enterprise."

While Apple, MediaTek and Qualcomm will keep pushing performance and features of their Arm-based SoCs forward in the coming years, AMD and Intel will not stand still and watch how Arm is eating their lunch. Intel says that its laptop-focused Lunar Lake SoCs featuring a multi-tile design and a brand-new microarchitecture will offer performance-per-watt leadership.

Unnamed sources have reached out to developer Kuba Wojciechowski with an extensive set of specifications for the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 SoC. This is an important processor for the PC industry that promises to deliver a similar impact for Windows PCs to that of Apple Silicon in the MacOS and iOS device universe. The SD 8cx Gen 4 is being developed as the first PC processor that features Arm cores optimized by the Nuvia team, now part of Qualcomm. Nuvia was formed by three senior Apple execs who departed the Cupertino company after the first Apple Silicon (M1) projects had been successfully delivered.  

In brief, Wojciechowski stated that the information he shared back in November, about the codename ‘Hamoa’ desktop PC processor with up to 12 (8P+4E) Nuvia Phoenix-based Oryon cores, still stands. Now he has added that the Performance cores are being tested at around 3.4 GHz, and the Efficiency cores at approximately 2.5 GHz. The cores are clustered in blocks of four, with 12MB of shared L2 cache, and there is also 8MB of L3 cache. Additionally, the SD 8cx Gen 4 design features, 12MB of system cache and 4MB for graphics purposes, according to the Twitter thread.

As ever with leaks, take the news with a pinch of salt until it can be verified.

The extensive leak also suggests that the top model(s) of Qualcomm’s next gen chip for PCs, i.e. those featuring the full complement of 12 cores, will also support discrete GPUs over 8 lanes of PCIe 4.0. Another 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 can be allocated for NVMe storage use, and PCIe 3.0 is there to support stuff like the Wi-Fi card and/or modem. Apparently, Wi-Fi 7 is supported by the upcoming SoC and those who want cellular connectivity will have an external X65 option. Systems packing an SD 8cx Gen 4 will be able to support up to 64GB of 8-channel LPDDR5x, according to the recent leak.

Another key spec of a Qualcomm SD 8cx Gen 4 powered PC will be the integrated Adreno 740 GPU. This is the same GPU as in the previous Qualcomm processor for Windows on Arm PCs, and its supports APIs like DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3, OpenCL as well as DirectML - but remember there will be discrete GPU support in top-end configurations.

Some other specs shared include; the support for UFS 4.0 storage, dedicated AI processing with the Hexagon Tensor Processor, and AV1 codec support. I/O support should extend to twin USB3 (10Gbps) ports, plus a trio of USB4 ports which also can be used for video out and up to 5K+4K+4K displays displays. 

Wojciechowski estimates that the Qualcomm SD 8cx Gen 4 could mean his big 300W PC could be made redundant by a compact new 100W model. Of course, there will be great benefits to laptop designs too, as long as the Nuvia team lives up to its own hype.

Qualcomm management previously stated that the first Nuvia CPU packing chips would be sampled by device partners towards the end of last year, with devices launching for consumers in late 2023 to early 24.

Apple's rapid transition to Arm-based system-on-chips has shown the industry how swift such changeover is possible if architected correctly. Analysts from Canalys believe that Arm's architecture advances so fast that Arm-powered SoCs will grab a sizeable share of the PC market and half of the cloud server market in just four years. But not everyone in the industry is so optimistic.

"By 2026, not 2050 but 2026, four years from now, half of the cloud processors will be ARM-based, 30% of PCs will be ARM-based," said Steve Brazier, president, and CEO of market research firm Canalys, at an event, reports DigiTimes. "It is an extraordinary event and an industry-changing event that simply has not been taken seriously enough.

30% of PCs by 2026

Arm already controls a sizeable chunk of the PC market. Almost 100% of the PCs that Apple sells are based on the M-series SoCs these days, and in Q3 2022, it controlled 13.5% of the PC market regarding units, according to IDC. Moreover, the company increased its unit shipments from 7.174 million Macs in Q3 2021 to 10.060 million systems in Q3 2022 amid deteriorating demand, which is quite an achievement. Meanwhile, Arm-powered SoCs also power loads of inexpensive Chromebooks. While such systems are not very popular, it is probably safe to say that the Arm architecture already commanded at least 15% of the PC boxes sold in Q3 2022.

According to Dean McCarron of Mercury Research, this assumption may be a bit too optimistic. He estimates that in Q3 2022, Arm commanded 13.1% of PC client processors, up from 9.4% in Q2 2022 and up from 8.9% in Q3 2022. It should be noted that while IDC counts PCs sold, Mercury Research counts sold-in CPUs and GPUs, which might get sold this quarter or next. Given inventory correction at PC makers and increasing sales of Apple's PCs, it is reasonable that the share of sold-in x86 CPUs dropped in the third quarter. In any case, the share of Arm's processors is growing because of Apple and Chromebooks.

"We note that within the Chromebook market, is appeared that Arm's share looks to have increased in the quarter, though the market was very weak," McCarron told Tom's Hardware.

Arm vs x86 Consumer Market Share Q2 2022

The head of Canalys believes that Arm has the potential to grow further in the PC space, especially if other leading PC suppliers like HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus come up with their own Arm-based SoCs. However, he never mentioned — at least according to the DigiTimes story — Qualcomm's efforts to drive its Snapdragon platforms into always-connected laptops by Lenovo and HP and then come up with something more powerful based on technologies from Nuvia. Yet, Qualcomm could become a significant player, particularly in notebooks.

We can hardly imagine HP, Dell, or Lenovo developing their own Arm-based SoCs for their PCs to differentiate from each other and offer unique competitive advantages. Developing chips are expensive nowadays, and since these companies sell boatloads of PCs featuring completely different configurations, they will need several different SoCs to address all of their markets. Keeping in mind the relatively thin profit margins on the PC market, it is unlikely that these companies will try to make their processors replace those from AMD or Intel. Meanwhile, they may start ordering customized versions of chips from the leading CPU designers. With multi-chiplet designs like Intel's Meteor Lake, it should be pretty easy to add third-party IP to the processor, though we are speculating.

It remains to be seen whether the Arm architecture will indeed capture an additional 15% - 17% of the client PC market in the next four years because Apple gains share (although we do not expect Apple to command one-third of the PC market by 2026) or because the joint effort of Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek will play its role. But given that so much work is happening around Arm, the technology is poised to increase its adoption.

Meanwhile, Arm adoption in the Windows space will largely depend on the experience of Arm-based machines running Windows 12, which happens to be when Qualcomm rolls out its Nuvia-based Snapdragons.

"It will be an incredible shock for Intel and AMD, to suddenly find themselves fighting to protect their business," said Brazier.

50% of Cloud Servers by 2026

Servers are another frontier that the Arm architecture entered reasonably recently thanks to datacenter-grade SoCs from Ampere, AWS, and Huawei. According to Omdia, Arm SoCs controlled around 7.1% of the server market in Q2 2022. Omdia only tracks data center machines, so we are talking about blades, rack servers, white-box servers used by hyperscalers, tower servers, and hyper-converged infrastructure servers, but not about edge servers, mission/business critical machines, and other niche markets.

In the coming years, we are going to see more Arm server processors from other makers, such as SiPearl and Chinese cloud giants, assuming that they can develop SoCs that they can produce in volume with decent yields and ship them to China without violating the recent U.S. export regulations. Therefore, the share of Arm in data centers will increase.

As costs of running cloud machines are increasing, designing highly custom SoCs for specific applications makes sense, and CPU cores based on the Arm architecture can be customized to meet the requirements of particular applications. Moreover, SoCs are, by definition designed with specific requirements in mind.

In fact, even Intel acknowledges that custom chips make a lot of sense for cloud servers, which is why it is willing to produce both Arm- and x86-based SoCs for IFS customers as part of the IDM 2.0 strategy.

But neither Intel nor AMD is giving up half of the cloud server market without a battle. AMD is set to release its 128-core codenamed Bergamo processor based on the Zen 4c microarchitecture optimized for cloud and hyperscalers. Intel, on the other hand, is building-in loads of special-purpose accelerators into its 60-core Sapphire Rapids CPU to address the specific needs of both enterprise and hyperscale customers.

Not everyone needs Arm-based servers, though. Enterprises that use tens of thousands of servers will unlikely adopt Arm since they run applications developed for x86, and Arm's advantages for them are not obvious. Therefore, Brazier believes cloud servers will be the primary market that Arm-based SoCs will address initially. He believes that Arm's advantages in this market are so significant that the architecture will be used by 50% of cloud server SoCs.

In the coming years we are going to see more Arm server processors from other makers, such as SiPearl and Chinese cloud giants, assuming that they can develop SoCs which they can produce in volume with decent yields and ship them to China without violating the recent U.S. export regulations. Therefore, the share of Arm in datacenters will increase.

As costs of running cloud machines are increasing, designing highly-custom SoCs for specific applications makes sense and CPU cores based on the Arm architecture can be customized to meet requirements of very specific applications. Moreover, SoCs are by definition designed with specific requirements in mind.

In fact, even Intel acknowledges that custom chips make a lot of sense for cloud servers, which is why it is willing to produce both Arm- and x86-based SoCs for IFS customers as part of the IDM 2.0 strategy.

But neither Intel nor AMD are giving up half of the cloud server market without a battle. AMD is set to release its 128-core codenamed Bergamo processor based on the Zen 4c microarchitecture optimized for cloud and hyperscalers. Intel, on the other hand, is building-in loads of special-purpose accelerators into its 60-core Sapphire Rapids CPU to address specific needs of both enterprise and hyperscale customers.

Not everyone needs Arm-based servers though. Enterprises that use tens of thousands of servers will unlikely adopt Arm since they run applications developed for x86 and Arm's advantages for them are not obvious. Therefore, Brazier believes cloud servers will be the primary market that Arm-based SoCs will address initially. Apparently, he believes that Arm's advantages on this market are so significant that the architecture will be used by 50% of cloud server SoCs.

After becoming one of the leading suppliers of system-on-chips for inexpensive Chromebooks, MediaTek wants to address the market of Windows on Arm PCs. To meet the performance expectations of Windows users, MediaTek plans to develop SoCs with enhanced CPU and GPU performance; the company reiterated this week.

"In CPU and GPU we are having to make some bigger investments as a foundational capability [for PC-oriented SoCs]," said Vince Hu, a corporate vice president of MediaTek at the company's event, reports PC World.

MediaTek's Kompanio platforms for Windows on Arm PCs will include 'some of the technology' applied to high-end Dimensity SoCs for smartphones as well as 5G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and even display driver ICs (DDICs) specifically designed for laptops, the company revealed.

The company's latest Dimensity 9200 SoC for smartphones features eight general-purpose CPU cores and an 11-cluster graphics processing unit with hardware raytracing support. The CPU department includes one Arm Cortex-X3 performance-enhanced core operating at 3.05 GHz, three Cortex-A715 high-performance cores at 2.85 GHz, and four Cortex-A510 energy-efficient cores. Also, the SoC is compatible with LPDDR5X-8533 memory.

By contrast, MediaTek's top-of-the-range Kompanio 1380 SoC for higher-end Chromebooks features four standard high-performance Arm Cortex-A78 cores at 3.0 GHz, four standard energy-efficient Arm Cortex-A55 cores, 5-cluster Arm Mali-A57 graphics, and an LPDDR4X-2133 memory subsystem. However, the Kompanio 1380 is less capable than the Dimensity 9200, so MediaTek wants to enhance its PC SoCs before addressing Windows on Arm machines with them.

It is unclear whether MediaTek plans to use performance-enhanced Arm Cortex-X cores for its notebook SoCs or will develop its custom Arm-compatible cores like Apple. On the one hand, it is entirely logical for MediaTek to build custom high-performance cores if MediaTek plans to compete against Qualcomm's next-generation Snapdragon SoCs that will use custom cores from Nuvia. But on the other hand, this requires significantly more investments and effort than licensing high-performance out-of-box cores.

MediaTek has been gradually transforming itself from a developer of mainstream SoCs for consumer electronics and handsets to a supplier of premium application processors for advanced smartphones. As a result, it will be logical for MediaTek to start developing custom performance-enhanced IP in-house to differentiate from its rivals (most notably Qualcomm, Samsung, and Unisoc) and offer unique capabilities. However, it is unclear whether the company has such plans for now.

Qualcomm have naturally been quite optimistic about always connected Windows PCs based on Snapdragon system-on-chips. Ever since the company acquired Nuvia with its high-performance CPU design, the company's optimism turned into confidence. Apparently, there are reasons to be confident as Qualcomm's next-generation Nuvia-powered SoCs are allegedly already winning designs two years before their actual availability.  

"We expect to see an inflection point in Windows on Snapdragon PCs in 2024 based on a significant number of design wins to date," said Cristiano Amon, chief executive of Qualcomm, at the company's call with investors and analysts this week (via SeekingAlpha). "We increased OEM design wins in ecosystem traction for our next-generation Windows on Snapdragon solutions, which incorporate our custom CPUs."

Qualcomm faced a number of setbacks with its Nuvia-powered Snapdragon SoCs. Initially, the company planned to start sampling the processors in August 2022 and then ship them commercially in 2023. But the company then delayed sampling to 2023 and now expects the arrival of Windows systems based on its SoCs to hit the market in 2024.  

While Qualcomm's chief executive did not reveal the number of design wins or when exactly they are set to hit the market in 2024 (holiday season 2024 launch is technically 2024 availability), the increasing number of design wins indicates that PC makers are committed to deliver Arm-based Windows machines two years from now. Furthermore, this shows their assurance of performance and competitive advantages that such computers may provide, which is a good sign both for Qualcomm and other designers of Arm-powered SoCs. 

Unfortunately, there are some things to worry about when it comes to Nuvia-based Snapdragons. Cristiano Amon did not address the ongoing legal battle between Arm and Qualcomm. If Arm wins the litigation, it will mean the end for Nuvia's existing CPU design as Arm demands Qualcomm to destroy it and never market it. 

Update 09/01/2022 5:37 pm PT

Qualcomm has issued a statement regarding the lawsuit filed by Arm against Qualcomm and Nuvia. The company believes that it has Technology License Agreements (TLA) and Architecture License Agreements (ALA) with Arm fully covering Nuvia-developed Phoenix core and other technologies.

“Arm’s lawsuit marks an unfortunate departure from its longstanding, successful relationship with Qualcomm,” said Ann Chaplin, General Counsel of Qualcomm. “Arm has no right, contractual or otherwise, to attempt to interfere with Qualcomm’s or Nuvia’s innovations. Arm’s complaint ignores the fact that Qualcomm has broad, well-established license rights covering its custom-designed CPU’s, and we are confident those rights will be affirmed.”

Original Article

Arm on Wednesday said it had filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm and Nuvia for breach of license agreements and trademark infringement. The CPU architecture developer wants to destroy Nuvia Phoenix core design, as well as fair compensation for the usage of its trademark.

Arm granted Nuvia a Technology License Agreement (TLA) and Architecture License Agreement (ALA) in Fall 2019, letting the company modify its off-the-shelf cores (TLA) as well as design custom cores based on Arm’s select architectures (ALA). However, these licenses were granted based on certain terms and could not be transferred to Qualcomm without Arm’s consent. Furthermore, Qualcomm’s own ALA and TLA Arm licenses do not cover products featuring Arm-based technologies developed by third parties under different Arm licenses, such as Nuvia’s custom Phoenix cores described by the company in mid-2020.

As it turns out, Qualcomm transferred Nuvia’s Arm licenses to a newly formed entity after it purchased the company last March without Arm’s consent, which Arm says is a standard restriction under Arm’s license agreements. Since the companies could not come to terms, Arm terminated Nuvia’s licenses in March 2022. Instead of getting a new license, Nuvia and Qualcomm continued to develop processors based on the Phoenix core, which is a breach of license agreements, according to Arm. Furthermore, since Nuvia and Qualcomm continued to use Arm’s trademark when talking about Nuvia’s upcoming processors, they also used it illegally.

To protect its legal rights, Arm filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm Inc. and its subsidiaries Nuvia and Qualcomm in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware for breaching license agreements and illegally using Arm’s trademark. Arm demands Qualcomm to destroy the Nuvia Phoenix design and fair compensation for the trademark infringement.

“Because Qualcomm attempted to transfer Nuvia licenses without Arm’s consent, which is a standard restriction under Arm’s license agreements, Nuvia’s licenses terminated in March 2022,” a statement by Arm reads. “Before and after that date, Arm made multiple good faith efforts to seek a resolution. In contrast, Qualcomm has breached the terms of the Arm license agreement by continuing development under the terminated licenses. Arm was left with no choice other than to bring this claim against Qualcomm and Nuvia to protect our IP, our business, and to ensure customers are able to access valid Arm-based products.” 

Nuvia was established by Gerard Williams, a former Apple chief processor architect, in Fall 2019 in a bid to develop datacenter-oriented system-on-chips (SoCs) based on a highly-custom Arm ISA. Apple sued Williams in late 2019 claiming that he used knowledge about Apple’s forthcoming chips illegally. Nuvia’s Phoenix design has never seen the light of day, but eventually the company got acquired by Qualcomm in a bid to use its designs in its upcoming processors for client PCs. At Qualcomm, Nuvia-based SoCs were delayed for a number of times and currently the company expects to start their sampling in late 2023 or early 2024. This did not stop the company from announcing that Nuvia’s designs will also be used for datacenter-oriented processors eventually. 

Qualcomm and Nuvia yet have to respond to Arm’s allegations.

Overclocking expert Der8auer has published a new video showing his interest in computing performance beyond the realms of PCs and x86 processors. In the video embedded below, Der8auer looked closely at the Ampere Altra Max Q80-30 core processor. He covers an overview of the architecture, the platform, does some benchmarking and, finally, delids this sizable chip.

The Ampere Altra featured is an 80-core, 80-thread part. The cores used are built using the Arm v8 architecture on TSMC's N7 fabrication process. This results in a sizable package, with a plethora of pads, using the LGA4926 socket. Other essential stats you should know are that the Ampere Altra Max Q80-30 runs at up to 3.0GHz, and in testing the system power consumption at idle was 35W. The TDP of the processor is 210W, says Der8auer. There is also a 128 core Altra Max, with a TDP of 250W.

Benchmarks

Der8auer decided to run Geekbench 5 on a server powered by one of the 80-core Ampere chips, to get a measure of its capabilities. After the test completed, the following scores were recorded. We have put in some comparisons, for you to get a handle of the performance on offer, as well as the HWBot world record multithreaded score from a 64C/128T Threadripper 3990X OC with liquid cooling. The 1T Threadripper score below was also completed with liquid cooling and a ~50% overclock.

As well as being impressed by the multithreaded score, Derb8auer noted that the power efficiency of the Arm-based chip was “double” its x86 competitors. During the 1T tests, the Ampere 80-core system consumed about 90W max, and when nT tests began it never went beyond about 300W. Moreover, temperatures never went beyond about 65 degrees Celcius with a basic-looking heatsink and blower cooler equipped.

Delidding

After initial attempts to delid using a razor blade didn’t seem to work, Der8auer moved over to a vice, where he managed to pop the integrated heat spreader (IHS) off quite quickly. The first surprise was that Ampere used just glue and thermal paste. It was expected that the firm would use a solder TIM. But no, a standard-looking gray gloop was present, squished between the silicon and IHS.

Measurements were made and the 80-core chip’s die size was 22.5 x 25.5mm (574mm2). Der8auer reckons the die size is comparable to the old Intel Core i9-7980XE (18C/36T, 480mm2), however the package of the Ampere chip is so much bigger due to the connectivity (128 PCIe lanes) it offers.

Apple seems to have had some success moving from x86 to the Arm architecture in recent years. Meanwhile, in PC land, we are still waiting for Qualcomm to really impress us with its upcoming Nuvia-designed Arm for PC chips. The first Qualcomm Nuvia CPU products are on track to sample this year.

Update 12/06 12:00 p.m. PT: A Qualcomm spokesperson has reached out to Tom’s Hardware with the following statement: “We are on track to sample the first products with our next generation CPUs this year. 

Original story

In a recent interview, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon indicated that his firm’s Nuvia core technology chips would start sampling with laptop makers later than previously outlined on roadmaps. Moreover, Amon started hedging concerning the launch of consumer laptops packing these highly anticipated new chips, shifting expectations from late 2023 into early 2024.

Roger Cheng of CNet interviewed Amon as part of his Daily Charge podcast series. In a short segment, starting at about 8:20, Cheng brought up the topic of Nuvia technology. Qualcomm acquired startup Nuvia for a cool $1.4 billion last year. Amon was effervescent regarding the advances Nuvia will bring to Snapdragon processors addressing the performance segment. “With the acquisition of Nuvia we are aiming to have performance leadership on PC on the CPU period,” stated Amon. To be clear, later on, Amon affirmed that Nuvia chips would mix CPU, GPU and NPU for the performance segment of the PC laptop industry.

We reported yesterday that Amon promises to deliver Arm architecture PC chips to outperform the Apple M2, which launched earlier in the week. If you are interested in the importance of the Nuvia acquisition to Qualcomm, please check those links.

It is exciting that Arm-based PC SoCs potentially superior to Apple M1 and M2 chips are in the works. Qualcomm previously made some pretty big claims about its Snapdragon chips for PCs, but even some of the newest devices with Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 SoC could only muster middling performance if we are being polite. With this in mind, we are always cautious about manufacturer/designer claims versus shipping reality.

Timing Troubles?

One of the signs of troubled development, or design target performance not being as good as test performance, is manifested by delays. Delays might be for other valid reasons, some out of necessity, but delays are unsettling.

Qualcomm execs previously said that the firm would sample its Nuvia core-packing Snapdragon chips to partners around August 2022. In the new Daily Charge interview, Amon stated Qualcomm will start "sampling chips to our customers for design next year." If he hasn't misspoken, this is a delay of at least four months.

Amon gave away some more information on timescales that tingled our spider senses. "Late next year / beginning of 2024 you are going to see Windows PCs powered by Snapdragon with a Nuvia designed CPU," he told Cheng. This statement isn't so decisive about a delay, as late 2023 is still in line with previous statements of devices "launching in 2023." However, the hedge of mentioning early 2024 is new, as far as our research shows. If Qualcomm doesn't launch early enough for the holidays, then early 2024 would make sense for CES 2024 debut.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon is bullish on the company's prospects for its upcoming Arm-based platform for mobile and desktop form-factors. In an interview with CNET, the CEO even went as far as claiming that its chips - which won't hit the market until 2023 - will outperform Apple's recently-introduced M2 chips, which build upon the company's extremely well-received first-generation Apple Silicon with significant performance improvements via updates to its performance and efficiency cores.

Naturally, no CEO would dismiss their own products against competitors. But Qualcomm does have an extremely important, $1.4 billion-worth card clutched tightly against its chest: Nuvia, the high-performance Arm chip design company founded in 2019 by Apple's former chip design lead himself, Gerard Williams. Williams led Apple's A-series SoC chip design and roadmap throughout the years, leading to Apple's relatively unchallenged command in the smartphone SoC space - a design on which Apple's own M1 and M2 CPUs are still based off of.

At the time of the acquisition, Nuvia's mission was to design the world's most powerful Arm-based CPUs - chips that could go toe to toe against both Intel and AMD, now placed on the same side of the ring against the increasingly compute-relevant Arm architecture. To do so, Gerard brought along two other invaluable Apple engineers, which prompted a yet-ongoing dispute with Apple. The company  later sued Gerard on claims that the lead designer intentionally kept Apple in the dark while accumulating knowledge that he intended to use for product development on Nuvia.

Qualcomm's aim does go above and beyond Apple, however; the company absorbed Nuvia's ethos of rivaling AMD and Intel. According to Amon, Qualcomm's goal is nothing short of claiming performance leadership in the personal computing CPU space with its Nuvia-powered Arm chips. This is a far cry from the mundane effects of its Snapdragon-based chips that have already made it into Windows-powered machines such as the Microsoft Surface Pro X.

Amon further said that the time for Qualcomm's Arm and Nuvia-powered assault on the PC sphere is now, considering Microsoft's increasing software support for Windows on Arm, as well as changes related to remote work. Customers now expect always-connected devices that feature always-on capabilities and powerful videoconferencing skills that still last through the day - something that Qualcomm feels has been finally unlocked. Time, as always, will tell.

Qualcomm has published its latest set of financials (concerning Second Quarter Fiscal 2022 Results), followed up with a lengthy earnings call, with answers provided by President and CEO, Christian Amon, among others. During the call Amon provided an update on the integration of the Nuvia team, and progress in their goal of developing a big-leap-forward for Arm processors. Amon commented upon the timescale in which we should expect to see Nuvia powered Windows laptops on retail shelves, indicating things are currently on track for late 2023.

In answer to a question from an IT industry analyst regarding the laptop market and Qualcomm silicon, Amon said that he was happy with the commercial and enterprise designs of Windows 11 systems based around the newest Snapdragon 8CX Generation 3. Then he brought up the Nuvia designed processor, which he claimed will be "going after the performance tier… development is on track, and we expect to have that in late 2023."

Processors are still going to be sampled with device design partners in H2 2022. This gives us some hope for performance leaks surfacing between late 2022 and late 2023.

Is This a Delay? Yay or Nay

The stated late 2023 availability of Nuvia Arm core designed processors appears to indicate Qualcomm has slipped a delay into its Nuvia plans. At the investor day presentation last November, Qualcomm's CTO said that SoC sampling by partners would start around August 2022, with shipping retail products set for 2023.

In an email to PCWorld, which asked whether the earnings call had surfaced a delay, a Qualcomm representative denied that there was any delay. The timing discussed by the Qualcomm CEO was consistent with the November investor day data, and "2023 refers to device launches," which still stands (but it is now "late 2023").

Nuvia's Potential

Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in January 2021. The processor startup was founded by ex-Apple engineers who wanted to turn their talents to Arm-based system-on-chips (SoCs) for servers. Just a few months later Qualcomm provided an extensive update on its plans for Nuvia-technology SoCs, and it publicly pinned its hopes on addressing the always-connected PCs (ACPCs) market with a processor that could get in the ring and trade blows with the Apple M1. This could be an exciting introduction for the Windows ecosystem, if all goes to plan.

For more about the potential Nuvia technology has to outpace existing CPU architectures from the likes of Apple, Intel and AMD, please check our article about the company's acquisition by Qualcomm.

The Nuvia chips will be a PC computing first product, according to Qualcomm, and are already talked about as Windows processors that are ready to combat the Apple M1. However, by 2023, Apple will be well into its M2 processor cycle, with whatever advances that family of processors might bring.

Qualcomm on Tuesday said that its upcoming Snapdragon system-on-chips (SoCs) for PCs that are set to include Arm cores designed by the Nuvia team will set the performance and efficiency benchmark for Windows PCs and challenge processors from Apple and Intel. The new SoCs are set be sampled with PC makers in August 2022 and will be launched commercially in 2023.

Qualcomm has been offering its Snapdragon platforms for notebooks since 2017 and has done a lot of work enabling the Windows-on-Arm ecosystem together with Microsoft. But despite all its efforts, it has not gained any significant market share. That's partly because not all Windows programs work perfectly on Arm-based systems, and partly because the performance Qualcomm's platforms offer is lower compared to x86 platforms as well — not to mention Apple's Arm-powered machines. Qualcomm hopes that the $1.4 billion acquisition of Nuvia, its design team, and microarchitectures will finally make it a stronger player on the PC market.

Up until now, Qualcomm essentially offered beefed up versions of its smartphone-oriented Snapdragon SoCs to PC makers. That's a viable strategy to address a specific segment of the market, but it's not good enough to compete against products from Apple, AMD, and Intel. With its next-generation Snapdragon for PCs, the company will offer SoCs designed specifically for PCs from the ground up. Qualcomm said the custom Nuvia CPU cores will be tailored for personal computer workloads and the Adreno GPU will be scaled to the level of standalone graphics processing units. It did not elaborate on how precisely it will do this.

Building a comprehensive integrated GPU could be more challenging than building a high-performance CPU core. Qualcomm's Adreno team includes loads of engineers from ATI Technologies and AMD who have experience with building high-end discrete graphics processors. However, these GPUs tend to be large and power hungry, and SoC developers have to come up with solutions that offer a balance between performance, die size, and power.

For example, Apple's M1 Max has an integrated GPU that offers performance sometimes akin to that of Nvidia's mobile GeForce RTX 3060. That's a good result, particularly for an integrated solution, but it's not consistent. In some tests, we've seen performance that's closer to half of what you'd get from a desktop 3060. Either way, there are also users who demand something faster.

Qualcomm's message essentially says that with its upcoming Snapdragon generations, it will bifurcate its mobile and PC SoC development in a bid to deliver the best hardware possible. The company still stresses that Nuvia microarchitectures will be opportunistically extended to mobile, automotive, and data centers, so at some point Nuvia's technologies could be used for smartphones, but for now the plan is to build a high-performance client PC SoC that will defeat or at least challenge offerings from Apple, AMD, and Intel.

Qualcomm expects to deliver the first samples of its next-generation Snapdragon SoC for notebooks with Nuvia general-purpose CPU cores next August and release it commercially in 2023, the company said at its Investor Day 2021 summit. It has not yet indicated what process node the chips will use, but a 5nm class design seems likely.

Christiano Amon, the new chief executive of Qualcomm, outlined the company's intentions for its own processors based on technologies developed by Nuvia, a CPU startup the company acquired earlier this year. Qualcomm plans to roll out notebook chips featuring Nuvia's architecture next year, but it will not return to the market of datacenters chips even with Nuvia's promising technologies. Instead, Qualcomm will try to license these cores to other companies.

Nuvia was originally co-founded by ex-Apple engineers in a bid to build Arm-based system-on-chips (SoCs) for servers. Based on the company's own simulations, its Phoenix core could deliver at least 50% higher peak performance than AMD’s Zen 2 and Intel’s Sunny Cove cores at 1/3 of power (4.50W vs. 14.80W) in Geekbench 5, which looked very competitive. The Phoenix core could also outperform Apple's A13 Lightning cores, which essentially means that the company claimed the core was considerably better than Arm's generic Cortex A-series cores that are widely used in smartphones, tablets, and some PC-oriented SoCs. 

"We needed to have the leading performance for a battery-powered device," said Christiano Amon in an interview with Reuters. "If Arm, which we've had a relationship with for years, eventually develops a CPU that's better than what we can build ourselves, then we always have the option to license from Arm." 

The new Qualcomm CEO confirmed that the company would start selling Nuvia-based Snapdragon SoCs for next-generation always-connected PCs (ACPCs) as early as next year. Meanwhile, he did not disclose exactly when SoCs aimed at smartphones and self-driving cars featuring Nuvia's architecture will be available. 

Addressing Windows PCs with its own high-performance SoCs is a big opportunity for Qualcomm. This market is huge, and PCs are performance-hungry, so Nuvia's performance per watt advantages over x86 designs will be important. Of course, many things will depend on the user experience provided by Microsoft's Windows 11 on Arm SoCs and compatibility with apps originally designed for x86 CPUs, but at least on paper, Qualcomm seems to be in a good position with its Nuvia trump up its sleeve. 

But while Nuvia originally targeted data centers with its SoCs, Qualcomm does not plan to re-enter this market after it failed with its Centriq CPUs several years ago. Moreover, while the Arm-compatible data center software ecosystem has grown in recent years, it is now harder to compete in this field now that Arm offers Neoverse cores specifically tailored for data center applications. As a result, there are numerous developers of Arm SoCs for servers. 

Yet, Qualcomm might license Nuvia's cores to parties interested in building their own data center SoCs. Of course, with the availability of Arm's potent Neoverse cores, it remains to be seen whether any developers of data center SoCs will actually be interested in licensing Qualcomm's proprietary Nuvia cores

Qualcomm on Wednesday said that it had agreed to acquire Nuvia, a small yet ambitious microprocessor startup. The takeover of Nuvia will get Qualcomm a high-performance CPU design along with a proven CPU and system architecture design team, something that could give a strong boost to the company's mobile and PC system-on-chip (SoC), and eventually server SoC businesses. 

"CPU performance leadership will be critical in defining and delivering on the next era of computing innovation," said Gerard Williams, CEO of Nuvia. "The combination of Nuvia and Qualcomm will bring the industry’s best engineering talent, technology and resources together to create a new class of high-performance computing platforms that set the bar for our industry. We couldn’t be more excited for the opportunities ahead."

Qualcomm Gets New CPU Technology

Under the terms of the agreement, Qualcomm will pay $1.4 billion for Nuvia. It will get Nuvia's CPU designs and technologies. Furthermore, the founders of Nuvia will join Qualcomm's team, including John Bruno, Manu Gulati, and Gerard Williams III, who previously worked on CPUs and system architectures at Apple, AMD, Arm, and Google. 

Qualcomm says that Nuvia's CPU technology will be used for its Snapdragon SoCs for smartphones and next-generation always-connected PCs (ACPCs) running Microsoft's Windows or Google's Android. In addition, the same technology will be used for Qualcomm's platforms for self-driving cars. As Qualcomm plans to address smartphones and PCs with Nuvia's technologies, it expects to become a much stronger rival for companies like AMD, Apple, Intel, and Nvidia if the latter succeeds in taking over Arm. 

"Creating high performance, low-power processors and highly integrated, complex SoCs are part of our DNA,” said Jim Thompson, Chief Technology Officer of Qualcomm. “Adding Nuvia’s deep understanding of high-performance design and integrating Nuvia CPUs with Snapdragon - together with our industry-leading graphics and AI - will take computing performance to a new level and drive new capabilities for products that serve multiple industries.”   

Meanwhile, Qualcomm did not disclose whether it has plans to use Nuvia's processors for SoCs aimed at datacenters that could succeed the company's ill-fated Centriq CPUs.  

All major partners of Qualcomm, including Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Acer, Bosch, HP, Lenovo, LG Electronics, Renault, and numerous others have already endorsed the acquisition of Nuvia and expressed excitement about the prospects.

Ambitious Plans

John Bruno, Manu Gulati, and Gerard Williams III founded Nuvia back in 2019 with a plan to disrupt the cloud server market with a system-on-chip that would offer a significantly higher performance at a fraction of the power of x86 CPUs. 

Nuvia's very first server SoC that the company described last year is called Orion, and it is based on custom Phoenix cores. The latter is believed to be based on Arm's Armv9 architecture yet features a revamped pipeline designed to enable the core to scale from power/thermally constrained designs to machines designed for unconstrained performance. 

Last year, Nuvia demonstrated its Phoenix core's simulated performance compared to Apple's Lightning and Vortex, Intel's Sunny Cove and Skylake, AMD's Zen 2, and Arm's A77 cores in Geekbench 5. Based on the numbers showcased by Nuvia, its Phoenix could deliver at least 50% higher peak performance (2000 points vs. 1300 points) than AMD’s Zen 2 and Intel’s Sunny Cove at 1/3 of power (4.50W vs. 14.80W) or around 2.5 times higher per-core performance at the same (4.50W) power. 

Nuvia never announced that it had taped out its Orion SoC or Phoenix core, so nobody outside of the company understands the design's readiness.  

Phoenix to Meet Snapdragon

Assuming that Nuvia's Phoenix is ready now, it could be used for Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoCs that will be released sometime in 2022 at the earliest. That said, it will have to compete against Apple's, AMD's, and Intel's cores due in the coming years. Therefore, it remains to be seen how competitive the core will be against next-generation rivals.

Historically, Qualcomm has developed its custom Arm cores called Kryo, but they are largely based on Arm's off-the-shelf designs and do not offer tangibly higher performance than the standard Cortex-A series. With a full-custom core design, Qualcomm will likely be able to offer considerably higher performance, which might make smartphones and laptops running next-generation Snapdragon SoCs more competitive against handsets powered by Apple's SoCs or notebooks based on processors from AMD or Intel. 

What is particularly important is that original designers of the new core will join Qualcomm and will continue to develop their Phonix core architecture, which pretty much guarantees steady performance gains in the coming years, making Qualcomm's SoCs considerably more competitive going forward. 

ARM servers have long held the promise of breakthrough power efficiency and performance, and Ampere took its first big step forward to delivering on those goals with the announcement that its Altra 80-core chips, which consume a mere 210W, are shipping now in both single- and dual-socket systems. The company wades into an ultra-competitive market with x86 competitors like AMD's EPYC, which currently offers leading connectivity options and core counts, and Intel, which is now competing on both price and differentiated features. The ARM ecosystem is also ripe with new competitors forming, like forthcoming chips from startup Nuvia and Amazon's Graviton2 chips. 

Ampere fabs the Altra processors on the 7nm TSMC process to enable up to 80 cores on a single die that are tied together with a coherent mesh interface. Unlike Intel's Xeon and AMD's EPYC, the ARM cores come without threading, meaning that software executes on a single thread per core. Ampere positions this as providing lower power consumption, enhanced security via a lack of shared resources, and a more precise quality of service. Clocks weigh in at a 3.0 GHz boost, but the company hasn't shared base clock information. 

The Neoverse N1-based chips come armed with up to eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory (4TB max), which provides up to 200GBps of throughput per socket, tied via a mesh interconnect to the ARM v8.2+ (the company roped in some enhancements from v8.3 and v8.4) cores. The chips also come with the modern trimmings we've come to expect, like 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0 in a single-socket server and 192 lanes in a dual-socket, along with support for the CCIX interface to provide cache coherency for up to four connected devices (CXL in the future). 

Altra also supports INT8 and FP16 for inference workloads, a key in today's AI-driven infrastructure, and come equipped with 32MB of total L3 cache along with 1MB of L2 and 64KB of L1 instruction/data cache per core. Vectorized code is fed through two 128-bit SIMD units. 

Ampere claims industry-leading per-core power consumption, which in turn enables the heftier core counts, but hasn't released detailed performance metrics. However, the company does claim the industry's highest density with up to 3,500 cores per rack, an important capability due to rack-level power constraints. The company compares its overall projected performance to servers with Intel's 8280 and AMD's EPYC 7742, beating the former by a large margin. As pointed out by ServeTheHome, Ampere "de-rated" the EPYC and Intel platforms by 16.5% and 24%, respectively, to adjust for compiler differences. STH notes that this practice is common, and Ampere disclosed it clearly in the footnotes. 

Ampere wraps all of this up in two server solutions that are currently being evaluated by cloud service providers. These servers come in both 1U and 2U flavors and support up to 16 DIMMs per socket. As mentioned, the company supports CCIX across the PCIe Gen4 interface, but has joined the CXL consortium that seems to have emerged as the preeminent future solution and will move to the interface when its chips evolve to the PCIe 5.0 specification. 

Ampere isn't sharing details about the various chips in its product stack, or pricing. However, we do know that the SKUs will span from 40W up to the "200W+ range." All models will come with the same feature sets, meaning no disabled PCIe connectivity or memory capacity support for lesser models, instead differentiating on cores and power consumption. The company also has Mystique and Siryn models coming in 2021 and 2022, respectively. 

Ampere lists Oracle (its CEO sits on Oracle's board), Microsoft Azure, Canonical, VMware, Lenovo and Gigabyte, among others, as companies either evaluating the hardware or optimizing software for the Altra platform. The chips will be generally available mid-year.  

Ampere could have a strong single-socket play with 80 cores and 128 lanes of PCIe crammed into slim 1U servers, rivaling AMD's leading core counts in that segment, along with the overall lead in core counts for the broader dual-socket server ecosystem. A foe on the ARM front has emerged in AWS's Graviton2 chips, but those chips are captive to AWS infrastructure, so they may simply enable broader support for the ARM software ecosystem. Newcomer Nuvia, which is grabbing headlines due to a very public spat with Apple, is also shaking up the scene. We shouldn't expect to see silicon from that company for quite some time, leaving Ampere an opportunity to strike after several years in development. 

In an interview with The Next Platform, Nuvia has said that it is designing a clean sheet architecture based on the Arm architecture, for its data center chips. The startup came out of stealth mode late last year and is aiming for “double-digit” performance improvements.

Jon Carvill, vice president of marketing at Nuvia and previously working at Intel, disclosed some of the startup’s plans in an interview with The Next Platform. Carvill noted that data centers are getting constrained by thermals. He also seemed to refer to Intel’s delays of 10nm, as Intel has been reliant on its Skylake architecture for much of last several years.

“They have not seen any meaningful improvement in IPC in CPU performance in some time. If you look at the last five years, they have largely had the same architectures. They have had incremental improvements in basic CPU performance. There’s been some new workloads on the scene and there’s been a lot of improvements in areas like AI and some other corner cases, for sure. But if you look at the core CPU, can you think of the last time you have seen a big meaningful difference or change in the datacenter?”

In particular, Carvill said that the startup is aiming specifically at the cloud service providers (also called hyperscalers), ignoring the more traditional enterprise segment of the data center. It wants to deliver “significant” improvements in performance, and said hyperscalers have shared information about their workloads.

“This is a server-class CPU, with an SoC surrounding it, and it is designed to be the clear-cut winner on each of those categories – and in totality. And we are not talking about the incremental performance improvements that we have come to expect over the past five years. We are talking about really meaningful, significant, double-digit performance improvements over what anyone has seen before.”

Additionally, he disclosed that it will use the Arm instruction said for its custom architecture design: “What we are doing is custom, and we will not be using off the shelf, licensed cores. We are going to use an Arm ISA, but we are doing it as a clean sheet architecture from the ground up that is built for the hyperscaler world.”

Nuvia raised $53 million in a series A funding last year at a $3.5 billion valuation, and was founded by several key people in the industry, including from Apple and Google.

Apple's lawsuit against its former lead chip designer is moving forward. Bloomberg reported Sunday that Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Mark Pierce rejected Gerard Williams III's request to dismiss his former employer's lawsuit against him.

Williams III led development of Apple's chips from 2013 to March 2019. He co-founded a new company, Nuvia, that left stealth in November 2019 when it revealed its data center-focused Phoenix processor. Apple's lawsuit arrived one month later.

Apple claimed that Williams III broke his employment contract by making plans to form his own company while still working at Apple, using the knowledge he gained working on Apple's chips to establish Nuvia and "stealing" other Apple employees.

Williams III said the relevant part of his employment contract violated a California law, and that the company's citation of text conversations he had with other Apple employees violated his right to privacy. He asked for the lawsuit to be thrown out.

Judge Mark Pierce said the California law doesn't allow employees "to plan and prepare to create a competitive enterprise prior to termination if the employee does so on their employer’s time and with the employer’s resources," per Bloomberg.

That doesn't mean Apple's won the lawsuit--it simply means that the lawsuit will be allowed to move forward. The rest of the process (or, as some would call it, rigmarole) should be able to continue despite Williams III's protest.

Apple launched a lawsuit against its former chief processor architect, Gerard Williams, who recently founded his own company, called Nuvia, along with two other former Apple chip design executives. Williams’ new company is focused on designing a data center-focused processor called “Phoenix.”

According to Apple’s complaint, which was filed in the Santa Clara Superior Court in California, Williams broke his employment agreement when he created his own enterprise. Primarily, Apple accused Williams of hiding the fact that Williams was preparing to launch his own startup while he was still working on the design of new Apple chips. 

More than that, Apple’s filing also accused Williams of taking the knowledge he acquired about Apple chips while working for the company to develop data center processors and then lure Apple into acquiring his company in the future:

"Williams boasted about starting a new company with technology that he was working on at Apple, that he believed Apple 'needed' and that he believed Apple would have no choice but to purchase."

Another one of Apple’s main accusations against Williams is that he is now stealing Apple’s employees, too, which is in breach of contract. Apple is now seeking injunctions and damages against Williams for breach of contract and breach of duty of loyalty.

The latter accusation is something only the courts can clarify, but it’s important to note that only a few years back, some of the largest tech companies, including Apple and Google, ended up settling for about $100 million each for creating agreements that said they wouldn’t recruit each other’s employees. This type of agreement is illegal in California, as well as other states.

William's Counter Argument

William published a counter argument, arguing mainly that Apple’s employment contract provisions are not enforceable under California law, because the contract language describes a no-compete clause, which again, is illegal in California. 

Williams also accused Apple of illegally collecting SMS messages between himself and another Apple employee to prove that Williams was preparing to launch a start-up. Once again, Apple may be in violation of California privacy laws here. As such, the messages can’t be used as evidence, either.

Williams quit Apple in February, but he made his start-up public only last month. His new company, Nuvia Inc., gave few details about the features of the processors it was designing, or even its instruction set architecture. Most assume it could be an Arm-based chip, because he has experience overseeing Apple chips’ designs for more than a decade. 

However, that’s not yet clear yet. Some of the recent processor design start-ups we’ve seen seem to focus more on adopting the RISC-V ISA, but Arm may still make a little more sense for data centers right now. 

Arm server processors have had a hard time catching-up to x86 processors in the data center, or at least in convincing data center software developers as well as potential customers to support them. Even so, it’s much further along in the development of its own data center ecosystem than RISC-V currently is.

Several large semiconductor companies such as Qualcomm, Samsung, and Broadcom, as well as a few smaller companies, too, have tried and failed to enter the server processor market with Arm-based chips. 

However, Nuvia, may succeed whether the former didn’t because of the minds working on this project. After all, they are the same minds that have consistently beat competition in the mobile chip market by a significant margin year after year with relentless performance and efficiency upgrades to each generation.

Former Apple chip designers Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati and John Bruno, have launched a new start-up called Nuvia Inc that plans to take on Intel and AMD in the data center with a new server-focused processor codenamed  “Phoenix.” 

The company raised $53 million from Dell Technologies Capital and several other Silicon Valley investors, according to Reuters today. Nuvia plans to use the money to increase the number of employees from 60 to 100 by the end of the year.

Williams was Apple’s chief architect for all Apple central processors and systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) for nine years until he quit earlier this spring. Gulati also worked on Apple’s mobile SoCs for eight years, and Bruno worked on Apple’s platform architecture group. Gulati and Bruno also worked for Google for a short period before joining Nuvia as co-founders.

Williams told Reuters that the three plan to use their experience and knowledge building highly efficient mobile chips for Apple and apply it to building highly efficient server processors that will also have high performance and security.

In the past few years, we’ve also seen Qualcomm, Marvell, as well as Ampere, another startup formed by Intel’s former president, attempt to combat Intel and AMD in the data center market using mobile technology (in other words, the Arm instruction set architecture).

Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies, told Reuters that if anyone has a chance against the Intel and AMD incumbents it might be Nuvia, due to their star chip architects. The Nuvia founders played a major role in pushing Apple’s chips to gain significant performance improvements year after year, drastically outpacing other Arm chip competitors in the market, at least if we go by most benchmarks.

Scott Darling, president the Dell venture group, told Reuters that he can’t comment on whether or not Dell will end-up using Nuvia chips in its servers. But he has high hopes for Nuvia regardless:

“The silicon industry is relentless. It pounds forward,” he said. “You have to have a world-class team to do something disruptive enough that it will prevail despite the response of competitors. At Nuvia, we think we have found one.”