Arm will cancel Qualcomm’s license to make the Snapdragon X Elite

Arm Ltd. has notified its licensee Qualcomm, informing the company that its architectural license will be terminated in 60 days — the agreement that allows Qualcomm to manufacture the Oryon CPU cores at the heart of the Snapdragon X Elite chip and Copilot+ PCs.

PCWorld has independently confirmed an earlier Bloomberg report that Arm is canceling the architectural license agreement, the agreement that allows Qualcomm to manufacture custom cores, like the company’s Oryon processor. Qualcomm called the cancellation notice “more unfounded threats” and that it looks forward to a trial in December that is set to resolve the issue.

In the fall of 2022, Arm sued Qualcomm, seeking an injunction that would have forced Qualcomm to destroy the chip designs that a company called Nuvia developed. Qualcomm bought Nuvia in 2021, in a bid to beef up its own Arm-based CPU designs. Arm, in turn, argued that it should have been allowed to approve the deal and cancelled Nuvia’s licenses in 2023, according to Bloomberg. Since then, the suit has quietly simmered without any real action or rhetoric by either side, even as the two sides nailed down a court date in December.

Now, the stakes have been raised significantly. Arm designs its own CPU cores, known as Cortex, and licenses them to companies like Qualcomm, Mediatek, and others. That license remains in place. But Qualcomm is entertaining partners, analysts and media at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui, where the company launched its next-generation Oryon core that the company claims is actually faster than Intel’s Lunar Lake chip. Embarrassing? Very much so.

Arm declined to comment. Qualcomm, however, issued a statement calling the action a “desperate ploy.”

“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,” Qualcomm said, in a company statement emailed to PCWorld by a company representative. “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.”

Right now, Arm and Qualcomm still have an agreement by which Qualcomm could make chips based on Arm’s finished Cortex cores. But those cores proved unable to keep up with x86 designs from Intel and AMD.

The Oryon cores at the heart of the Snapdragon X Elite processor has proven far more competitive, and are arguably the most power-efficient chip for the PC. Now those cores are in jeopardy because of Arm’s action, setting up either a heated negotiation process or an even more fervent battle in court in a few months.