Arm is reportedly cancelling Qualcomm's chip licence but it probably won't stop Snapdragon X 'AI' PCs from being made

pcgamer.com:

Arm has finally thrown its toys and given 60 days notice that it intends to cancel Qualcomm's licence to produce chips based on Arm technology. So says Bloomberg, which claims to have seen Arm documents detailing the move.

This dispute has been running for a while, but the consequences of such a cancellation, if true, are potentially catastrophic for Qualcomm. The most immediate impact would involve Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X chips for PC laptops. In theory, if the licence was cancelled, Qualcomm would have to stop making the Snapdragon X and the whole Windows-on-Arm AI PC thing, which is only just getting going, would implode.

That's because the licence cancellation is thought to pertain specifically to Qualcomm chips with custom core designs that use the Arm ISA or instruction set architecture. The Snapdragon X is just such a chip design with bespoke CPU cores designed in-house at Qualcomm.

To be really accurate, the Snapdragon X's cores were designed at a startup called Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired in 2021. But the overarching point is that there are two ways to build an Arm-based chip. One is to licence the Arm ISA and design your own compatible cores, the other is to buy ready-made core designs from Arm.

It's the former that Qualcomm has done with Snapdragon X, so the licence cancellation would apply to custom CPU designs, but not to other Qualcomm chips based on Arm CPU core designs. In other words, the cancellation wouldn't mean that Qualcomm couldn't produce any Arm chips at all, just Arm chips with its own in-house CPU core designs.

In fact, even more specifically than that, the cancellation wouldn't stop Qualcomm from making its custom design chips for phones, for which it reportedly has a separate licence. So, the dispute appears to be narrowly limited to the Snapdragon X for PCs and laptops.

The whole mess can be traced back to the fact that Nuvia originally acquired a licence to produce custom Arm cores aimed at servers and enterprise applications.