The trial of Arm's lawsuit against Qualcomm over the issue of royalty payments has now begun in a Delaware court. Arm is suing Qualcomm for using a lower royalty rate in the Oryon CPU design developed by Nuvia. The ARM license royalty rate paid by Nuvia is higher. Qualcomm has already taken over Nuvia in 2021.
Because of the lower royalty rate, Arm is losing around $50 million (~RM 222 million) in revenue. Qualcomm reportedly pays $300 million (~RM 1.33 billion) a year to Arm for existing licenses. In addition to the lawsuit, Arm is also demanding that Nuvia's chip designs be destroyed due to license infringement. Last October, Arm decided to cancel the license held by Qualcomm in retaliation after the two companies failed to resolve their dispute out of court.
The impact of this case is high because almost all the chips produced by Qualcomm, such as the Snapdragon series, currently use Arm's architecture. Last month, they finally produced a RISC-V chip, but it was for pilot computing use.