- Arm could consider selling its own chips
- Details of proposed change revealed in Qualcomm’s legal victory against Arm
- A change in strategy could prove incredibly lucrative for Arm
Semiconductor technology provider Arm, which almost certainly has its hardware somewhere in your business smartphone, is known for helping companies make their own mobile-friendly processors, but that could soon change with a rumored shift to manufacturing of its own chips.
A report of PK Press Club discusses Arm’s so-called “Picasso” project; an attempt to increase its revenue by selling its own chips and competing with its own heavyweight customer base – notably Qualcomm and Apple – to whom it normally sells off-the-shelf Arm intellectual property in order to help it design fleas.
Arm may also be considering increasing royalty rates for these customers.
Arm vs. Qualcomm in brief
Details of the proposed strategy were revealed as part of Qualcomm’s legal victory against Arm in a royalty dispute brought and lost by the latter in December 2024.
This theoretically would have included Qualcomm, but Arm’s purchase of startup Nuvia, to use its technology to produce its own chips, gradually moved away from the prior agreement, leading Arm to file a complaint with in the United States District Court of Delaware for a violation of the terms of the license.
Ultimately, however, a jury ruled that Qualcomm’s Nuvia-tech chips were properly licensed and that the company could continue to sell them as part of its journey into the personal computing and computer industries. AI.
Arm’s future plans to “water” its customers
Documents filed in that proceeding, which PK Press Club reports are still under court seal, reveal that the “Picasso” plan for Arm to sell its own chips (or even “chiplets”) came at the request from Arm CEO René Haas, who, even before taking on the role, had generally described the company’s biggest customers as “hosed” in an internal Teams message sent in December 2021.
In fact, court evidence suggests that Arm executives had discussed a 300% increase in the royalty rate for its customers using Armv9 – its latest computer architecture, as early as 2019, in an effort to increase smartphone revenue of the billion-dollar company during the year. a decade.
Ultimately, it is unclear whether this rate increase will occur or last; Using Arm’s computing architecture does not necessarily require its ready-made component plans.
And, like PK Press Club points out that many of Arm’s largest customers-turned-competitors could survive without these plans while designing their own parts.
