CHIP FIGHT GO!

Any student of PC history is likely to tell you that perhaps the most interesting era in PC history occurred from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s. That was the era when the internet went mainstream, when computers became common, and when the CPU market started getting competitive.

During this period, companies like AMD and Cyrix started ramping up their attempts to undercut Intel by offering chips that extended the life of older generations of hardware. While Cyrix ended up more influential than successful long-term, developing many ideas that would later shape the semiconductor industry, AMD, meanwhile, eventually caught onto a hot streak. They developed their first in-house processor during this period, the Pentium-compatible K5 processor, and continued innovating to the point where, by the turn of the decade, they had produced serious competition for the Pentium line of chips in the form of the Athlon.

Then, while Intel was going down the deeply misguided road of the Itanium (a whole mess for another time), AMD built a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, which Intel eventually had to license back from AMD.

Long story short, the point I guess I’m trying to make here is that competition between processor manufacturers, even over the same architecture, has been hugely beneficial for consumers. We have gained a lot from having access to Intel and AMD’s prowess for making fast chips, even if at times one was a bit less robust than the other.

Which is why a story from XDA brought a small smile to my face. It described an ongoing legal battle between Qualcomm and Arm over the company’s unusual approach to souping-up its hardware. See, back in 2021, Qualcomm acquired a startup called Nuvia, whose engineers had been involved in the creation of Apple Silicon, and whose entire existence, start to finish, has inspired lots of litigation. Apple at one point sued Nuvia’s founder, Gerard Williams III, over poaching accusations.

Williams was key to the creation of Apple Silicon, and while the company was focused on server CPUs, Nuvia essentially has evolved into Qualcomm’s bid to expand into desktops, adding custom features to the Arm chipset, like neural engines, that have proven essential to Apple’s shift away from Intel. Just one problem with that: Arm, whose stock is now hovering around all-time highs after a couple of relatively down months, says that Nuvia’s agreement is non-transferrable, and Qualcomm’s original agreement doesn’t allow the mobile chip giant to just up and rejigger its SoCs in this way. The legal drama is not new, dating to at least mid-2022, but it is picking up as Qualcomm’s ambitions gain buzz.

Arm has shared some pretty tough language about the whole situation in the days before Qualcomm’s first decent laptops start to hit the market. From Arm’s POV, as reported by Reuters:

Arm's claim against Qualcomm and Nuvia is about protecting the Arm ecosystem and partners who rely on our IP and innovative designs, and therefore enforcing Qualcomm's contractual obligation to destroy and stop using the Nuvia designs that were derived from Arm technology.

If you look up comments about this story, you’ll see sides are already starting to form—many defending Qualcomm, many others defending Arm, which has ambitions to create licensable desktop processors of its own; Qualcomm’s unique twist on the market gets in their way.

Next question: Will Arm laptop chips mean upgradeable Arm desktop chips at some point? Possibly? Maybe? A blogger can dream, right? (Fidel Fernando/Unsplash)

We don’t know what exactly is going to happen just yet—something tells me it will not involve 'enforcing Qualcomm's contractual obligation to destroy and stop using the Nuvia designs,' as the cat is already so far out of the bag at this point that it would cause damage to the entire PC industry.

But what I do think this means for the average consumer is that, at least in terms of the processor you get in your laptop or mini PC, odds are high that there will be a lot of competition over what chip actually ends up in your machine. And the result will be lower prices, along with better devices.

Honestly, competition of this nature will do nothing but benefit the consumer by giving them lots of choices they didn’t have before—along with, potentially, cheaper options. For people who don’t want to spend $2,000 on a new laptop, this is a win.

I do think this is a moment very similar to Cyrix and AMD nipping at Intel’s heels, casually undermining Intel’s ship-steering ways. In Arm’s mind, Qualcomm just ruined their plans to build a standards-based architecture for the PC by creating a product strong enough to make Arm’s offering less desirable.

In the consumer’s mind, it means that odds are good that they may have a choice between two types of svelte laptops with no fan and all-day better life. If you add Apple back in the mix, three.

More competiton is better for the consumer. Let them fight.