> And for a long time even a firm with the resources of Qualcomm couldn't outperform Arm.
For a long time (around 2010 to 2016) the internally developed Qualcomm ARM core did outperform the cores you could license from ARM. Qualcomm's internal team fell behind and then Qualcomm started licensing the standard ARM designed cores. Now Qualcomm acquired Nuvia and wants to develop their own custom cores again. We will see how it goes.
Most of the old Qualcomm ARM CPU team went to Microsoft for a few years, got laid off, and now actually work for ARM.
Qualcomm quickly switched to licensing a 64-bit core from ARM which was the Snapdragon 810 that had overheating problems. After that the next Snapdragon 820 with Qualcomm's internally developed 64-bit CPU was fine.
That same team was also developing their ARM server CPU but that whole project got cancelled and the team got let go around 2018.
Qualcomm's Znew proposal is basically an attempt to skirt ARM royalties while keeping a design that is very close to ARM64 (basically, throw out 16-bit instructions then add some new modes and complex 32-bit instructions ARM uses to make up for it).
This smells of them trying to convert Nuvia from ARM to RISC-V so the entire Nuvia case basically goes away before they get forced to pay out a lot of money.
Arm's case isn't about the ISA, it's about use of IP developed by Nuvia with help from Arm under Nuvia's Arm license being used in a way that isn't compatible with the terms of Nuvia's license.
IANAL but I'd be astonished if they get away with that IP making its way into RISC-V designs, if Arm win.
Plus, they won't have anything RISC-V based available in anywhere near the required timescales. They're still arguing about the ISA after all!
ARM's case is that a uarch is necessarily tied to its ISA and that their license isn't transferrable because the contract plainly says so.
If Qualcomm can show up and say "here's our uarch running a different ISA", it disproves that point and at most leaves dispute about some patents where Qualcomm can probably get a quick settlement for far less than the royalties would cost them.
The whole point of Znew is to transform RISC-V into something so similar to ARM64 that they can swap out the decoder and be good to go.
For a long time (around 2010 to 2016) the internally developed Qualcomm ARM core did outperform the cores you could license from ARM. Qualcomm's internal team fell behind and then Qualcomm started licensing the standard ARM designed cores. Now Qualcomm acquired Nuvia and wants to develop their own custom cores again. We will see how it goes.
Most of the old Qualcomm ARM CPU team went to Microsoft for a few years, got laid off, and now actually work for ARM.