Days of Arm-Qualcomm legal disputes continue, and with new day we get new updates. Gerard Williams III, CEO and founder of Nuvia, also one of the main brains behind Qualcomm's Oryon cores inside Snapdragon X processors, testified before the court that the chip design contains minimal Arm IP despite using the company's instruction set architecture. Williams estimated that "one percent or less" of the final design originated from Arm's IP. Despite Qualcomm using Arm ISA license, the company has very little Arm IP in its SoCs. Most of the Snapdragon X design has been done within Qualcomm's labs, in addition to Nuvia. Williams, who co-founded Nuvia in 2019, explained that while their processors use Arm's Armv8 instruction set, the core design was largely developed from scratch. Nuvia initially secured two non-transferable licenses from Arm: a Technology License Agreement (TLA) and an Architecture License Agreement (ALA).

These agreements allowed the company to develop custom cores while implementing Arm's instruction set. The development team created their own proprietary microarchitecture, including custom data paths and cache systems, rather than using Arm's existing designs. The controversy erupted when Qualcomm acquired Nuvia and announced plans to use the cores in PC processors rather than the initially intended datacenter applications. Arm demanded a renegotiation of licensing terms following the acquisition, which Qualcomm refused, arguing that its existing ALA covered Nuvia's designs. The dispute escalated when Arm revoked Nuvia's licenses in 2022 and terminated Qualcomm's Architecture License Agreement this October. Arm is now seeking the destruction of all Nuvia designs developed before the merger, arguing that the licensing agreements couldn't be transferred through acquisition. Qualcomm builds a case on TLA not being violated since the designs are mostly custom, so we have to see how the ruling proceeds. Arm wants to "hurt" Qualcomm with ALA revoking, and perhaps the final case ends with a settlement, given that Qualcomm is one of Arm's biggest customers.

Arm CEO Rene Haas predicts that SoCs based on the Arm CPU machine architecture will beat x86 in the Windows PC space in the next 5 years (by 2029). Haas is bullish about the current crop of Arm SoCs striking the right balance of performance and power efficiency, along with just the right blend of on-chip acceleration for AI and graphics, to make serious gains in this market, which has traditionally been dominated by the x86 machine architecture, with chips from just two manufacturers—Intel and AMD. On the other hand, Arm has a vibrant ecosystem of SoC vendors. "Arm's market share in Windows - I think, truly, in the next five years, it could be better than 50%." Haas said, in an interview with Reuters.

Currently, Microsoft has an exclusive deal with Qualcomm to power Windows-on-Arm (WoA) Copilot+ AI PCs. Qualcomm's chip lineup spans the Snapdragon Elite X and Snapdragon Elite Plus. This exclusivity, however, could change, with a recent interview of Michael Dell and Jensen Huang hinting at NVIDIA working on a chip for the AI PC market. The writing is on the wall for Intel and AMD—they need to compete with Arm on its terms: to make leaner PC processors with the kinds of performance/Watt and chip costs that Arm SoCs offer to PC OEMs. Intel has taken a big step in this direction with its "Lunar Lake" processor, you can read all about the architecture here.

Microsoft is preparing a big update for its Windows operating system. Currently at version 11, the company is gearing up for the launch of Windows 12, which is supposed to bring a monumental shift in the tectonic plates of the regular PC user experience. Enhanced by AI, the Windows 12 OS should utilize many features like generative AI, large language models, some GPT integration, and many other tools that could benefit AI, like photo editors. The confirmation for the Windows 12 launch coming in 2024 is sourced from the Taiwanese Commercial Times, which analyzed comments from Barry Lam, the founder and chairman of PC contract manufacturer Quanta, and Junsheng (Jason) Chen, the chairman and chief executive of Acer.

Both of them underscored the importance of AI and that AI PCs are coming with the next version of Windows. Supposedly, the launch date for Windows 12 is set for June 2024. In that timeframe, hardware vendors should roll out their SoCs embedding AI processing elements at every silicon block. Qualcomm is set to debut its Snapdragon Elite X SoCs in mid-2024, aligning with the alleged release schedule of Windows 12. With more players like NVIDIA, AMD, and others planning to utilize an Arm instruction set for their next-generation PC chips, we expect to see Windows 12 get full-fledged support for Arm ISA and treat it like a first-class citizen in the OS.

During the Q3 2023 earnings call, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger was answering some questions from analysts regarding the company's future and its position on emerging competition. One of the most significant problems the company could face is the potential Arm-based chip development not coming from x86 vendors like Intel and AMD. Instead, there could be fierce competition in the near future with the recently announced Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X, possible NVIDIA Arm-based PC processor, and in the future, even more Arm CPU providers that Intel would have to compete against in the client segment. During the call, Pat Gelsinger noted that "Arm and Windows client alternatives, generally, they've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business. And we take all competition seriously. But I think history as our guide here, we don't see these potentially being all that significant overall. Our momentum is strong. We have a strong roadmap."

Additionally, the CEO noted: "When thinking about other alternative architectures like Arm, we also say, wow, what a great opportunity for our foundry business." If the adoption of Arm-based CPUs for Windows PCs becomes more present, Intel plans to compete with its next-generation x86 offerings like Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and even Panther Lake in the future. As stated, the CEO expects the competition to manufacture its chips at Intel's foundries so that Intel can provide a platform for these companies to serve the PC ecosystem.

Thanks to the information from Windows Report, we have received numerous details regarding Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon Elite X chip for laptops. The Snapdragon Elite X SoC is built on top of Nuvia-derived Oryon cores, which Qualcomm put 12 off in the SoC. While we don't know their base frequencies, the all-core boost reaches 3.8 GHz. The SoC can reach up to 4.3 GHz on single and dual-core boosting. However, the slide notes that this is all pure "big" core configuration of the SoC, so no big.LITTLE design is done. The GPU part of Snapdragon Elite X is still based on Qualcomm's Adreno IP; however, the performance figures are up significantly to reach 4.6 TeraFLOPS of supposedly FP32 single-precision power. Accompanying the CPU and GPU, there are dedicated AI and image processing accelerators, like Hexagon Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which can process 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS). For the camera, the Spectra Image Sensor Processor (ISP) is there to support up to 4K HDR video capture on a dual 36 MP or a single 64 MP camera setup.

The SoC supports LPDDR5X memory running at 8533 MT/s and a maximum capacity of 64 GB. Apparently, the memory controller is an 8-channel one with a 16-bit width and a maximum bandwidth of 136 GB/s. Snapdragon Elite X has PCIe 4.0 and supports UFS 4.0 for outside connection. All of this is packed on a die manufactured by TSMC on a 4 nm node. In addition to marketing excellent performance compared to x86 solutions, Qualcomm also advertises the SoC as power efficient. The slide notes that it uses 1/3 of the power at the same peak PC performance of x86 offerings. It is also interesting to note that the package will support WiFi7 and Bluetooth 5.4. Officially coming in 2024, the Snapdragon Elite X will have to compete with Intel's Meteor Lake and/or Arrow Lake, in addition to AMD Strix Point.