ARM's new licensing policy may threaten MediaTek and Nvidia's SoC cooperation

ARM’s new licensing policy may threaten MediaTek and Nvidia’s SoC cooperation

ARM’s new licensing policy may threaten MediaTek and Nvidia’s SoC cooperation.

ARM’s current licensing policy states that it charges manufacturers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek royalties for using its CPU designs based on the chip’s average selling price and licensing fees.

In the future, however, there will be a small but very impactful change in the way ARM does business, and it could negatively impact the rumored MediaTek-Nvidia partnership, which has previously been reported to team up to make chips that include more powerful GPUs. chipset.

If ARM licenses the Cortex CPU, existing partners cannot use their own GPUs, ISPs, NPUs and modems.

A new image from the Financial Times mentions ARM’s current and future licensing policies, and Twitter user @korean_riceball uploaded an image that reveals how the British chip designer will make money going forward.

Instead of simply charging licensing and patent fees to the likes of Qualcomm and MediaTek, ARM has added another condition; those entities cannot use their own GPUs, NPUs, modems, or ISPs if they adopt a Cortex design.

Over the years we’ve seen companies like Apple use not only their own CPU designs but also custom GPUs, so does ARM’s latest licensing policy mean that the tech giants won’t be able to use custom designs?

No, because according to the picture, companies like Apple and Samsung are not affected by this decision because they have their own agreement with ARM, which means they are free to use their own ISP, GPU, NPU, modem and other custom chips.

Unfortunately, the same is not true for other companies.

Another Twitter user, @RGcloudS, put together a long thread talking about the implications of this new licensing policy.

In addition to the MediaTek-Nvidia collaboration, he believes these new changes also threaten Qualcomm’s quest to launch a Snapdragon SoC with a custom Oryon core, which will be made possible by the acquisition of Nuvia. The whistleblower mentioned that in order to avoid this situation, companies such as Qualcomm and MediaTek need to register themselves as device manufacturers and build their own factories.

However, ARM knows that this is risky for the two SoC makers and believes that such companies will not take this decision, subjecting them to new changes.

There’s no word on whether Qualcomm will be sued by ARM anytime soon for this policy shift, but we’ll wait for more details to emerge and update our readers accordingly.