Cortex-X4 is Arm’s flagship core, or mega-core, which delivers an average 15% performance improvement over last year’s X3 core while reducing power consumption by 40% at the same frequency.

The physical size of Cortex-X4 has been increased by less than 10%, making it the most efficient Cortex-X core ever. 2MB of L2 cache size delivers higher performance, as well as increasing the number of Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) from 6 to 8, adding an additional branch unit (3 total), adding an additional multiply-accumulator unit, and pipelining floating point and square root operations.

The Cortex-A720 is Arm’s performance core, with a 20% increase in core efficiency and improved performance at the same power as last year’s A715. The A720 core is a balance of performance and power, with four to six of these cores typically used in the chip. The A720 core also features front-end improvements such as shorter pipeline lengths, optimized branch prediction, and streamlined floating-point division and square root operations.

The Cortex-A520 is Arm’s efficiency core, offering a 22% improvement over last year’s A510 core for the same performance. The A520 core also optimizes branch prediction on the front end and removes or scales back some performance features.

In addition to CPU cores, Arm has also updated the Dynamic Shared Unit (DSU-120), a module that integrates multiple CPU cores with an L3 memory system, control logic and external interfaces to form a multi-core cluster. The DSU-120 has several improvements over the DSU-110, such as support for up to 14 CPU cores (up from 12) and up to 32MB of L3 cache.

Arm says these new CPU cores are designed to respond to the changing needs of the mobile device market, which seeks not only higher performance but also better efficiency, security and scalability. With Android’s increasingly stringent requirements for 64-bit applications, Arm believes the 64-bit transition is “mission accomplished” and that 32-bit applications no longer need to be supported.

These new CPU core designs are expected to appear in new chips late this year or early next year, and MediaTek has already said it will use the technology in its next-generation products.

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ARM sues major customer Qualcomm

At the heart of the conflict is Nuvia, a chip startup acquired by Qualcomm last year for $1.4 billion. ARM claims that Nuvia develops chip designs under an ARM license that cannot be transferred to Qualcomm without consent.

Lawsuits over intellectual property and contracts are common in the semiconductor industry. But the lawsuit between ARM and Qualcomm is a major conflict over the ability to compete for chip designs. It could have a major impact on chip startups and open a path for the adoption of an open-source architecture alternative to ARM.

In reality, ARM’s relationship with Qualcomm is not as good as it seems; they are partners, but they also compete fiercely in private. This lawsuit also reveals the delicate relationship between the two companies.

Partners, but also enemies
ARM chips have been gaining ground in recent years because they are more energy efficient than the x86 chips made by Intel and AMD. 29 billion ARM chips will be shipped in 2021, including the main chips used in Apple’s iPhone, Mac and iPad.

Companies such as Apple obtain instruction set architecture (ISA) licenses from ARM and then design their own physical processor circuits to execute ISA instructions. Historically, other companies such as Qualcomm have also purchased the rights to use the complete core design, or Cortex core, from ARM, which reports $2.7 billion in licensing and royalty revenue in 2021.

ARM Cortex chips

However, there is a conflict between ARM’s architecture licensing business and its own CPU design business, as companies such as Qualcomm that license ARM’s architecture develop their own processors and compete with ARM’s CPU design business. MediaTek, for example, uses ARM’s CPU designs.

When Nvidia announced its $40 billion acquisition of ARM in 2020, the chip industry immediately split into two camps: MediaTek, Broadcom and Marvell, which use ARM CPU designs, supported the acquisition, and Qualcomm and Intel, which developed their own processors, opposed it. Among them, Qualcomm’s opposition was the loudest.

In a document outlining the acquisition deal late last year, ARM emphasized that while Qualcomm is a licensee of ARM’s architecture, the company uses its own team of engineers to develop proprietary CPU designs and does not use ARM’s CPU designs, and that the two parties are in direct competition.

“ARM’s architecture licensees, such as Qualcomm, compete head-to-head with licensees such as MediaTek that use ARM’s own CPU designs. As a result, these architecture licensees will benefit from the declining competitiveness of ARM’s designs and from ARM’s reduced investment in its own engineering teams. They will also benefit if ARM is forced to remain independent and has to scale back its R&D to please the public market.” ARM explained.

In a statement, Qualcomm general counsel Ann Chaplin said the dispute was a departure from the “long and successful relationship” the two companies have built. “ARM ignores the fact that Qualcomm has broad, well-established licensing rights covering its custom-designed CPUs, and we believe these rights will be affirmed,” Chaplin said. Chaplin said.

In a statement, ARM said the company “had no choice but to file a lawsuit against Qualcomm and Nuvia to protect our intellectual property and business and to ensure that our customers can legally use ARM architecture products.

Qualcomm’s expansion path blocked
Qualcomm acquired Nuvia because it wanted its chips to outperform off-the-shelf ARM processor designs, particularly to compete with Apple’s highly efficient custom ARM cores, a startup founded by former Apple and Google engineers that was developing a server chip with a customizable core based on an architectural license. It also used ARM’s core design.

Qualcomm CEO introduces Snapdragon chips

With the acquisition of Nuvia, Qualcomm is putting Nuvia at the heart of its smartphone and PC strategy, using Nuvia’s cores to boost PC chip performance and give its laptop processors, due as soon as 2023, a better counterweight to Apple’s M-series homegrown chips.

But ARM says Qualcomm has the architecture license but needs ARM’s consent to buy and use Nuvia’s custom core design. ARM has terminated Nuvia’s license in March this year after the two sides failed to communicate.

Alternative Architectures
If ARM’s arguments are upheld in court, Qualcomm’s entire chip strategy could change. However, Qualcomm may have another path to follow.

Karl Freund, founder and analyst at Cambrian AI Research, speculated that Qualcomm might try to use RISC-V, an open-source alternative to the ARM instruction set. ARM had told regulators last December that “the momentum for RISC-V is accelerating” and that older Vendors are increasingly using it to replace ARM’s instruction set. A handful of startups are currently developing CPU cores based on the RISC-V architecture, but it is not yet being used in popular smartphones, which currently use all ARM architecture chips.

However, ARM’s efforts to strengthen IP ownership with long-time partners may prompt companies developing custom ARM cores to reconsider open source alternatives.

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