Being a customer shouldn’t protect a company from lawsuits. ARM feels they have merit here , just like Qualcomm did when they sued Apple. It’s not that rare in the corporate setting to have suits between companies with otherwise amicable relationships.
The optics can still be terrible. Qualcomm (or more accurately, Nuvia, the company they acquired) produced some stunning chips with almost unheard of battery life for a laptop, and Arm are suing them to use their own inferior designs. They even tried to have end user laptops recalled and destroyed! There's no world where this looks good for Arm.
There’s a very clear bias and idolization in this comment of yours which is based on a misunderstanding of the case at hand.
ARM aren’t trying to force Qualcomm to use ARMs cores. They’re trying to force them to update the licensing royalties to make up for the (as ARM sees it) licensing term violations of Nuvia who had a design license for specific use cases.
The part you reference (using ARM designs) is the fallback if Qualcomm lose their design license.
The destruction of the chips is standard practice to request in cases of license and IP infringement .
Qualcomm already had a design license prior to the acquisition of Nuvia. They were doing custom cores back in the original Kryo days which were an in-house custom ARMv8.0-A design.
Their design license doesn’t extend to Nuvia’s IP however according to ARM.
That is the entire crux of the issue. ARM gave Nuvia a specific license, and then Nuvia was acquired which transferred the IP to a license that ARM did not extend it to.
Hypothetically, if Qualcomm have broken their Arm licenses in a way that damages Arm’s business do you think Arm are supposed to just let them carry on? Should Arm say ‘legal action won’t look good so we’ll just let it pass’?
And the fact that Qualcomm got just about everyone to endorse the acquisition ahead of announcing it but didn’t even tell Arm is a bit of a tell.
Arm's major competition is RISC-V. Qualcomm engineers have been joining the important RISC-V committees recently. If Arm beats Qualcomm in the courts, Qualcomm will switch to RISC-V, and then Arm will have won the battle but lost the war.
If Qualcomm loses to Arm in the courts then they have a big problem in 2025 which switching to RISC-V at some point in the future will not solve for them.
They are not suing them to use "inferior designs," you're completely misrepresenting the issue. They are suing them over IP and contract violations. The ISA in question is irrelevant here, you could also get sued by SiFive if you licensed their cores and then did something that SiFive believed violated that license. It's not that deep.
