CPU on fire: Shutterstock Arm and Qualcomm are at loggerheads and in court, which could have some interesting implications for the future of CPU design. The phrase “big company” is somewhat relative in the context of consumer technology, but however anyone looks at it, Qualcomm is a pan-galactic gargle blaster of a corporation. It makes a vast number of the Arm-based CPUs for cellphones, which has made it large enough to be represented on NASDAQ and capable of paying US$1.4bn for chip design house Nuvia in early 2021. Underlying all this is one of those creations of business politics that’s absolutely nothing to do with technology and is almost too dull to consider in detail. The RISC-V architecture is something we have encountered before in the context of the Xianshan processor put together by the Chinese Academy of Science back in 2021. The bad blood reportedly arises from Qualcomm’s involvement in objections to Nvidia’s purchase of Arm.