Why Arm's ban on Huawei will not have any substantial effect?

Huawei can rely on its existing ARMv8 licenses for a long time, long enough to wait until this wave of technology embargo ends.

Today, the technology embargo Huawei faces in the United States has reached a new global level.

According to the BBC, Arm, a British technology company wholly owned by SoftBank, sent an internal letter to employees, requiring them to cease all contracts, technical support and business dealings with Huawei and its subsidiaries.

As a chip giant in the mobile computing industry, Arm licenses its chip designs and instruction set architectures to well-known technology companies. Arm's intellectual property is the underlying technology for Qualcomm Snapdragon, Apple's A series processors, and global 4G and future 5G base stations.

Huawei's self-developed Kirin processor also uses Arm's instruction set architecture (ISA). This is because ARM and Intel's x86 are the only two instruction set architectures supported by Android, which is the world's largest mobile operating system.

Under the premise that x86 is not favored, if Huawei wants to pre-install the Android operating system on its mobile phones, it must use an ARM architecture processor, whether it is produced independently or purchased from Qualcomm.

It seems that Huawei's Kirin and smartphone businesses will suffer a huge blow. However, in fact, considering the complexity of the global technology licensing cooperation system and the mechanism adopted by Arm as the licensor, Huawei may be able to survive for a considerable period of time and be able to survive this round of technology embargo.

Due to Arm's licensing model, the company's internal ban on Huawei cannot have a substantial impact on Huawei's ability to continue using ARM architecture to produce processors.

Arm is a chip designer, not a manufacturer. Selling the right to use Arm's intellectual property to global technology companies is the company's business model.

In order to meet the needs of different customers, Arm has designed a complex licensing model.

For example, universities and non-profit research institutions can obtain authorization from Arm through the two basically free models of "academic research" and "DesignStart" for research purposes, and startups can obtain authorization from Arm for the production of prototypes through the two basically free models; for-profit companies can use multiple or one-time use authorizations to obtain authorization for a specified number of products within a specified time; Arm has also launched an annual fee model (subscription) to help companies save large deposit fees.

At the top of the pyramid is the instruction set architecture licensing model adopted by Huawei and 15 other global top technology companies. Under this model, Arm licenses a large amount of instruction set architecture knowledge to Huawei without strict usage restrictions. In this way, companies like Huawei and Apple can customize processors according to their needs. Of course, the licensing fee for this model is also the most expensive.

According to industry insiders, the instruction set architecture licensing model is authorized according to the version of the instruction set architecture, and the effect is absolute.

The latest version of the instruction set architecture released by Arm is ARMv8, which was released in 2011. It focuses on 64-bit processing to reduce power consumption and supports more than 4GB of memory. Huawei obtained the license in 2013 and has since produced a large number of Kirin processors based on ARMv8.

Arm's internal ban cannot affect Huawei's design and development of processors based on the licensed ARMv8 instruction set architecture and install them on mobile phones. Considering that the release time of ARMv9 has not yet been determined, and the processor technology of Qualcomm Snapdragon, Apple and Huawei Kirin is still being updated (even many ARMv7 processors are still in service), ARMv8 is still far from being scrapped.

In theory, Huawei can continue to design and produce Kirin processors using the ARMv8 instruction set architecture until the current round of technology embargo is lifted. This means that the Arm ban will not have a substantial effect on Huawei, at least in the short term.

On the other hand, the official release time of ARMv9 is expected to be between 2020 and 2021, and the time it takes for Arm and the licensee to sign a contract can be as short as half a year or as long as two or three years. Therefore, if Arm terminates the dialogue and cooperation with Huawei now, it will inevitably delay the technological upgrade of Huawei's processors and reduce the market competitiveness of Huawei's future processor products and smartphones.