Today · courtroom notes, October 10

Arm's economist admits five v10 licenses; record is pending

On day four of Qualcomm's antitrust trial against Arm in Delaware, according to notes from someone watching in court, Arm's economist conceded under cross-examination that only five architecture licenses for the latest v10 architecture exist worldwide. An architecture license gets you only Arm's instruction set; you design the processor cores yourself, as Apple does and as Qualcomm does for its Oryon cores. That's different from using cores Arm has already designed. The same notes say the judge described architecture-level competition as "strictly Arm and Intel," and that Arm's economist said RISC-V is "barely off the ground" in enterprise data centers; Qualcomm can use its existing contract until 2033, and without a new v10 contract it would be "completely unlicensed" (courtroom notes, 2026-10-10). The note-taker leans toward Qualcomm, these aren't the official transcript, and the numbers need the court record; the judge's remarks in court aren't a ruling, and there is no jury: the judge alone decides this case. If the count holds up, the bar to designing your own Arm cores is narrower than many assume; what to watch is the court record and the eventual ruling. How we checked →

Concept illustration: in a wood-panelled, courtroom-like room with DELAWARE lettered on the back wall, a man in a dark suit stands at a lectern on the left, and a man in a dark jacket sits behind a wooden stand in the centre, looking toward a white-haired man in a black robe seated at a raised bench on the right. In the foreground, a table holds a black chip with pins along its edges, lettered QUALCOMM with Qualcomm on a white label, and beside it a thick red book whose white cover label is lettered ARM and arm.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 12, 2026, alongside 13 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Arm's economist admits five v10 licenses; record is pending." https://secondsource.io/en/news/2026-10-12-3/. Accessed access date.