I’m sure Apple being one of the founders of the joint venture that established ARM has something to do with that.
Initially Apple only contributed $3 million in 1990. If they had bought back some AAPL stock instead it would be worth $1.5 Billion today.
Apples got to have the most ridiculous architectural license and royalty terms ever lol.
Kinda cool to see tho. Does anybody know who else has a full architectural license from ARM? I think Nuvia has one?
Nuvia doesn’t exist anymore. There’s actually an ARM / Qualcomm lawsuit where ARM is trying to invalidate all Nuvia technology brought into Qualcomm because they were under a different licensing agreement that ARM said was voided on Nuvia being merged into Qualcomm.
We’ll see what comes out of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#Architectural_licence
Companies can also obtain an ARM architectural licence for designing their own CPU cores using the ARM instruction sets. These cores must comply fully with the ARM architecture. Companies that have designed cores that implement an ARM architecture include Apple, AppliedMicro (now: Ampere Computing), Broadcom, Cavium (now: Marvell), Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Fujitsu, and NUVIA Inc. (acquired by Qualcomm in 2021).
Qualcomm has an architectural license and used to design their own ARM core in the Snapdragon 800, 805, 820 series. The 810 and later chips use licensed ARM cores. Then Q acquired Nuvia so they are designing their own custom cores again.
Google, Amazon and Microsoft all have fully custom cores in the pipeline. I think Ampere may also have an ISA license from AppliedMicro. Not sure about NXP and Broadcom.
Probably because they’re mainly licensing the instruction set. I’m pretty sure they don’t use the arm designed cores.
The fun fact is that it actually costs more to do this for the licence at least ISA licence is more expensive than the core net list licence, which is more expensive than the implemented core design licence.
If that translates to the royalties, then Apple would pay more per chip than Samsung, and they are paying more than someone using a stock core.
Why? Because they can.
Because anyone whom wants an ISA licence to design their own core from scratch has a ton of money to spend and thus arm charges them more.
The fun fact is that it actually costs more to do this
Do you have a source? IIRC, the move to custom cores was explicitly cited as a concern for ARM’s revenue.
I tried looking, as i’ve read the same thing before and am pretty sure he’s correct, but could not find the source. But I think this should give us a clue of arms value to apple.
“Apple was among a number of large technology companies that that on Tuesday invested $735 million in Arm’s initial public offering.”
Arm makes money from Arm ISA from:
- License Fees
- Royalties
License Fees are an upfront payment to gain access to Arm ISA. The License Fees for ALAs (Architectural License Agreements) are far more expensive than for TLAs (Technology License Agreements, i.e. stock cores)
Royalties are a % per chip sold which are reflective of the level of Arm IP used. The Royalties for ALAs are far lower than for TLAs. That’s because TLAs holders are using far more Arm IP, whereas ALA holders design the cores/IP themselves
Overall royalties make up a far larger portion of Arm’s revenue, e.g. for 2022: $1.7B in royalties vs $1B for “non-royalties”
Hence why Arm has been increasingly concerned about the rise in ALA holders, especially Qualcomm switching back to their ALA
Sources:
Arm’s statements from SoftBank’s Annual Reports
AnandTech, it is very old but Arm hasn’t changed their business model for ages, just the termology
This is the real reason ARM has taken off.
They are making big inroads in the embedded space as well. Pretty exciting to see what they doing in this space.
That’s still 30 cents too much for Tim Apple.
