Apples and oranges. The companies that design the chips and pays royalties for IP are mostly fabless (with rare exceptions like Intel). The fabs are owned by se

Apples and oranges. The companies that design the chips and pays royalties for IP are mostly fabless (with rare exceptions like Intel). The fabs are owned by separate entities like TSMC, Samsung, SMIC that specialize in the production itself. The fabs don't pay for CPU IP (they sometimes pay for some other basic IP to be able to offer them as standard to their customers, but that doesn't cover CPUs/GPUs). About Samsung, they're on both sides but with separate legal entities. The licensing cost IS usually significant to most fabless companies, who come in many sizes. Most are not as big as Apple or NVidia. The fabless model comes from the very high cost of a modern fab, it allows sharing a fab through many fabless design houses. ARM has the reputation of being cheap, because the typical IT/software people compare them to Intel. And yes, compared to Intel most anyone is cheaper ;) But in the embedded space, which is cost sensitive, ARM is not cheap. It's like what IBM and Microsoft were in IT: nobody got fired for choosing them, and they come with a very powerful ecosystem. Something they make client pay for. In front of ARM, one can find good technical competitors depending on the target market (MIPS, Cortus, Andes, Beyond Semi...). But MIPS ecosystem is smaller, and for the others waaaaay smaller. RISC V has an opportunity in time to provide a good technology, backed by a strong ecosystem, for lower costs. In the embedded space at least, this is a very powerful combination.