It is what Apple has been doing with ARM, but as he said there's only about 10 companies doing this, compared to the hundreds (thousands?) who take the core dir

It is what Apple has been doing with ARM, but as he said there's only about 10 companies doing this, compared to the hundreds (thousands?) who take the core directly from ARM. Even big players like Qualcomm seem to be moving to just requesting tweaks to the Cortex cores. It's much, much easier & cheaper to take the premade core rather than developing your own. But your own custom design gives you the ability to differentiate or really target a specific application. See Apple's designs. Read the Anandtech article, it goes into more detail on the license types. There's also the newer "Built on Cortex" license: https://www.anandtech.com/show/10366/arm-built-on-cortex-license https://www.anandtech.com/show/10366/arm-built-on-cortex-lic...