The thing about ARM is that they more or less act like they own the ISA itself, and have a huge patent portfolio. There's an expectation that a company have an

The thing about ARM is that they more or less act like they own the ISA itself, and have a huge patent portfolio. There's an expectation that a company have an "architecture license" to make their own ARM-compatible core from scratch (unless it's an obsolete version of the ISA, e.g. Amber [1]). So while you're right that Cortex per se isn't relevant, there's still a question of whether HiSilicon will legally be able to sell any new ARM-compatible core they design. [1] https://opencores.org/projects/amber https://opencores.org/projects/amber