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I hope you noticed "most". I did not say "the only". There are many, many ARM SoC developers. Very few of them have the right to modify or develop their own ARM

I hope you noticed "most". I did not say "the only". There are many, many ARM SoC developers. Very few of them have the right to modify or develop their own ARM core. It is also a question of what you do with your license. The cores in Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets for example differs quite little from the cores from ARM. Simularly with Samsung Exynos. They are basically A7x with some other big.LITTLE combination. Apple on the other hand have repeatedly shown that they are both willing and capable at doing their own micro architecture. I would like to credit the aquisition of PA Semi for starting this. But they of course are not the only people Apple have added to build competence and capability in this area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

panpanna 6y ago
Not trying to start an argument with you, but this is incorrect. Essentially all major vendors have this license, and essentially all major vendors do their own heavily modified designs. They have different goals,priorities, budgets and abilities but if you buy a COTS soc from a major vendor you can bet your neck it's not original arm hard macro or even a lightly modified custom version. In fact, the only major 64-bit pure-arm soc I can think of right now is the Hisense (Huawei) Kirin 960.