Wireless technology is a patent minefield. CPUs generally aren't because the techniques for internals are old, and internal design, manufacturing, and especial

Wireless technology is a patent minefield. CPUs generally aren't because the techniques for internals are old, and internal design, manufacturing, and especially validation (where intel fell flat lately) methodologies dominate the costs and quality. For much of ARM's recent volume use in MCUs and slightly larger embedded devices, there is credible threat from first party usage of RISC-V (see WD, Nvidia). Access to the ISA itself can be of high value.. see x86 and s390x for prime examples. Although I don't really see how ARM could pull that off outside being an acquisition like this, and making the licensing process onerous enough that people move to buying chips from nvidia instead of doing their own designs. In such a scenario, RISC-V can become a credible threat to phones too, and the server thing pundits keep pushing for the past 15 years never happens. So there is a lot of value here, but it's pretty hard to grow as a pure licensing play as ARM has been since there are many risks and opportunities for price compression.