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ARM licensing requires any vendor to approach ARM for permission to extend the ISA. ARM may well deny that request and instead make it part of the main ISA inst
by olliej 6y ago
ARM licensing requires any vendor to approach ARM for permission to extend the ISA. ARM may well deny that request and instead make it part of the main ISA instead
- skissane 6y agoAre we sure that applies to Apple in particular? I presume the exact terms of Apple's license agreement with ARM are not public, so who knows exactly what is in it. It might have different terms from what ARM offers in the general case.
- londons_explore 6y agoApple execs had by far the upper hand while negotiating the contract than ARM execs did. The entire environment at the time was "we will do whatever apple wants". Shortsighted really considering there weren't really any other options for instruction sets for apple to choose - all this stuff was signed before RISCV was a thing, and PPC and MIPS had pretty high barriers to entry (lots of porting work, lacking SIMD type instructions, and another migration for all apple devs) and poor performance.