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This isn’t true. Apple paid licence fees for the very first ARM Ltd processors - ARM would have had no income if they hadn’t. And there is no way that any comp
by klelatti 3y ago
This isn’t true. Apple paid licence fees for the very first ARM Ltd processors - ARM would have had no income if they hadn’t.
And there is no way that any company gets a ‘forever’ and ‘all future IP’ license just because they had an early shareholding.
- wyldfire 3y agoThe "nothing" probably refers to royalties which is true for architectural licensees like Apple. They instead pay for that license which is not sold per-CPU.
- klelatti 3y agoIt was very clear that they meant nothing at all. > Apple pays nothing, because they do not license ARM cores in any way, instead having a full royalty-free license for ARM ISA (and afaik covering updates too) since before ARM got big.
- p_l 3y agoI will admit to being a bit hyperbolic there. Compared to normal ARM licensing, it's way less. Meanwhile I recall start of RISC-V hype being, among other things, Western Digital dropping a ton of investment money into it just to escape ARM license costs.
- klelatti 3y agoWe all get a bit hyperbolic at times! Yes, I'm sure it's a lot less than most customers pay. I remember the WD announcement. They have open sourced the cores now I think. If you're shipping millions of drives those fees will add up.
- brucehoult 3y agoFor values of "now" equal to 2019 https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1 https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1