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>True. As mentioned above, architecture success != economic success

ARM is enormously economically successful, they're just not a manufacturer and thus not remotely a comparable business to the entirety of Intel, fabs and all.

Apple has a perpetual license from ARM, so it doesn't matter who buys ARM, Apple is all set license wise.

There is a risk that a new buyer might under-invest in the evolution of the architecture and future core designs. This is a small but real risk for Apple because they do base their cores on ARM designs. I've seen the argument before that the only thing Apple uses is the ISA, but that's flat out not true. They customise and tune the design sure, but the basic architecture comes from ARM. The secure enclave, for example, is an ARM design. Lack of investment in that core ARM architecture would be a problem.

On the other hand, it would equally be a problem for all the other ARM licensees, many of which are current direct Apple competitors. For this reason such a risk seems manageable from an Apple perspective. They are in a much better position to compensate for under-investment by the owner of ARM that most of their current competitors.

The exception in Intel, because Apple is soon be a direct competitor of theirs in the desktop and laptop CPU space. Hence my use of the work 'current' in several places above. Ultimately though, Apple seems to be on top of their CPU design game. They're already beating the living pants off their competitors on mobile, no threat there whatsoever, and very well placed to beat Intel on desktop/laptop. Underinvestment in ARM would be in inconvenience, but not an imminent threat.

RISC-V is interesting, but I think there's a lot of wishful thinking happening around it. Most of the really interesting RISC-V chips include proprietary enhancements. Theres a serious tragedy of the commons issue going on there that is already a problem, and that issue isn't going away. The sheer amount of talent and money ARM and their licensee ecosystem, including Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon, etc are throwing at the problem simply can't be matched by the ecosystem around RISC-V.

> Most of the really interesting RISC-V chips include proprietary enhancements.

100% of ARM chips on the market include proprietary enhancements. I don't think that has any bearing on the adoption of the core ISA, unless you can point to cases where a decision was made to avoid RISC-V over licensing an ISA extension.

Isn't the point though that a lot of the enthusiasm around RISC-V is that it's 'free' and that's no longer the case if you're using a proprietary extension. Plus you're looking at much greater possible fragmentation than can happen with ARM?

The big difference is RISC-V has been designed to handle that situation from the start. That's why the ISA is modular.

There's is no modularity when my code requires a specific RISC-V model from vendor X.

RISC-V is modular in the same way Windows or x86 is. Yeah, you can break up opcodes into groups and say there's some kind of probe to find out what groups are present. If your app needs that module then you're out of luck - it needs a different chip. This is nothing special and I don't see why it'd change anything fundamentally, competition wise.

But without buying ARM they might be able to replace ARM with their completely own thing.

But due to regulations around monopolies they likely will have problems if they end up with this after buying ARM.

It also isn't as profitable as Apple, so Apple stack holders might not like it. Even more if Risc-V takes over things might not be that good for ARM so it's another liability for Apple with like not that much benefits.

True, but losing influence on the core component you've pivoted your whole company around, would also be pretty disastrous.

Or in memespeak: scenes when nVidia controls Apple's CPU roadmap.

Nothing stops Apple from giving no craps about ARM CPU roadmaps though. They could just license what they need and build a completely custom everything on top without needing it to be a standard implementation in anyway. So long as whoever is buying ARM is legally mandated to provide licenses - Apple doesn't have to rely on them actually pushing out new CPUs/modules/features.

Historically I think they have just licensed the ISA and built their own thing on top. Maybe they needed the Big.Little stuff in the past but for the future they seem to be confident enough not to need anything from ARM or do it themselves.

My impression (based on a talk with both Simon Seegars - ARM CEO - and Jeff Williams - Apple COO - onstage) is that the relationship is pretty close.

You'd expect that ARM would be pretty responsive to the needs of one of its highest profile customers especially given the history and there is no reason why that would change with any sale.

That's the current story - where ARM is independent. If a competitor buys it and decide to not invest as much in ARM or keep things for themselves that's where this discussion plays off. I was saying it won't matter much for Apple but on the other hand Apple buying them would be a much worse outcome for the industry as a whole.

I'm reasomably sure that Apple does care about the ISA that will soon power 100% (to a reasonable approximation) of its products. My (less than fully clear) point was that there is a strong relationship there and that it's two way.

Sure, Apple has escape routes if things go wrong but it's very very unlikely they will be needed.

So What Stops Apple from hiring the ARM Team and design the next generation of big.LITTLE independent of ARM, without actually purchasing ARM the company?

If reports are correct they did hire some of the Imagination GPU design team.

So they probably could but whilst the relationship is good the best of all worlds is a strong ARM team plus a strong team in-house.

Actually Apple benefits if the ARM Core team isn't very good, the rest of the industry would suffer if Mali GPU's dont get upgrades. Already they are behind iPhones, a poor team at ARM Ensures competition doesn't catchup. But all this might change should NVIDIA buys it and adds their own GPUS to the SOC.

Lots of existing GPU alternatives already - including Nvidia (Tegra) so can't see this as a game changer.

Nvidia Tegra is a rent seeking expensive chip. Nvidia has a habit of stopping people from using certain chips through EULA. None of the car manufacturers are using Nvidia Tegra in their autonomous drives for this reason. Even Tesla which started out with Tegra stopped using it.

I think if someone anyone who buys a 32+ Billion dollar company would want to get returns from it, so surely they won't stop investing. The problem really is if it is someone like NVIDIA then they have this rent seeking behaviour. Which almost everyone is trying to run away from. For instance In the cloud NVIDIA shuns the usage of its commodity GPU's through the use of EULA and force you to buy there expensive and overpriced Cloud GPU solution. This kind of behaviour effectively puts NVIDIA in the category of Ransomware. So I am only concerned that Nvidia doesn't buy it. Anyone else is fine.

> Anyone else is fine.

Even Qualcomm?

Well Yeah forgot about them, Qualcomm too has this rent seeking behaviour with their Modems where they ask for a share of the profits from the phones. Maybe someone from the industry who doesn't rent seek.

> So long as whoever is buying ARM is legally mandated to provide licenses

Why would they? With Intel, AMD, IBM with PowerPC, etc. CPU ISAs are not a monopoly.

Whoever buys ARM might want to do that to start cranking up licensing fees, and might not give a damn if this results in customer loses.

If you have a perpetual license like Apple and many others do - that's a mandate to honor it forever.

The question is at which price. Those mandates _never_ fix the price. At best, they might restrict how often ARM is allowed to raise it, and maybe even by how much, but that would be it.

Or Nvidia raises the license fees to crazy levels. Maybe the contract terms prevent that? If not that would cause some big problems for a few years as companies scramble to find alternatives or design in house.

I would imagine Apple had themselves protected before the SoftBank acquisition.

> Or Nvidia raises the license fees to crazy levels

ARM was founded as a joint venture between Apple and Acorn, and Apple funded, helped design, and built their first joint ARM chip (the 610), and the ARMv3 architecture. I'd say they have a special relationship. They're the first licensee and like all the big names (Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc.) have a far more permissive architectural license that allows them to extend the ISA or modify ARM cores as long as they comply fully with the ARM architecture. They also hold a lot of related patents.

So Apple is the last company that should worry about licensing (nothing to lose), or be interested in buying ARM (nothing to gain).

> True, but losing influence on the core component you've pivoted your whole company around, would also be pretty disastrous.

It doesn't seem to have hurt Apple in any of their past transitions.

The fact that Apple could improve their vertical integration by switching to their own silicon, doesn't mean that they need to control every single aspect of it. That rarely happens.

Also, any move by Nvidia to specifically hurt Apple would be not only detrimental to their own business, but likely an easy target for a lawsuit.

They likely have existing binding contracts with ARM, due to which they don't have to worry about that.

Is there a risk NVIDIA could change the licensing terms to ARM's detriment?

Do you mean Apple’s detriment?

yes

> I am bullish on Risc-V and think there's a good chance we will all eventually converge to that.

I'm very hopeful for the mill. I think they have a good 15-20 years left to get their stuff together before we can definitively say they've succeeded or failed. Barring that, though, riscv is quite nice. 'Specially the vector instructions—so much nicer than simd.