The comment above is talking about ARM's business model, which Intel on Itanic definitely didn't have, Sun didn't have for SPARC (they later freed it, after it was no longer commercially relevant), and MIPS as a company didn't follow, either.
The 68K line was the Itanium of it's time. It overpromised and underdelivered and was crushed by the 286 and 386. Many vendors made machines based on it (Atari ST, Amiga, Mac, Sun Microsystems, Sinclair QL, ...) and all of those vendors either went out of business or transitioned to RISC architectures in a hurry. It was one of the many near death experiences the Mac platform had.
It was more successful than the beautiful losers such as the TMS9900, iAPX 432, i860, NS32000, but it hit the end of track and left everyone in the lurch.
But I think a lot of this usage goes back to the days where embedded CPU families had been a lot more fragmented, and companies usually picked one family of their favorite supplier (based on pricing, fulfilling the use-case, etc) and then just sticked to it due to code not being particularly portable.
Since that time the amount of CPU families that are actually used shrank drastically, and it's a lot more likely that all of those use-cases just pick ARM.
ARM as an architecture may be on solid ground, but their future as a company may be uncertain given that their IP seems to have been appropriated by the CCP.
On the other hand, there's a global supply chain appetite for cheap products including CPU's. Upstream commits aren't required to dump cheap CPU's on the market or to develop compute intensive businesses around them that undercut the competition on price.
High-end CPUs, hardly. That would require significant design efforts to keep up with ARM's development.
Not that it'd be impossible for China to develop their own strong processor-designing forces, driven commercially or by the state. But so far it seems far from a trivial task.
We're talking about instruction sets with ARM, correct? It's not anywhere near the level of investment as next generation litho tech for a chip foundry?
I don't underestimate the ability to innovate. Stolen tech can be improved just as well as in-house R&D'd tech.
Soon, those companies will move beyond China as well.
Even Intel had trouble surviving on 14nm, hence all the contra-revenue spent to directly subsidize Intel tablets (whether they were $100 HP Stream Windows tablets, or $50 Walmart special Android tablets) to try and not get locked out of that space.
Well, maybe the fact that not so long ago it had none of that and it clearly looks like both the company and the political regime aren't having many problems getting their hands on all the missing pieces.
If the smartphone market is an indicator, too bad that this will just mean that the majority of OEMs will just buy their chips from ARM china and thus demand for ARM IP will expectedly drop, and meanwhile this IP appropriation will just be used to develop independent design capabilities.
I'm really not sure what that means. Does ARM china have fabs?