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Comment by kayson | Hacker News Reader

Of course they do. No one wants to pay ARMs licensing fees but there isn't really any other marketable option.

It's not just the fees. ARMs licensing terms are fucking annoying. They're militant about their shitty IP so they refuse to license their cores for FPGA based deployments, for instance.

I hear this all the time, but are there any public numbers on how much money is spent on licensing? Are we talking pennies per chip (which adds up) or tens of dollars per shipped device? ARM was going to sell for "only" $40 billion, which makes me think that per device fees are low (there is an ARM chip in everything).

ARM reported 2.7 billion in revenues in fiscal 2021 (I cannot seem to find 2022 results easily).

Thats smaller than I expected for such a prominent company

"2021 licensing (non-royalty) revenues were up 61% to $1.13Bn as our expanded product portfolio and new business models such as Arm Flexible Access gave more customers more reasons and more ways to license Arm technology.

2021 royalty revenues were up 20% to a record $1.54Bn, helped by continuing strong growth of 5G smartphones, more ADAS and IVI chips going into cars, and price increases in 32-bit microcontrollers."

Source: https://www.arm.com/company/news/2022/05/arm-delivers-record...

The royalties are higher on the newer more complex designs, so the 29.2 billion chips number can't really be used to derive a proper price per chip.

Don't even get people started on the perpetual and architectural licensing too.

That doesn't really seem like an emergency.

What's the rough size of the end markets for the devices the chips are in? Like hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue?

46.23 billion for apple. And that's a single manufacturer, albeit potentially the highest revenue one.

I imagine Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. all are also massive core producers despite not making an external product for sale.

So I'd guess trillion(s?) in production of product or internal use, or near enough.

It's not really about the level of the fees.

RISC-V is "permissionless". Grab a core from github, grab the freely available specs, and start working. No up front agreement, no fees down the road. For Arm you have to enter a legal agreement before you can start, and then negotiate licensing for your product.

Also Arm have been acting aggressively recently which doesn't make other customers feel happy: https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/01/qualcomm_arm_cpu/

It's such a single point of failure that it kind of boggles my mind. Seems like the world would become chaotic fast if they just stopped giving out licenses (though I know that some companies like Apple have perpetual licenses)

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