Apple makes up less than 5% of Arm's revenue, and Arm can't do anything about it | Hacker News Reader

Apple makes up less than 5% of Arm's revenue, and Arm can't do anything about it

9to5mac.com

52 pointsCharlesW17 comments

Apple has a special deal with Arm because they used to be in a Joint Venture with Acorn

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/05/apple-arm-have-be...

Apple invested $3 million to own 43% of the company. That investment was specifically to fund the design and development of the ARM processor for what would become the Apple Newton MessagePad.

Was VSLI not also a partner since they fabbed the first ARM ???.

There was a BBC series called "Micro Men" which covered the development of ARM, Acorn and the BBC Micro.

Just watched this based on your suggestion and it's really good. Anything like this for the newton or anything else?

The German guy (Hermann Hauser) is still around doing his thing - think living in the UK rubbed off on him.

Roundtable of the 10th year anniversary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaonVYOTSsk

General Magic is always a strong recommendation in the valley

Didn't you read your own link? Jobs sold that 43% in the 90s for $1.1 billion to keep Apple afloat at the time.

The reason that Apple doesn't pay much to ARM is because of the long term "architectural license" that Jobs negotiated in the 2000s well before it was clear that ARM would be the dominant powerhouse in mobile devices. At the time, Intel was pushing a low power version of their Atom chip, and Apple used that as leverage to get a deal from ARM.

That type of license meant that Apple was in full control over their implementation, meaning they don't rely on the rest of ARM's IP like other licensees do. It doesn't use any Cortex designs, for instance, or any thing else in the stack. This means Apple uses less of ARM tech than any other licensee while still remaining ARM compatible.

Didn't both Intel and AMD have big projects for Arm?

Why would we expect it to be significant? Apple is not the largest deployer of ARM chips, and they don't use ARM's CPU designs, only the ISA.

This is before we get to the whole "apple was a founding partner of ARM and has a magic license" (though at this point I have no idea what the actual ownership status is for this, I'm sure someone else on HN can say :D)

What does Apple buy from ARM? The right to use the instruction set? Is it even eligible for licensing?

They bought it already. It’s called an “architectural license. Probably not necessary for just the instruction set but I’m sure there are patents and trademarks involved that mean you wouldn’t want to go forward without them.

This looks like good case of Goldratt's Theory of constraints. - It states, that in all production chains (system graph), exists most important link, which could dictate to pay much extra payment, much more than other (less important) links.

To be strict, even when people said, "Apple required ARM", in reality, Apple have few options to choose from: ARM, x86, Risc-V, and probably some others.

This is not really true in my opinion. Arm could innovate and create some additional IP that would be needed by Apple. I don't think that Apple could have a contract forcing such a low fee for everything they could be created by Arm.

All ARM advancements since ARMv8 come FROM apple. How do you think it happens that anytime ARMv8.X is announced, apple announces "and our phones from 2 years ago and on support ARMv8.X"?

Sources:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368681

https://web.archive.org/web/20210106015533/https://twitter.c...

Evidently this does not apply to ARMv9/SVE, which Apple so far eschews.

> All ARM advancements since ARMv8 come FROM apple.

This made me thinking Apple designed ARMv8 and gave it back to ARM. But from your source:

> Apple contracted ARM to design a new ISA for its purposes.

"We want you to design a new ISA, and btw, it would be extra cool if it happened to look just like this."

That’s theoretically true but very hard to pull off when Apple’s handily outperforming ARM’s CPU design team. It’s unclear what they could build outside of the existing license that would be compelling enough to garner a much greater license share, especially since unless it was patentable Apple would have an upper bound where they’d prefer to build their own.

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