Good. It’s always insane to me that they get 1% of the iPhone CPU cost of ~$68 or something there around.
There was a lawsuit in 2020 or 2021 where some evidence was unsealed showing ARM gets 1% of the CPU cost. I can’t recall how that CPU cost was calculated - but I believe that was a part of their deal through the early 30’s. That’s less than a dollar per iPhone.
Not that I wouldn't want Apple to pay ARM more, but,
a) Apple is getting really good at switching CPU architectures when needed.
b) Don't they already have a forever licence to the ARM ISA (since the 90s/Newton) as well as a substantial in-house team? I guess the renegotiations are about future/roadmapped ARM archictural enhancements.
Maybe they're greedy or maybe they see the long game is that their architecture licensing business is in serious jeopardy from RISCV. So, if you can't beat em, join em.
Maybe they'll eventually make their own RV core designs too.
This feels like a religious belief. Somehow everyone captures exactly the value they create - no more, and no less. Amazing how perfect every transaction must be to ensure this is always true.
arm pushing for a bigger cut makes sense if they think they're leaving money on the table, but it also shifts incentives for ecosystem trust. do we expect more 'platform tax' behavior (tooling, certification, reference stacks) vs pure isa licensing? also curious how this interacts with risc-v on the low end and apple/qualcomm doing more in-house on the high end.
RISC-V could completely eat ARM for lunch if they try to jack up fees under the guise of "value extraction", and not through true value creation.
In 2 years from this date, I fully expect the safety critical RISC-V chips like the forthcoming High Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC) from Microchip, Inc.[0], and derivatives [1] [2] leveraging SiFive IP[3], and other RISC-V competitors [4] to take a dominant position in Space, Aerospace, Aviation, and potentially other less cost-sensitive industries where RTOS dominate.
This raises a few questions in my mind:
Could that extend to vehicles and other use-cases?
Will we see more derivatives with even higher performance beyond the already announced PolarFire2 designed specifically for terrestrial use?
I don't know how sensitive their overall BOMs are to high priced reliable chips designed for fault tolerance...
I don't know how fast the quality of the mass market chinese RISC-V chips will ascend the perceived quality gap, and expand offerings into newer profiles [5]
Where will the toolchain for RISC-V be on a specific chip basis?
> In 2 years from this date, I fully expect the safety critical RISC-V chips like the forthcoming High Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC) from Microchip, Inc.[0], and derivatives [1] [2] leveraging SiFive IP[3], and other RISC-V competitors [4] to take a dominant position in Space, Aerospace, Aviation, and potentially other less cost-sensitive industries where RTOS dominate
They already are in India [0][1], but SiFive helped build a portion of the ecosystem in India as well [2].
I'm sure there are similar applications in China but I'd need help pointing to a specific initiative. I know Tenstorrent is hitching their wagon to China especially after poaching Arm China leadership.
> Could that extend to vehicles and other use-cases
They already are in India [3][4] - this is something the US and Indian governments as well as American and Indian VCs and corporations are collaborating on together. One such collaboration has already IPOed [5], seen combat, and begun helping develop capacity within America [6]. And another has recently announced a mega-raise with General Catalyst [7]. RISC-V design is on the roadmap as well in this relationship.
I'm not sure I buy Arm's argument. It is hard to describe the degree to which policymakers in China [0][1], India [2][3][4], and South Korea [5] are all heavily promoting RISC-V in order to reduce vendor dependency as well as build their own competitive and domestic design ecosystems.
Additionally, a significant portion of Arm's China, US, and India engineering and product leadership has left to work on RISC-V startups and companies now.
That said, I can see Arm being leveraged by other Softbank owned companies like Ampere (which they already do) and Graphcore, with an eventual merger of all 3 into some form of a mega-corp due to operational overlaps and efficiencies, but this would be defensive in nature given the degree to which the industry has aligned with funding a RISC-V ecosystem and how RISC-V's governance and leadership consists of major players and leaders in the chip design space.
---
Edit: Can't reply
> It is also a bad look when they sue Qualcomm for selling chips in a way that Arm does not like.
That's why Qualcomm is also betting on RISC-V as well after acquiring Ventana [6] and is participating in India's DeepTech initiative [7], which has been targeting RISC-V startups as well as Renesas [8] in Japan+India taping out a 3nm RISC-V processor for automotive and IoT usecases. And also why FuriosaAI in SK has been working on RISC-V, as well as the multitude of fabless players in China.
It's the same thing that happened with IBM POWER vs x86 decades ago with an added sovereignty component.
---
Edit 2: After thinking some more, I think a case could be made for Arm to survive but not thrive in the same manner as Minitel continued to kick around for so long due to France's stress on technological sovereignty. Long term, I think RISC-V will eat a large portion of Arm's commodity and embedded computing market share, but Arm (and moreso Softbank) is attempting to position itself as critical to British [9], Malaysian [10] (they remain a major semiconductor hub), and even Indian [11] attempts at design sovereignty.
I can see a British-Japanese alignment around eventually merging Softbank properties like Arm, Graphcore, Ampere, and Rapidus into a British-Japanese version of Intel such that Graphcore+Ampere leverage Arm's ISA for HPC and Embedded/Telecom usecases respectively and Rapidus becomes their foundry.
Additionally, I can see the Japanese government pushing it's players to heavily leverage Arm as well - especially given that all the major players in Japan already cooperate, have an ownership stake in, or are partially owned by Softbank.
Yes, ARM did lose the case, but I attribute that to an ignorant judge as the license wasn’t transferable to Qualcomm from Nuvia. Regardless, ARM will have their day when it comes time to license the next ARM architecture version.
Orthogonal question for Dang or someone who knows -
Do downvotes, account flaggings, and/or high posting volumes trigger this? I run into it frequently whenever I get downvotes. I almost never used to get this before 2022 or so.
I have experienced this issue some time too - I think if you post some "controversial" comment (judged by many quick upvotes and downvotes) it triggers a "cooling down" period before you can post a reply to your immediate child comments in the thread (or it could be mod-triggered). This ensures you don't dominate the thread, and allows a conversation with other participants to develop. Based on how others react to the comments, I assume it also gives the mods a better idea if they need to intervene. I found it a minor annoyance at first, but have learnt to appreciate it - thoughtful comments (with careful moderation) from a diverse group of people is what makes a community like this valuable.
ARM is an incompatible pile of mess. On an (X86) PC you can tranfer your disk, as it is, to a new X86 architecture and it will run.
On ARM, every processor has its own bootloader, blobs needed for initialisation. Even the systems have different architecture.
In the end, you need a special software setup, which is not supported more than a few years. See phones, Raspberry PIs and derivatives, Chromebooks.
AMD has CPU, GPU, NPU, FPGA, NIC, DPU... They seem well positioned. The Arm ecosystem has everything you could want but Arm themselves are taking some time to create their in-house CPU and TPU.
That's good news. A system for customers (and themselves) to conveniently tightly mix and match all those computing modes is a great competitive/value move.
If ARM wanted a bigger cut then they should have been fabricating their designs years ago instead of licensing their IP. They would have owned the Android SoC market.
There was a lawsuit in 2020 or 2021 where some evidence was unsealed showing ARM gets 1% of the CPU cost. I can’t recall how that CPU cost was calculated - but I believe that was a part of their deal through the early 30’s. That’s less than a dollar per iPhone.
a) Apple is getting really good at switching CPU architectures when needed.
b) Don't they already have a forever licence to the ARM ISA (since the 90s/Newton) as well as a substantial in-house team? I guess the renegotiations are about future/roadmapped ARM archictural enhancements.
Keep on doing IPR focussed design.
Grow deeper roots into a foundry, work on integration of the tech into FPGA and big chip/platter stuff for AI.
If AI tanks, the work will find a value point. We all want more memory and more execution cycles per clock tick be they on one ALU or many.
Lots of work to come in optical related areas. ARM has green fields to dig, beyond the instruction set.
After following that drama, it's difficult to see ARM as anything but a greedy profiteer.
Maybe they'll eventually make their own RV core designs too.
No, they capture exactly the value they create.
As a long time (40 years) subscriber to The Economist, I expect better of them.
Analogous to discussion 3 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46994869#46995258
We're fast approaching 1 trillion Arm CPUs manufactured - because it was a good design for a good price.
No doubt unprecedented for something so complex to be produced in such volume. I predict that nothing else will ever achieve such scale.
In 2 years from this date, I fully expect the safety critical RISC-V chips like the forthcoming High Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC) from Microchip, Inc.[0], and derivatives [1] [2] leveraging SiFive IP[3], and other RISC-V competitors [4] to take a dominant position in Space, Aerospace, Aviation, and potentially other less cost-sensitive industries where RTOS dominate.
This raises a few questions in my mind:
Could that extend to vehicles and other use-cases?
Will we see more derivatives with even higher performance beyond the already announced PolarFire2 designed specifically for terrestrial use?
I don't know how sensitive their overall BOMs are to high priced reliable chips designed for fault tolerance...
I don't know how fast the quality of the mass market chinese RISC-V chips will ascend the perceived quality gap, and expand offerings into newer profiles [5]
Where will the toolchain for RISC-V be on a specific chip basis?
Is Nvidia likely to expand their usage of RISC-V?
[0] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...
[1] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...
[2] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...
[3] https://www.sifive.com/
[4] https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765
[5] https://docs.riscv.org/reference/profiles/rva23/_attachments...
They already are in India [0][1], but SiFive helped build a portion of the ecosystem in India as well [2].
I'm sure there are similar applications in China but I'd need help pointing to a specific initiative. I know Tenstorrent is hitching their wagon to China especially after poaching Arm China leadership.
> Could that extend to vehicles and other use-cases
They already are in India [3][4] - this is something the US and Indian governments as well as American and Indian VCs and corporations are collaborating on together. One such collaboration has already IPOed [5], seen combat, and begun helping develop capacity within America [6]. And another has recently announced a mega-raise with General Catalyst [7]. RISC-V design is on the roadmap as well in this relationship.
[0] - https://www.iitm.ac.in/happenings/press-releases-and-coverag...
[1] - https://www.isro.gov.in/vikram3201.html
[2] - https://www.sifive.com/blog/sifive-expands-presence-in-india...
[3] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260209VL216/risc-v-automot...
[4] - https://www.mindgrovetech.in/s2401-secure-iot
[5] - https://www.qualcommventures.com/insights/blog/ideaforge-fro...
[6] - https://firstbreach.com/news/first-breach-signs-jv-with-idea...
[7] - https://www.generalcatalyst.com/stories/our-investment-in-ra...
Additionally, a significant portion of Arm's China, US, and India engineering and product leadership has left to work on RISC-V startups and companies now.
That said, I can see Arm being leveraged by other Softbank owned companies like Ampere (which they already do) and Graphcore, with an eventual merger of all 3 into some form of a mega-corp due to operational overlaps and efficiencies, but this would be defensive in nature given the degree to which the industry has aligned with funding a RISC-V ecosystem and how RISC-V's governance and leadership consists of major players and leaders in the chip design space.
---
Edit: Can't reply
> It is also a bad look when they sue Qualcomm for selling chips in a way that Arm does not like.
That's why Qualcomm is also betting on RISC-V as well after acquiring Ventana [6] and is participating in India's DeepTech initiative [7], which has been targeting RISC-V startups as well as Renesas [8] in Japan+India taping out a 3nm RISC-V processor for automotive and IoT usecases. And also why FuriosaAI in SK has been working on RISC-V, as well as the multitude of fabless players in China.
It's the same thing that happened with IBM POWER vs x86 decades ago with an added sovereignty component.
---
Edit 2: After thinking some more, I think a case could be made for Arm to survive but not thrive in the same manner as Minitel continued to kick around for so long due to France's stress on technological sovereignty. Long term, I think RISC-V will eat a large portion of Arm's commodity and embedded computing market share, but Arm (and moreso Softbank) is attempting to position itself as critical to British [9], Malaysian [10] (they remain a major semiconductor hub), and even Indian [11] attempts at design sovereignty.
I can see a British-Japanese alignment around eventually merging Softbank properties like Arm, Graphcore, Ampere, and Rapidus into a British-Japanese version of Intel such that Graphcore+Ampere leverage Arm's ISA for HPC and Embedded/Telecom usecases respectively and Rapidus becomes their foundry.
Additionally, I can see the Japanese government pushing it's players to heavily leverage Arm as well - especially given that all the major players in Japan already cooperate, have an ownership stake in, or are partially owned by Softbank.
---
[0] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260213PD208/arm-risc-v-com...
[1] - https://www.cas.cn/cm/202601/t20260126_5097208.shtml
[2] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260216VL205.html
[3] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=2224839&...
[4] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1820621&re...
[5] - https://m.blog.naver.com/nanambook/223316051806
[6] - https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/12/qualcomm-acqu...
[7] - https://idtalliance.org/
[8] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250923VL201/renesas-3nm-re...
[9] - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-a-sovere...
[10] - https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-malaysia-silicon-vision
[11] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250918VL202/arm-design-chi...
Orthogonal question for Dang or someone who knows -
Do downvotes, account flaggings, and/or high posting volumes trigger this? I run into it frequently whenever I get downvotes. I almost never used to get this before 2022 or so.
Not all ARM use cases need that, but it would be a huge mistake to not develop integrated options.
And also an opportunity to make adjustments to their business model.
On ARM, every processor has its own bootloader, blobs needed for initialisation. Even the systems have different architecture. In the end, you need a special software setup, which is not supported more than a few years. See phones, Raspberry PIs and derivatives, Chromebooks.