this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Open standard CPU instruction set. Meaning people can design new chips for it without needing to enter an expensive license agreement.
I would have thought the license agreement would be one of the least expensive parts of making modern high-performance chips.
Quite the opposite. Well, sort of.
It's easy to get a licence, you just need money. Lots of money.
That's if you can get a licence. Intel only licensed to AMD because the USA military requires two vendors.
ARM charges an, err, arm and a leg.
Intel licensed to Cyrix (now VIA) as well, and it wasn't the military but IBM that wanted more suppliers
Oh yeah, I even had a VIA! What happen to them?
That was all from unreliable memory. TY for the error correction.
Tbh the biggest saving from this that I've actually heard was time saving some 6 months or even potentially saving legal costs during development. Which for a budget starting closer to nothing,like academics, open source, or early start ups, any cost is barrier.
It's actually very lucrative scheme. For example, you'll need to get some licenses to some Qualcomm patents before you can even buy their Snapdragon chips.
If you have the order volume, enough capital to book fab capacity and a solid margin, kind of. These agreements are often done in cents per chip with minimum volume amounts, this is why you see most complicated ARM SoCs targeted at the smartphone market first and trickle down into lower margin products later.
This is the consequences of only being able to get your licence from one vendor.