Personally, I think Arm is setting up a sale to Apple. If Arm makes things uncomfortable enough from a PR perspective, they can persuade apple to buy the whole company
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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Wouldn’t it be still be billion of dollars considering the number of devices Apple produce?
Less than $134 million if the article is correct in saying that Apple accounts for less than 5% of ARM's revenue.
At a royalty of $0.30 per chip, Apple would need to order over 3.33 billion chips for ARM to hit a billion in sales.
That math still isn't mathing. There are more ARM chips then just the CPU in Apple devices.
Apple was one of the founding investors in ARM in the early 90s. One of the first big ARM products available to the public was the Apple Newton.
They also probably sell more ARM chips than anyone, so they make it up in quantity--ARM is still doing well with what they get from them. I wish I made something that Apple would pay me 30 cents for and put into literally every product they make.
ARM and Apple also just signed a deal to extend the license until 2040 under current terms, so if ARM really wanted more royalties they could've pushed for them.
On the other hand, why would ARM want to kill the golden goose? Apple really brought ARM into the mainstream in a big way, and showed that its capabilities weren’t limited to low powered mobile devices.
ARM was originally a joint venture of british Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI. There will be no ARM without investment from Apple back then. Their history goes all the way back and Apple used their ARM processor in the Newton back in 1997.
It it is still incredibly good deal for ARM to get all the fees for selling instruction sets. Apple still needs to design their processors themselves and pay for manufacturing.
This may change in the future when RISC-V may or may not take over. But it seems ARM will be ok for next 18 years with Apple contract.
Apple makes less than 5% of their revenue, how is it an incredible deal for them? And how are they going to be ok for the next 18 years if Apple makes such a small percentage of their revenue?
Everything else is using or moving to ARM other phones, laptops, servers, IOT devices, cars, etc.
ARM wouldn’t be the default architecture for all mold devices if it were not for Apple. Texas Instruments was a big player early on and there were others but now it’s basically ARM.
Because a big portion of ARM's other revenue Apple has set up the foundations for. They set the foundations for ARM on mobile devices with Newton - then perfected it with iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc. Then, in an industry-defining shift, Apple became the first major player in the industry to successfully push ARM onto Laptops/Desktops and have any sort of market for doing so.
ARM is going to be just fine - the only viable alternative is RISC V which as it stands is immature and not very usable. Giving Apple a break on royalties is a sensible option if Apple is creating a ton of new business - which they are. Apple revitalizing ARM on desktop/laptop is creating a ton of new business as competitors do what they always do and look to copy Apple.
ARM is mostly attorneys and engineers. They don’t produce chips, they don’t need expensive end user support, they don’t have the same types of expenditures most companies have to deal with. They are exclusively B2B sales.
They are very happy with apple because apple showcases what ARM IS can do and in turn generates lots of hype. Do you think all those comparisons between the A series chips and Qualcomm every generation are for nothing? Or apple silicon standing up against Intel desktop?
Besides the long history between those companies, Apple also has an architectural license, so they just take the ARM instruction set and completely build their SoC including the different CPU Cores themselves.
Other ARM licensees often don’t design the entire chip themselves, but instead use the ARM-developed CPU cores of the different Cortex families and maybe also the Mali GPUs and other adjacent ARM chip designs for periphery, memory etc. so they not only buy the license rights to the ARM instruction set, but also readily designed SoC components as well.
Those licenses are usually more expensive, but lets you make you SoC much faster and you don’t have to design you CPU and maybe GPU and whatnot yourself. Apple goes through all that trouble to maintain full control over their SoC, so it makes sense that they pay less royalties to ARM because they don’t need to use any of the ARM Cortex design and such.
I think Apple had (or might still have) a similar deal for their GPUs, they licensed the PowerVR GPU architecture from Imagination Technologies but I believe they have been using custom GPUs for a while now
You mean Apple didn't just call it quits when ARM had a bad quarter or two over the course of 25 years? /s
So, that would be less than $110,000,000 per annum (for iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, and Apple Watches). If AirPods also use ARM SoCs (which is probably the case), then it could be 135M instead.
people forget apple docent pay the core and graphics IP because they make their own
Even if this is a sweetheart deal every apple device uses an ARM based chip so they are still probably making a tens of millions if not a couple hundred million in royalties from just Apple per year
This is disgusting. They need to pay more. It’s not fair to other co pansies. Apple needs to be investigated for anti trust
ARM probably gets more out of the "free" advertising than the royalties
Imagine how different this would have been if Nvidia had been allowed to purchase arm.
Fun fact: ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine and was used in the Acorn Archimedes family of British home computers in the 1980s and early 90s.