Arm Changes Business Model – OEM Partners Must Directly License From Arm

[sounds]

This is absolutely the moment when ARM changes seats from the "also-ran" and the "cheap garbage" and moves up to the "nobody got fired for buying ARM."

 

x86 is currently in that seat. So they'll sit in it together, I guess?

 

RISC-V is being shoved down into that "cheap garbage" seat.

 

Innovator's dilemma says ARM has about 20 years of the "nobody got fired for buying ARM." And then RISC-V will take over.

[AlexGoesHigh]

I bet Samsung must be regretting killing their custom CPU cores now, but to be fair, at that time nobody expected this to happen. Qualcomm meanwhile must be fast tracking the shit out of their nuvia made cores now.

 

I guess who truly got fucked was mediatek cause at least on their high end chip they still use ARM CPU and GPU design without ever saying a thing about making their own of those two AFAIK.

 

 

[pas008]

So our phones just went up in price? Cause another fee? Wait some TV's too 

[igormp]

Btw, that's only for their A-series CPUs, right? If this also applies to their M lineup then they are fucked and I can't see it working in any way whatsoever.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, igormp said:

Btw, that's only for their A-series CPUs, right? If this also applies to their M lineup then they are fucked and I can't see it working in any way whatsoever.

It will probably affect other series than the A-series (like the X-series) but it should not affect the completely custom architectures like what Apple does with their M series.

[igormp]

29 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

It will probably affect other series than the A-series (like the X-series) but it should not affect the completely custom architectures like what Apple does with their M series.

I meant their M lineup because their microcontroller division, where most of the manufacturers just buy an ARM core and slap their own peripherals all around, and ARM offers no replacement for those custom peripherals and I have no idea if they're going to ban those or not (basically, they'd ban ALL mcus sold this way lol)

[hishnash]

3 hours ago, pas008 said:

So our phones just went up in price? Cause another fee? Wait some TV's too 

Not quite, this is realy a change of were the current fee is applied.  For ARM this change means they will be able to charge different prices depending on were the chips are used but it will also mean the price that OEMs pay for the chips (excluding the fee) will go down since all ARM chips will be much more compatible with each other so you can shop around without needing to re-design and re-write all the rest of your devices firmwere.   

It does make a lot of sense for ARM.   And it draws a nice clear line between the ISA licensing as the ARM chip manufactures. It also ensures that chips made from `unlikeness` sources are much less likly to end up in real products (in the past you could just assume that it was the fault of the manfutuer for not paying ARM but now it is the OEM that sells the final product). I would not be surprised if there are a large number of (lower end) arm M chips out there that skip on proper reporting of volumes to ARM and thus under pay the fees they should be paying.