ARM licensing fee increase could drive some customers to competitors

techspot.com

6 points·thg··5 comments

Who would the competitors be?

MIPS could be a competitor, but AFAIK there is currently no "high-performance" mips processor. An ARM-like roll-your-own model might be feasible, but that would take at least 4-5 years (i'm just speculating).

RISC-V? Maybe, but again, neither tomorrow nor next week.

Regarding Apple... Apple is not stupid when it comes to money. My guess is that Apple probably cut a long-lasting deal with ARM (the company).

At this point though, I wonder why Apple hasn't bought a quota of ARM shares, given how much strategical it is.

PowerPC is still around too, but their problem is that it's either very high-performance (ppc64le / IBM POWER9 & co.) or efficient embedded but also outdated if not straight up dead (powerpc & ppc64 / NXP e-series & IBM 6xx)

But then again, Intel's Atom came from rifling through the design archive, and look at what's in Lakefield now...

Also — NXP already "cross-platform'ed" their QorIQ / Layerscape stuff from PowerPC to ARM, pretty sure if they don't like the license fees they could go back. (But that'd probably piss off their customers to no end. They'd rather use it in negotiating a cheaper ARM license I suppose.)

Also there’s a dedicated little slice of the ppc market that is radiation hardened/ space rated chips.

For embedded uses, RISC-V is perfectly capable and in fact being used by a bunch of companies already (mostly in China).

So private equity is going to ruin yet another successful company?

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