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Comment by IntelMiner | Hacker News Reader

Apple's CPU's are still ARM64 cores at heart, even if heavily modified

A thought I've been kicking about, though I fully understand it to be incredibly unlikely would be if NVIDIA would simply terminate any license Apple has to use ARM at all. The move would arguably be done out of pure spite. "payback" for the GeForce 8600M issues that cost them 200~ million and $3 billion in market cap in part due to Apple pushing for a recall.

Apple also seemingly pushed Nvidia utterly out the door, going as far as to completely block NVIDIA from providing drivers for users to use their products even in "eGPU" external enclosures on newer versions of MacOS. Even if only a minority of Apple users ever bought Nvidia cards, being completely banned from an OEM's entire lineup would likely ruffle feathers

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Let’s ignore that founding ARM investor Apple has a perpetual license and their own CPU designs.

Do you really think NVidia is going to substantially overpay for ARM to then nuke it’s remaining value by going to war on it’s licensees?

Apple has an "ARM Architecture License". They have a custom implementation that's very different from the reference design (which is why they're miles ahead of other ARM CPU makers). I'm sure the license has contractual obligations that protects Apple. In short, Apple is in no danger, most likely.

You're swallowing the poison pill with pride. The reason why no ARM customer actually wants to buy ARM is because there is almost no way to make money off of it. If you cancel licenses ARM is going to implode and $32 billion worth of value locked up in ARM will vanish into thin air. If you want to extract value out of ARM you'll have to play nice and that is definitively not worth $32 billion either.

Aren't you mixing ISA with implementation here? Or do Apple's CPUs really contain Arm's logic contrary to public info eg on Wikipedia?

You have to license the ARM ISA as well, you can't just freely implement it. IANAL, but as far as US law is concerned, I don't think you're violating copyright by cloning an ISA, but if that ISA is covered by any patents, you'd be fairly screwed without licensing. ARM definitely considers there to be enforceable patents on their ISA (just follow their aggressive assault on any open source HDL projects that are ARM compatible).

If Nvidia bought ARM and decided to find some legal way to terminate the contract with Apple out of spite, Apple would have to find another ISA for their "Apple Silicon".

If Apple are worried about that prospect, couldn't they easily outbid Nvidia to buy ARM?

Or just buy Nvidia

Bloomberg says that SoftBank approached Apple before they approached Nvidia, but who knows.

I should have read the article before commenting! But I guess that means Apple aren't worried, either because their contracts are solid enough and/or they already have backup plans ready that are cheaper than buying ARM.

(Or, of course, Apple are making a huge mistake. But seems a bit less likely to me.)

Theoretically Apple could probably outbid Nvidia, but realistically regulators would never let Apple make that purchase so it's irrelevant that they have the cash to do so.

I'm not particularly familiar with US antitrust law specifics...

One big point that came up in the congressional hearing the other day was how Google, when buying DoubleClick, said (under oath to congress) that not only would they not merge data but that they legally couldn't if they wanted to - and then years later did just that.

Is there any way to acquire in such a way that Apple would own ARM but there'd be a complete firewall between them, with ARM having a separate board, CEO, etc. and nothing between them except the technical ownership (and any contracts between the two companies)?

I hope not, as I'm in favour of breaking up huge companies myself... but if legal firms can have a system in place for firewall of information between clients I don't see why a similar legal situation could be feasible for allowing Apple to buy on the condition that they can't have any say over operations, with selling ARM being their only way of influencing them in any way?

Of course, owning a company where you have no control at all isn't great, but in this case it might be worth it if Apple trusts ARM to keep doing well without Apple's help, and if it would prevent someone like NVIDIA from shutting Apple out.

And would there be any antitrust issues if Apple bought a 500 year license to freely (or at a pre-set calculation of pricing) use any and all current and future ARM designs?

It would be like a gas station refusing to sell gas. Utter suicide for ARM.

It's not just patents.

ARM has previously shut down open source software emulation of parts of the ARM ISA.

For a while QEMU could not implement ARMv7 I think, until changed their mind and started permitting it. There was an open source processor design on opencores.org that got pulled too.

The reasoning was something like "to implement these instructions you must have read the ARM documentation, which is only available under a license which prohibits certain things in exchange for reading it".

To my knowledge, "Apple Silicon" or what ever you want to call it is an ARM64 ISA, with Apple extensions

Third parties have been able to get IOS running in an emulator for security research and Android(!) has even been ported to the IOS devices that contain the "Checkrain" Boot ROM exploit (though with things like GPU, Wi-Fi etc in varying states of completion)

ISA is just about the instruction set that the silicon is designed to interpret. Aww compatibility does not imply any shared heritage in the silicon between apple and arm LTD cores. Just like AMD and Intel share no silicon design even though they are both sell processors implementing the AMD64 ISA.

(The silicon implementation of an isa is referred to as the microarchitecture btw)

Right, but the ARM ISA is covered by various patents, so you have to get a license for it. ARM has aggressively shut down any open efforts to make ARM compatible cores (without licenses).

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