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Comment by TomVDB | Hacker News Reader

Apple has a perpetual ARM architecture license. Nvidia wouldn’t be able to force chips on Apple at all.

This is of course related to the fact that ARM was initially a joint venture between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI Tech way back in 1990. Apple was a major early investor and has been using ARM ISA chips in products since the 1990s.

If anyone is curious, third parties can license specific designs and drop them in their chips, or architecture licensees can design their own chips, like the M1, based on the instruction set architecture. There are around a dozen or so companies with an architecture license.

But I believe there is a new instruction set released by ARM every couple of years. Would Apple get automatic access to say ARMv10 architecture because of their architectural license? Or would they have to renegotiate with ARM (or NVIDIA?)

If they have to renegotiate with NVIDIA to get access to ARMv10, it would be quite nasty if NVIDIA decided they wanted a bigger piece of Apple's pie, especially if Apple has developed competitive GPU technology that made NVIDIA's somewhat obsolete.

I haven't read the license of course, but what I have read from others is that Apple has a perpetual license that gives them access to all future architectures as long as they fulfill their side of the deal (fees, etc.). That deal is with ARM, so if someone buys ARM the purchaser is still bound by the terms of existing deals.

>Apple has a perpetual license that gives them access to all future architectures as long as they fulfill their side of the deal

Each generation of ARM ISA, e.g ARMv7 and ARMv8 are treated as separate license, mostly because they are incompatible. ( Possibly with the exception of ARMv9 which is really a ARMv8++ ) You dont get future ARMv10 work just because you keep paying. ARM's extension are a different matter.

Seems like a good reason to block it. Apple could only do it with a perpetual license. Competitors would (potentially) have to abide by rules that Apple avoids.

Several companies have the same 64-bit architectural license, including Nvidia,AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung, Broadcom, Cavium, HiSilicon, Applied Micro, and Apple. There are probably some others.

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