> Qualcomm is almost certainly ARM's biggest customer.
You think Qualcomm is larger than Apple?
You think Qualcomm is larger than Apple?
There are nearly 2B smartphones sold each year and only 200M laptops, so Apple's 20M laptop sales are basically a rounding error and not worth considering.
As 15-16% of the smartphone market, Apple is generally selling around 300m phones. I've read that Qualcomm is usually around 25-35% of the smartphone market which would be 500-700M phones.
But Qualcomm almost certainly includes ARM processors in their modems which bumps up those numbers dramatically. Qualcomm also sells ARM chips in the MCU/DSP markets IIRC.
Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture, that was a decade of design and manufacturing already, they VC'ed the independence of the CPU. The staffing and knowledge came from Acorn.
I believe they had a big hand in ARM64. Though best reference I can find right now is this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368489
They had the Newton project, found ARM did a better job than the other options, but there were a few missing pieces. They funded the spun out project so they could throw ARM a few new requirements for the CPU design.
As a "cofounder" of ARM, they didn't contribute technical experience and the architecture did already exist.