Hacker News Reader

Comment by speed_spread | Hacker News Reader

Except that ARM is pretty much theirs, or at least they have complete control over it, which they never did for any previous arch. They also handle chip production directly. Nothing in RISC-V could be worth more than what they can already wring out of ARM without having to migrate.

View on HN

That all depends on their current licensing terms, doesn't it?

Besides, ARM-to-RISC-V doesn't require a full redesign. Plenty of components are going to stay more-or-less the same, the big change is the instruction decoder. Chip developers have done far more drastic redesigns while staying with the same ISA - just look at the history of x86.

I think the bigger question is: does Apple want to go through another binary compatibility break?

Look into Apple's ARM licensing terms. They are very generous to apple.

ARM could change that in the long term, Apple doesn't own them. It would be a generational fumble by ARM to lose Apple as a customer, though.

The license agreement they signed a few years back goes into the 2040s. Long term, you are right obviously. That is just so long term, so much can happen in that time span it's hard to even guess.

We have no idea at all what the terms are.

Apple has an architecture license agreement that extends "past 2040" (their phrasing), and it requires Apple to pay ARM ~$0.30 per device sold.

Apple can do whatever they want with the cores, but they do have to pay for the privilege and do have a future expiry to worry about, though it's far enough off that it certainly isn't pressing.

ten years is a very long time in technology, RISC-V ecosystem could be so vibrant and advanced that it might prove more cost effective for Apple just to feed off it (assuming Apple is still relevant by then).

It's almost like trying to predict if the smartphone leaders in 2006 (Nokia / RIM) would want to adopt this new mobile operating system that hardly anyone uses (android) in 2016.

The thing is Apple designs its own ARM cores. They don't use the vibrant ecosystem of ARM for all the important parts of the CPU; they compete with it on their own and manage to win. They only pay a small amount per device for an architecture licence that's very generous for Apple, in large part because Apple was an initial seed investor and first customer of ARM.

If all the current investments in ARM don't suffice to beat Apple's own efforts, I don't see how they could ever need to use RiscV's community to achieve their goals.

As long as ARM keeps the architecture up-to-date and the fees minimal, Apple's staying.

>ten years is a very long time in technology,

10 years is relatively short time in hardware, that is only at best 4 cycles. In today's world it is only 3 cycles. The amount of time, energy and resources required to switch from ARM to RISC-V only to save $100M a year makes very little sense. That is assuming you can get the same performance switching over in the first place. Which right now isn't the case in the next 5 years.

And I wouldn't be surprised ARM gives Apple some other patents protection as well as discount on other IPs.

Well you can see from the original poster's timeline, that 10 years from now will be effectively 16 years into Apple's ARM journey, so you can add two more cycles.

And also from the timeline you can see that the average Apple hardware transition period is 2.75 cycles, so I wouldn't bet too much that their ARM journey will last more than 6 cycles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com