News Apple pays Arm less than 30 cents per chip in royalties, new report says

[bit_user]

I didn't say NOW, no where did I say NOWW. Why would they even bother now if the have an agreement till 2040?

Why would you even be talking about something so far in the future? I wouldn't try to predict anything in tech that's more than a decade out. A lot can change in that time.

The point is, if they started to feel ARM was going to try to shake them down for higher royalties I have no doubt they would start to move on from ARM.

And that's what I'm saying wouldn't happen. I'm sure Apple would exhaust every other avenue than switch from ARM so soon.

by then it would have been 8 years since flipping to ARM on Mac.

I don't think you can count from when they started. It took a couple years for the dust to settle and virtually all commercial software to port over. Heck, Mac Pro is what completed their transition, and that only launched this year!

What stuff in emulation?

You said that the x86 transition was a big win, and I meant that I'm skeptical it was terribly popular with Mac users at the time, because they had to run stuff in emulation for a while.

 

[JamesJones44]

I don't think you can count from when they started. It took a couple years for the dust to settle and virtually all commercial software to port over. Heck, Mac Pro is what completed their transition, and that only launched this year!

It was response to an assumption about starting today, it wasn't a "it will only take 8 years" response. The point was if they started transitioning today, by the time customers even got their hands on the new SoCs it would be several years removed from the first transition to ARM.

You said that the x86 transition was a big win, and I meant that I'm skeptical it was terribly popular with Mac users at the time, because they had to run stuff in emulation for a while.

Simply look of the sales from when the introduced Apple Silicon to their most popular product lines. It was a success by any way you want to measure it.

Apple Silicon drives year of record-breaking Mac revenue | AppleInsider

Apple's in-house chip designs are behind a renaissance for Mac, with M1-powered hardware like MacBook Pro leading the way in a year of consecutive quarterly revenue records for the hardware category.

appleinsider.com

 

[Bullet Punch]

Down road, Qualcomm used this partnership with ARM to create the Cortex-X1, which was apparently so successful that ARM decided to continue the Cortex-X series on its own.​

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So samsung were able to use the x1 too? No exclusive deal for it?

 

[bit_user]

Simply look of the sales from when the introduced Apple Silicon to their most popular product lines. It was a success by any way you want to measure it.

We're getting crossed up, here. The original quote was about the transition from PPC -> x86. Anyway, my ultimate point was just that I think you shouldn't be so dismissive about the burden it puts on users.

Sure, in the case of the ARM transition, you can make a compelling argument about the benefits, but a lot of that had to do with transitioning from Intel-designed SoCs to Apple-designed SoCs more than x86 -> ARM. In a hypothetical ARM -> RISC-V transition, no such upside exists, since Apple would be designing the SoC either way. It's basically a hassle for users with no real benefits.

 

[bit_user]

So samsung were able to use the x1 too? No exclusive deal for it?

Okay, slight misunderstanding on my part. This text describes the Cortex-X program as an evolution of the program under which Qualcomm previously worked with ARM to make tuned versions of their cores:

"The Cortex-X1 was designed within the frame of a new program at Arm, which the company calls the “Cortex-X Custom Program”. The program is an evolution of what the company had previously already done with the “Built on Arm Cortex Technology” program released a few years ago. As a reminder, that license allowed customers to collaborate early in the design phase of a new microarchitecture, and request customizations to the configurations, such as a larger re-order buffer (ROB), differently tuned prefetchers, or interface customizations for better integrations into the SoC designs. Qualcomm was the predominant benefactor of this license, fully taking advantage of the core re-branding options."

Arm's New Cortex-A78 and Cortex-X1 Microarchitectures: An Efficiency and Performance Divergence

www.anandtech.com