I imagine Apple has an ironclad contract with ARM that likes of which everyone else would be jelly. Even some of the internal architecture changes have long been forbidden by ARM licensing.

Not to mention, ARM is about to destroy the market by trying to backtrack on all their licensing. They now want per device royalties paid by the device manufacturer instead of chip maker to get a larger slice of the pie. And they are basically moving to kill Qualcomm's licenses and IP out of spite in a lawsuit.

Do apple even pay licencing fees?

I thought they could basically do whatever they wanted with the instruction set.

They have a lot of freedom which nobody else has access to, but according to arm’s SEC fillings they are a paying client

Apple pays nothing, because they do not license ARM cores in any way, instead having a full royalty-free license for ARM ISA (and afaik covering updates too) since before ARM got big. Samsung used to have one, no idea if they still have one, but the mismanagement of the unit that built their custom ARM designs might have killed the whole venture.

Apple does not pay nothing. Read recent pre-IPO Arm SEC filing (not a lot of details, but enough to reveal they clearly aren’t paying nothing).

The rumor is that Apple owns part of AArch64 itself, and it's relationship with ARM is more like the Intel/AMD relationship.

That would mean that at a minimum they still pay for some of the Cortex M cores that are in their SoCs.

Ah, good source to check, thanks.

This isn’t true. Apple paid licence fees for the very first ARM Ltd processors - ARM would have had no income if they hadn’t.

And there is no way that any company gets a ‘forever’ and ‘all future IP’ license just because they had an early shareholding.

The "nothing" probably refers to royalties which is true for architectural licensees like Apple. They instead pay for that license which is not sold per-CPU.

It was very clear that they meant nothing at all.

> Apple pays nothing, because they do not license ARM cores in any way, instead having a full royalty-free license for ARM ISA (and afaik covering updates too) since before ARM got big.

I will admit to being a bit hyperbolic there. Compared to normal ARM licensing, it's way less.

Meanwhile I recall start of RISC-V hype being, among other things, Western Digital dropping a ton of investment money into it just to escape ARM license costs.

We all get a bit hyperbolic at times! Yes, I'm sure it's a lot less than most customers pay.

I remember the WD announcement. They have open sourced the cores now I think. If you're shipping millions of drives those fees will add up.

For values of "now" equal to 2019

https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1