As you know Arm makes most of its money selling actual designs, not the ISA. I suspect Apple pays very small fees which are not material in the context of the Mac.
For that it probably gets access to the full range of Arm IP, including for example the IP associated with big.LITTLE - and there are likely to be others.
There are two areas where RISC-V, for example, does have present a clear advantage for firms: where firms want to innovate on top on an ISA (eg Tenstorrent) or who want to shave cents off their BOM (eg WD).
ARM makes most of its money in royalties, not licensing. Under royalties, how much comes from chips that use their designs and how much from ones that don't, I don't know. Do they make that data available?
> I suspect Apple pays very small fees which are not material in the context of the Mac.
There were at a minimum 1.5 billion A series based CPUs sold last year - possibly a lot more. Arm’s total royalty sales were $1.5bn. I think we can safely say that the fees Apple pays - with its architecture license - are not material in the context of the Mac.
> There were at a minimum 1.5 billion A series based CPUs sold last year - possibly a lot more. Arm’s total royalty sales were $1.5bn. I think we can safely say that the fees Apple pays - with its architecture license - are not material in the context of the Mac.
I don't see how that follows. You don't know what their royalty arrangement is. It's probably related to the value of the chip sold. If they sell 20 million macs a year and pay ARM 2 bucks a chip that's 40 million every year. If macs have a gross profit of a couple of billion that's not insignificant. Could be 5% of that. Not to mention several hundred million a year for iphones. Lot of money to pay to be locked into a proprietary ISA when you almost entirely support your own ecosystem, compilers, OSes, etc anyway.
Apple’s net margin is around 25% so that’s around $300 per Mac sold so with your $2 it’s about 2/3% for which it probably gets access to all of Arm’s IP (eg big.LITTLE) as well as use of an ISA that Apple has long experience using and almost certainly helped to shape. As I said not material in this context.
Oh and they are clearly not locked in as they have just changed the ISA for Macs anyway.
For that it probably gets access to the full range of Arm IP, including for example the IP associated with big.LITTLE - and there are likely to be others.
There are two areas where RISC-V, for example, does have present a clear advantage for firms: where firms want to innovate on top on an ISA (eg Tenstorrent) or who want to shave cents off their BOM (eg WD).