Comment by StopDisinfo910
4 days ago
To me, that seems like a misreading of the market.
Apple and Qualcomm don't sublicense so they are not really Arm competitors. Plus, ARM was always a convenient way to mutualise development costs without the risk of collusion. I am not sure it's changing.
You say people want to differentiate but Google constant failures to bring a state of the art offer with the Tensor shows that it's not that easy. Meanwhile Mediatek is competitive while remaining close to ARM design.
I don't think the market has changed that much on the high-end. The real question is how free will ARM be to export their future architectures. That's more where I see a risk.
That and the low-end being contested by Risk-V.
Apple and Qualcomm absolutely are Arm competitors. Otherwise, Arm wouldn't have sued Qualcomm over the Nuvia deal.
Arm makes far more money licensing their cores than their ISAs. If their entire business was reduced to just licensing their ISAs because their cores can't compete against their customers' custom cores, then they will be at a highly disadvantaged position.
It's more about losing a customer than about competition to me in the case of Nuvia. I guess technically if you squint hard enough you could say Arm and Qualcomm are competing for Qualcomm sells but that's a bit of a stretch.
The important things for Arm is not so much the few customers with competitive cores which are great marketing but the multitude of other customers who don't have the budget to design their own core. It's far from trivial as shown by the Google exemple.