ARM Holdings isn't doing well?

[neinjohn]

As far as I know, that’s all true. My best bet is that Apple can essentially do whatever it wants. It might not be allowed to call its products “Arm” if it doesn’t get ”concessions” when it makes certain types of modifications. But notice that Apple really doesn’t mention Arm in any of its marketing. It’s just “Apple Silicon.”

All of which goes to show you that if Arm went away, Apple would be perfectly capable of going it alone and moving its chip architectures forward, but for now, for the sake of keeping the benefit of industry-wide Arm tooling and resources, they play nice.

Out of the technical zone, could not Nvidia, if holder of ARM, decide to review all contracts Apple has signed with ARM Holdings for licenses to ban the use of some basic extensions, ISA, claim royalties, etc?

Of course we don't the have the contract to see and read but on general terms how would the perpetual license work.

 

[cmaier]

Out of the technical zone, could not Nvidia, if holder of ARM, decide to review all contracts Apple has signed with ARM Holdings for licenses to ban the use of some basic extensions, ISA, claim royalties, etc?

Of course we don't the have the contract to see and read but on general terms how would the perpetual license work.

Having not seen the license, I don’t know, but it would be highly improbable that nVidia could change the terms of an existing contract. Wouldn’t be much of a contract if the terms were modifiable by one party.

I would be anything that, in exchange for Apple providing all of the funding to create Arm, that it is free to do whatever it wants, as long as it doesn’t make something incompatible with the specs and call it ”Arm” (which would be a trademark problem for Apple). Adding things while still complying with the mandatory Arm specs should be fine. Leaving things off that are optional in Arm’s specs should be fine. Breaking Arm - removing necessary instructions, etc. - is *probably* fine so long as Apple doesn’t claim it is making Arm chips and doesn’t refer to it as Arm. Again, it would be clear if we saw the secret agreement, but since we haven’t all we can do is speculate based on how the industry works, and what you would demand if you were in Apple’s shoes - remember that ”ARM” had no leverage back when this agreement was entered into.