Who is going to cough up $40b to turn ARM into a non profit?
Can we be realistic here?
Perhaps we need to turn Apple into a non profit also? Given how important Apple is to many users and businesses.
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Arm wants to charge dramatically more for chip licenses
- Thread starter maflynn
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Can we be realistic here?
Perhaps we need to turn Apple into a non profit also? Given how important Apple is to many users and businesses.
I didn't say it was realistic
Just that I believe it would work well in this particular case, for this type of company. I wouldn't mind if the App Stores were nonprofits with a separate board (albeit tight cooperation with the corporate Apple obviously). Would massively improve user and developer experience alike.
Its strange to think... but people have spent more for far stupider reasons.
It's possible, if not incredibly probable.
But Twitter isn’t a non profit. Musk still intends to make money from Twitter as he just announced that he sees a vision to $250b valuation.
It wouldn’t work well. ARM stock designs need to be competitive in order to allow other companies to easily create their CPUs.I didn't say it was realistic
I wouldn't mind if the App Stores were nonprofits with a separate board (albeit tight cooperation with the corporate Apple obviously). Would massively improve user and developer experience alike.
A non profit cannot compete with Apple, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung in core designs.
I think maybe you meant that the ISA should be open sourced and free?
Why not? Pay out bonuses based on revenue and hitting performance milestones, reinvest surplus revenue in R&D. Non-profit doesn't mean that they can't make money or pursue revenue. The more money they make, the more is available in the budget.
Not at all. I don't see much value in an open source ISA aside of teaching and simple applications. An important function of ARM is that they take care of IP, so that their customers dot' have to worry about patent litigations. That's something that they should continue doing.
That's a for-profit business.
I think what you want is a highly regulated for-profit ARM that is almost like a public utility. Not a nonprofit.
It won't because Apple has a deal with ARM that immunizes it from changes like this. Literally the source of this rumor said it wouldn't affect Apple.
ARM To Reportedly Modify Its Royalty System; Will Charge For Entire Phone Rather Than SoC, Potentially Increasing Handset Prices
Instead of charging a percentage for a smartphone SoC, ARM is reportedly thinking to charge a royalty for the price of the entire device
wccftech.com
Maybe I am confused, but I always thought that a non-profit is a business that is not allowed to make profits for their owners. For example, I live in housing owned by non-profit and they operate like any regular homeowner, just that they are required by law to invest all of their revenue back into operations. So it should be possible to hire a manager to run your nonprofit business entity and incentivise them with bonuses from successful operations as long as you don't get any profit from it yourself. Of course, I am sure that the specific regulations and definitions will vary from country to country.
In the end, yes, that's exactly what I mean. Whether it qualifies as "non-profit" in the strict legal sense of a particular country law is another question.
His latest "vision" includes the following:
- Eliminating all legacy "verified" checkmarks, forcing everyone to pay to be "verified" instead of actually verifying anything.
- Restricting both the ability to create and vote in Twitter polls to only those who pay for the new "verified" trash
- Firing the engineers who made Twitter work without even having the ability to understand the code (or even see parts of it due to how hastily he fired said engineers).
Unless the agreement is valid in perpetuity. Which is what Apple would’ve wanted in any deal before betting the entire company on ARM-based silicon.
Unless I'm mistaken, Apple's license for ARM is different from everyone else (especially Qualcomm). Apple has an architectural license, which allows the company to design their own SoCs based off the ARM ISA rather than using existing ARM designs, which is what Qualcomm, Samsung (with Exynos), MediaTek, and others do by incorporating existing Cortex cores into their SoCs. This is also what allows Apple to build their own instructions on top of the existing ISA (some of which have been pulled into the ARM ISA itself). Those companies using existing Cortex core designs are much more limited in terms of how they put multiple cores into an SoC as well as any changes made to the base designs. I do believe the license is in perpetuity, although Apple may decide to jump to a newer version of the ARM ISA at some point in the future.
Does Apple even need ARM or RISC-V or any one else's design in the long-run? Seems like they could evolve Apple Silicon to a 100% in-house design. It's nice to own the full hardware/software stack. And we know they look to pull things in-house.
Apple has been using 100% in-house designs for a while now? The only ARM designs they use are some tiny coprocessors where investing resources in developing your own doesn't make much sense (if I remember correctly Apple even uses a 20+ year old CPU core somewhere inside M1 as some sort of controller...)
I meant they could even migrate away from the ARM instruction set if they wanted to avoid or reduce future licensing issues.
Yeah, and break application software yet again. (not a good idea)
Ah, I see. Fairly unlikely if you ask me, because there is no benefit for Apple. ARM64 is a very good instruction set and should serve them for a while, unless they want to develop some radically new processor that needs a different software model. By using ARM Apple profits from the great software and tooling ecosystem, as well as programmer competence.
By the way, they can still tweak things around as much as they want. They have plenty of custom instructions and even a custom vector coprocessor.
Agreed, I was just talking in relation to the original thread's subject: i.e. if there was some ARM licensing issue that became onerous for Apple, they would probably be in a position to "de-ARM" if they wanted to.
One thing to note: some of Apple's additions to the existing ARM64 ISA have actually been integrated into the ISA itself, so if anything Apple is helping ARM out while designing their own silicon.
At any rate they are probably safe from any such disputes at least for the next decade
In fact, some industry sources were claiming that the original ARM64 was influenced or maybe even co-designed by Apple CPU engineers. After all, Apple was first to ship commercial ARM64 silicon by a large lead. And ARM's new matrix extensions are oddly similar to how Apple's AMX works.
This story only highlights once more that in the Windows/Android world every single component is its own for-profit enterprise, chip design, chip making, hardware, software, services, retail. Everything is another company with its own incentives. Whereas at Apple neither the chip designers nor the software engineers need to prove their value and monetise their work directly every step of the way. Only the final product gets one premium price tag and everyone along the supply chain gets paid. This eliminates so many problems of capitalism. Apple management can direct billions of dollars worth of additional investment into chip design, if that's the place where currently the most added benefit can be created. For a couple of years the Mac platform might even stagnate and suffer from too much focus on the iPhone. Only to come back even stronger when the A-series informs and finances the development of M-series chips. Compare that to Softbank's financial problems, becoming ARM's problems, becoming Qualcomm's problems and so on ...