Well, what else would one expect?
I wonder how much Qualcomm is paying SoftBank in royalties/licensing fees for use of ARM IP.
I remember the Qualcomm cellular chipset team being gobsmacked when they saw the active receive and transmit path switching system Apple engineers designed using Qualcomm’s own chipset elements.
ARM, another investment opportunity missed.
The Intel era seems to be coming to an end. The tightly integrated end to end of production of chips overtaken by design and farm out to foundries. I guess not even the paranoid always survive.
The ARM license terms are usually a per chip royalty I think, and if you think of how many ARM chips Qualcomm ships for all those Android phones & tablets as well as the new AI laptops, it’s going to be a lot of money. AFAIK, Qualcomm is ARMs biggest customer. Which makes it a bit absurd that ARM is suing Qualcomm over these AI chip designs for complicated reasons.
Apple on the other hand doesn’t pay a per chip fee, it just chucks a big gob of money to ARM periodically.
Apple used to horse trade IP with Qualcomm to reduce how much actual money they paid them.
Apple only used Qualcomm in the first place as Infineon (now Intel?), the baseband chipset vendor for the early GSM and 3G iPhones couldn’t supply a chipset that supported CDMA for the USA and Asia.
Infineon were ditched completely when they confessed to Apple that their 4G/LTE roadmap was a scribble on a McDonald’s napkin and they’d need development funding from Apple to achieve that.
Considering that Apple’s field engineer team had done the lion’s share of testing on their previous chipsets and a great deal of the issue analysis on their behalf, said confession was not well received.
Interesting.
Reminds me of when IBM selected the 8086 for the PC and then discovered Intel were in financial trouble. IBM had to take a shareholding in Intel to steady the ship. A shareholding that was foolishly divested later on. Instead they should have taken a 49% stake in Intel and Microsoft
I often wonder if the world would have been noticeably different if they’d gone with the 68000.
An interesting question. Or with CP/M
The famous, semi mythological, meeting between IBM representatives and Gary Kildall.
Safe to say that Bill G would not have quite as much money as he does today.