Arm wants to charge dramatically more for chip licenses.

[Colstan]

Softbank is trying to monetize Arm before an IPO.

If you want to succeed on the stock market, you've got to show revenue, and while Arm enables the sale of billions of dollars of devices around the world, the company's chip licensing scheme only brings in a comparatively small amount of money—around $500 million a quarter.

RISC-Y Business: Arm wants to charge dramatically more for chip licenses

Arm is tired of seeing device makers bring in billions while it makes millions.

arstechnica.com

Apple and Samsung will have their own licensing agreements in place, but it's hard to imagine Arm's new "Gotta impress Wall Street" strategy won't eventually affect them somehow.

Good times.

 

[leman]

Oh well, good luck with that.

 

[Cmaier]

Contrary to the article, hardly a “dream scenario for RISC-V.” A lot of companies rely on Arm to step in and defend them from patent and intellectual property lawsuits. Who does that for you if you use RISC-V? ”Free” isn’t always free.

 

[Yoused]

Over at TOP, or maybe it was Ars, there were some comments that phones are already ridiculously over-powered, so using a five-year-old SoC would satisfy the lion's share of people who rely on ARM architecture. RISC-V is still fairly untested in the marketplace. Softbank should apply their licensing in a way that reaches the high-end of the market most and more lightly down at the mass market level.

 

[Cmaier]

Over at TOP, or maybe it was Ars, there were some comments that phones are already ridiculously over-powered, so using a five-year-old SoC would satisfy the lion's share of people who rely on ARM architecture. RISC-V is still fairly untested in the marketplace. Softbank should apply their licensing in a way that reaches the high-end of the market most and more lightly down at the mass market level.

Sounds like that’s what they are trying to do, by shifting the licensing to the end-devices and charging a percentage of the price of those - so a high end phone would get them a lot more license revenue than a feature phone. But, putting aside architecture licenses for a moment, it seems an easier and less controversial method would be for them to just charge more for their high end IP and less for their low end IP. If someone wants to put a low end microcontroller design in a thousand dollar phone then, sure, Arm would miss out on some revenue, but not much (because nobody would buy that phone).

As for the architecture licenses, that’s a different story, and they could do something like charge based on chip’s performance, number of transistor, number of cores, etc. (though any formula would be tough to come up with and potentially easy to game). So their proposed scheme might make sense for those.

And as for Apple, contrary to the article, I don’t think Apple will ever have to worry about a change in licensing terms with Arm. Perks of paying for Arm to exist in the first place (I would be shocked if Apple didn’t get very favorable terms in perpetuity, and, even if they didn’t, Arm isn’t going to want Apple to switch ISA to something else and take the whole industry along for the ride).