Let's see how strong Arm's ARM is... Will they have much power to strong arm?
"Arm intends to alter its royalty program, ceasing to charge chipmakers royalties for using its designs based on a chip's value, and instead charge device makers based on the value of the device, the report said.
"Arm is going to customers and saying 'We would like to get paid more money for broadly the same thing', a former senior employee who left the company last year told FT."
Two quotes from the article in the Financial Times that broke the story.
So it seems that Qualcomm were right about what Arm are intending to do.
Well... as the ArsTechnica article suggests, this is RISC-V's moment!
If it's Arm's intention to squeeze design companies [out of business?], as the first quote suggests, then surely those companies are going to look to alternative ISAs... So will they start designing RISC-V chips in stead?
And will OEMs, in the face of an 'ARM Tax', start using SoC like the TH1520 - which, as we know, can provide more than sufficient processing power for a phone or a netbook - in their kit in stead of ARM? ( It's not as if Arm's own designs are as good as the design company's alternatives, is it!?) The alternative is to pass on the tax to the consumer, and perhaps lose market share to cheaper RISC-V-based kit as a consequence.
Maybe we're going to see RISC-V SoCs widely used sooner than anyone thought. And what happens come 2025, when the more powerful RISC-V chips with the Vector extension come out?