The thing about Apple having a “special license” due to being a partial founder of Arm is an urban legend. They have an architectural license, just like several other companies making custom Arm CPUs do.
The thing about Apple having a “special license” due to being a partial founder of Arm is an urban legend. They have an architectural license, just like several other companies making custom Arm CPUs do.
Yeah, why would ARM prevent other companies from paying more for the better license?
All they care about is that companies buy an ARM license, not that they use the boilerplate ARM CPU design.
Those designs are there to make it easier for companies to make ARM-based chips who would otherwise never be able to design their own.