Qualcomm is rumored to be paying 2-2.5% per chip instead of the 5-5.5% ARM sued them for (some sources claim it was 6-10%).
No matter how you slice up their handset and mobile divisions profits, the current cost is billions just to license an ISA.
Qualcomm could likely pay for most of their chip design costs with the amount of money they’re giving ARM. When contract renewal comes up, Qualcomm will be even more incentivized to move to RISC-V.
Apple has apparently been moving on chip soft cores to RISC-V. At some point (probably around renewal time), they’re likely to want to save money by switching to RISC-V too.
There are even rumors of ARM working on RISC-V cores (I’d guess smaller cores to compete with SiFive).
There’s an economic incentive to change and the only blocker is ARM inertia, but making ARM emulate quickly on RISC-V is almost certainly easier than making x86 and all its weirdness/edge cases run on ARM.
Once the software is in place (getting close) and a competitive RISC-V phone chip exists, I suspect the conversion will be very fast.
> the current cost is billions just to license an ISA.
It used to be that instruction sets were not copyrightable, and you had to resort to implementation patents to extract money (e.g. the MIPS vs Lexra case https://www.eetimes.com/mips-technologies-sues-lexra-for-pat... )
Apple probably pays a lot less than Qualcomm? They have a unique (details unknown) license. They have a license to 2040 now too: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/apple-inks-new-deal-arm...
I do write RISC-V, x86_64 assembly, and I had to code a bit of ARM64 assembly (because of an old RPI).
Well, could not really make the difference between RISC_V and ARM64.