Arm licenses their designs to everybody. They are okay, but you are never going to make market leading processors by using the Arm designs.

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skeezyboy 6 days ago | parent [-]

The M1 and M2 were beating the best-in-class i7 when they were relased IIRC

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PaulRobinson 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Apple took the ARM base design (they licensed it), and then they modified and tweaked it.

You get the ARM ISA, and compilers that work for ARM will compile to Apple Silicon. It's just that the actual hardware you get, is better than the base design, and therefore beats other ARM processors in benchmarks.

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stinkbeetle 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Apple took the ARM base design (they licensed it), and then they modified and tweaked it.

More likely it was derived from PWRficient, or a clean sheet design that took lessons from it.

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diffuse_l 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's more than that. They have an unlimited license to arm designs, and can change them as they see fit, since they were an early investors (or something along those lines). Other manufacturers can't get these terms, or if they can, it will be prohibtly expensive

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sgerenser 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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brokencode 6 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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kalleboo 6 days ago | parent [-]

Then why are they so shy about granting Qualcomm a license?

	▲	brokencode 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Qualcomm has a lot of money and Arm wants it. They’re not shy, but greedy.

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ryao 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Apple has an architectural license that lets them build their own ARM cores:

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-...

It is very unlikely Apple uses anything from ARM’s core designs, since that would require paying an additional license fee and Apple was able to design superior cores using its architectural license.

	▲	abc_lisper 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yep, Apple was a significant early investor in ARM. https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/05/apple-arm-have-be...

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6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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