It's not just the fees. ARMs licensing terms are fucking annoying. They're militant about their shitty IP so they refuse to license their cores for FPGA based deployments, for instance.
I hear this all the time, but are there any public numbers on how much money is spent on licensing? Are we talking pennies per chip (which adds up) or tens of dollars per shipped device?
ARM was going to sell for "only" $40 billion, which makes me think that per device fees are low (there is an ARM chip in everything).
RISC-V is "permissionless". Grab a core from github, grab the freely available specs, and start working. No up front agreement, no fees down the road. For Arm you have to enter a legal agreement before you can start, and then negotiate licensing for your product.
It's such a single point of failure that it kind of boggles my mind. Seems like the world would become chaotic fast if they just stopped giving out licenses (though I know that some companies like Apple have perpetual licenses)
"2021 licensing (non-royalty) revenues were up 61% to $1.13Bn as our expanded product portfolio and new business models such as Arm Flexible Access gave more customers more reasons and more ways to license Arm technology.
2021 royalty revenues were up 20% to a record $1.54Bn, helped by continuing strong growth of 5G smartphones, more ADAS and IVI chips going into cars, and price increases in 32-bit microcontrollers."
