Okay, this is gong exactly where I thought it would go.
Apple announces they are completely switching architecture.
Softbank suddenly decides to sell ARM Holdings.
A competitor swoops in to pull the rug out from under Apple
OK. This is exactly where it is going. No one cares about Apple using its own chips for its own computers ... but people who use Apple computers. (And even then a tiny subset of people who use Apple computers. Most Apple computer users see their Macs as locked boxes and know/care less about their internals than Windows/Linux users. The same for iPhone/iPad owners versus Android device owners. They buy Apple products because they "just work" - and when they don't they just take advantage of Apple's legendary support - and do not have to think about the underlying technology.)
Seriously, who you think regards themselves as being in competition with Apple in the PC market? Nvidia? In what way? They don't manufacture PCs. They don't manufacture PC CPUs. And Apple doesn't even buy their GPUs for the vast majority of their products. So what on earth would Nvidia gain by denying Apple licenses for ARM and forcing Apple to continue using Intel? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
How about someone who actually makes PCs then? Dell. Dell buys ARM, keeps Apple from making ARM Macs. Guess what? Apple still keeps making Intel Macs. Apple's market share remains the same. And Dell keeps getting hammered by Lenovo. And Dell - who is already financially struggling from their failed VMWare purchase that they are going to have to write down billions from - will also have another worthless acquisition in ARM. Lenovo? More of the same. Virtually no one on this planet who would even think of buying a Mac would buy a Lenovo because they don't have the brand name that IBM once did. HP? Acer? Asus? Yeah, no. There aren't very many people who would say "will I buy a MacBook Pro or will I buy an Acer Predator?" either. (By "very many" I mean absolutely none.)
Um, no. It doesn't work that way. Despite your tautological pleonasmic trolling you should know that much.
You're good.
I had to google pleonasmic.
Select word, hard press or triple finger press your trackpad or right click and "look up x".
Wasn’t found on iOS 12.x...
That was for Mac. On iOS, you highlight the word and then choose "Look Up".
Okay, this is gong exactly where I thought it would go.
Apple announces they are completely switching architecture.
Softbank suddenly decides to sell ARM Holdings.
A competitor swoops in to pull the rug out from under Apple
Nope, Apple has as far as I remember a perpetual far reaching cross license agreement; remember, Apple co-developed the architecture, which is why they don’t need to buy ARM.
Are we sure that this applies to AArch64? As I understand it, that's a different ISA and Apple didn't have any hand in developing it.
I don't think Apple had a hand in the 64bit architecture; they'd pretty much gone their own way by then. But for the instruction set, the agreement is perpetual, and that's all Apple really cares about.
But A64 is a different instruction set. What does Apple have a perpetual license for?
Good question.
Apple has a perpetual license for the ARM instruction set specification and a suite of compatibility tests.
That’s it. They have no compilers, tools or code. Apple is building everything in-house. Their license gets them updates to the specification (very rare) and updates to the test suite (probably quite frequent).
Apple uses the compatibility suite to make sure that whatever they build will run ARM code so it’s easier to port tools such as Docker and virtualise Linux. This does not necessarily mean that ARM code generated by Apple’s tools would run on any ARM chip running a hacked version of MacOS. Why? Because it’s possible that Apple has optimised the instruction set to work best with their devices.
This isn’t that different to how Sun licensed the JVM. You can build your own JVM and use a hulking great test suite to make sure it will run all Java bytecode. Changes to the JVM spec (which hardly ever changes) would get you a new test suite to make sure your stuff was compatible. No one would buy a license if the vendor could increase the price year after year, so they were expensive to begin with, and negotiated individually.
Comments
This does not necessarily mean that ARM code generated by Apple’s tools would run on any ARM chip running a hacked version of MacOS. Why? Because it’s possible that Apple has optimised the instruction set to work best with their devices.
They will find themselves in court loosing big time.