woochifer

The article glaringly omits the fact that among the companies listed, Apple is the only one that doesn't license the actual core designs from ARM. Because Apple has a perpetual architectural license from ARM, they can design their own completely customized core designs while licensing only the instruction sets. Apple has only used their own custom core designs since the A6. Because Apple is one of the original ARM founding partners, I would assume that they have layers upon layers of safeguards built into their licensing terms before they spun off their stakes.

Qualcomm also has an ARM architectural license. But, as their in-house core designs became less competitive compared to ARM's Cortex reference core designs, Qualcomm abandoned designing their own custom cores and began incorporating modified versions of the Cortex cores into their Snapdragon SoCs instead. Qualcomm's reliance on the ARM reference cores, makes them way more vulnerable to any changes that might occur under Nvidia ownership.

Of course, unfair licensing terms and abusive monopolist practices is something that Qualcomm is well versed in. They know well what it's like to dish it out, and probably don't want to find out what the receiving end tastes like.

Apple's only vulnerability would be if the ARM reference designs begin to surpass the performance of their custom cores, and they're forced to consider licensing ARM's reference core designs to remain competitive. But, that seems unlikely to happen for a while considering how Apple can tweak both the OS and the CPU design to meet specific performance goals that might differ significantly from the rest of the market.