Apple very much does not and is reported to have a perpetual license to the ISA. Apple will most likely be fine even in the worst case scenario.

Qualcomm however has been rebranded/tweaked (which is unclear) ARM standard CPU core designs since 2017. They very much depend on ARM doing a lot of heavy lifting.

A few years ago 15 companies, among which Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei and more had an architecture license which is perpetual so that probably puts them all on safe ground. I'm sure that the specific licensing terms can vary but I doubt someone like Qualcomm didn't take any precautions for exactly such eventuality given how much they rely on being able to ship new ARM based SoCs. They probably gave up on designing custom cores because of the effort/costs involved and the fact that 99% of the Android market doesn't really require it. But they'd still have to ship ARM cores, standard or not.

Apple is probably the safest of the bunch given how they helped build ARM.

ARM announced it would cut ties with Huawei after the US ban but reconsidered the decision less than half a year later so I assume that the architecture license is either usually iron clad or simply too valuable to both sides to give up.

> more had an architecture license which is perpetual

Architectural license is not necessarily perpetual

> Drew declined to comment on whether the deal was multi-generational

https://www.eetimes.com/microsoft-takes-arm-architectural-li...

So they may have license for ARMv8 but not future ISAs like ARMv9.

Perpetual means they can indefinitely deliver as many designs as they want using the ISA they licensed. Not "perpetual for everything ARM present and future". It's similar to the perpetual multi-use license except the holder has more freedom with the modifications and customized designs. All other licenses are time limited.

And again, the terms of the license may vary. I have the impression that Apple has a far more permissive license than anyone else out there for example.

Ah, I was not aware of this agreement.

Qualcomm has shown in the past to be able to build great custom ARM CPUs not based on an ARM standard design. But it seems they decided the investment was not worth it after their custom Kryo design (which was not a complete failure but definitely not better than what ARM was producing at the time). But I think they'll need to go back to their own silicon at some point if this acquisition happens.

For sure Huawei and Samsung (and smaller manufacturers like Rockchip, Mediatek, Allwinner) don't have an impressive track record designing custom CPU IP and definitely not custom GPU IP. These guys should be terribly alarmed if this were to happen.

All the latest Snapdragons use bog standard ARM cores.

I imagine there are some ongoing license fees paid for ARM.