There's a rumor on the grapevine that RPi doesn't pay the license fees for their cores. There's probably more to it than that (maybe they do for compute modules which are explicitly not for the .edu market?), but the word on street is that that baseline licensing cost is $0 for them from ARM.

I ultimately think you're right, and we won't see a V9 in an RPi for a while, but it's a more complex situation than most SoC integrators that has a slight chance of working out in RPi's favor. Does ARM care enough to make a tiny core in their gate count niche? Does ARM want to give the free new cores to increase market share and get V9 features in the hands of tinkerers? etc.

Why would RPi pay the license fee for ARM cores? Up until the Pi Pico, they didn't make their own SoCs. You don't have to be a licensee if you're only consuming processors.

edit - the microcontroller was called Pico, not Nano

Yes it doesn't really make sense. And I am not even sure why paying the absolute minimal fees to ARM matters in the discussion.

RPi is basically a subsidiary of Broadcom. And it was RPi engineers that worked on each of the SoCs past the original BCM2835.

They're not actually a subsidiary, but historically they've been pretty close. Regardless, Broadcom is absolutely the entity responsible for negotiating with ARM and paying the license fee.

If there's any truth to this rumor it's probably ARM discounting the license fee for the fraction of devices that Broadcom sells to the Raspberry Pi foundation.

ARM knows that RPi is the go-to ARM SBC, and they benefit tremendously when developers treat it as a first-class platform.

Broadcom owns Acorn so I would guess that they may have a special licence.

SoftBank owns ARM, with a pending sale to Nvidia. I doubt owning the Acorn trademarks and back catalog has any effect on that relationship.

Apple has a perpetual royalty-free license as a result of being an ARM co-founder. It wouldn't be too surprising is Acorn had the same arrangement.

I think you're mixing ARM up with PPC. The AIM alliance was Apple/IBM/Motorola and granted them access to the tech.

Apple pays ARM for an architectural license, just like any other company.

No, I meant ARM.

ARM was created as a joint venture between Apple, Acorn and VLSI.

SoftBank is very hands off, and the sale to Nvidia appears to be kaput.

Sure I didn't say that they were a true subsidiary, I used the word "basically".

At that point, yes Broadcom is ultimately paying the fees to ARM, but separating RPi from that negotiation is an oversimplification. RPi absolutely has a seat at that table.

And ARM probably doesn't care that much about it being the go to SBC (some cheap chinese board would take on that mantle without RPi leading the charge), but instead that it's the practical successor to what ARM was founded to do. Put passable performance, hackable computers designed by Brits in front of British school children as cheaply as possible.

> The RPi seems to intentionally lag around 5 years behind the Arm roadmap so maybe the RPi 7 will have Armv9 in 2027.

The chance they'll have stuff using RISC-V in 2027 is definitely above zero. It's easy to forget that the Raspberry Pi Foundation have been RISC-V Foundation members for years.

Fingers crossed! A popular raspi-like sbc is definitely something that could boost RISC-V popularity. They already exist, yes, but are expensive for their power.

LowRisc.org has some Rpi folks on their team, and they seem to be chasing features (minion cores, for example) that would be good for the Rpi.

Rasperry Pi is one of the faster SBCs on the market right now. It’s amazing that it’s as cheap as it is.

The sad reality is that the faster ARM cores don’t trickle their way into mainstream ARM SoCs very quickly. The fastest ARM chips go into cellular phones, set top boxes, and other mass produced electronic goods from vendors who can afford to implement them.

I hope this changes in the coming years as more chipmakers embrace mainline Linux and open source drivers instead of relying on the old models.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem very likely. None of the major vendors (including ARM itself) seem terribly concerned about the open source world. Given they're dealing in 100's of millions to billions of units and the open source world (currently) accounts for perhaps low 10's of millions (all time total!) it's understandable from a business standpoint.

This reminds me of Game Boy vs. Game Gear and I think it's a very smart move.