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A comment on Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the Next Decade. Parent comment

Re:Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the... by Teknoman117 on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @05:12PM (#26640593)
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

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Re:Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the... by ksec on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @04:34AM (#26644823)
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.
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Re:Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the... by monocasa on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @05:17PM (#26640668)
RPi is basically a subsidiary of Broadcom. And it was RPi engineers that worked on each of the SoCs past the original BCM2835.
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Re:Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the... by ohazi on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @06:20PM (#26641292)
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.

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Re:Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the... by rjsw on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @07:09PM (#26641664)
Broadcom owns Acorn so I would guess that they may have a special licence.
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Re:Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the... by deaddodo on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @11:40PM (#26643269)
SoftBank owns ARM, with a pending sale to Nvidia. I doubt owning the Acorn trademarks and back catalog has any effect on that relationship.
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Re:Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the... by M2Ys4U on Thursday April 01, 2021 @11:23AM (#26661595)
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.
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Re:Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the... by deaddodo on Thursday April 01, 2021 @01:46PM (#26663784)
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.

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Re:Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the... by M2Ys4U on Friday April 02, 2021 @06:22PM (#26676583)
No, I meant ARM.

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

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Re:Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the... by monocasa on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @12:14AM (#26643454)
SoftBank is very hands off, and the sale to Nvidia appears to be kaput.
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Re:Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the... by monocasa on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @06:41PM (#26641450)
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.

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