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.