The graviton chips are not an in house architecture, the cores are designed by and licenced from ARM.

Apple also licenses it from the same party - it holds an "Architecture License" from ARM.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190521

That's a license for the use of the instruction set, not the design. The design is completely in-house.

The point of an architecture license is that you license the ISA itself but can design your own chip from the transistor up :) There's like 15 holders of ARM architecture license. As long as Apple properly implements the ISA and passes validation, they can literally do whatever they want to the core itself (not just the SoC around it).

Most ARM users have much more limited licenses, and can only buy and fab IP blocks designed by someone else (usually ARM).

That is the case of Amazon, the Graviton used A72 cores, and the Graviton II uses Neoverse N1, which are derived from the A76 with more focus on server workloads.

Both are designed by and licensed from ARM.

I see this come up often, and it reminds me to go check the details (which I haven't done, as I write this, per Internet tradition)...

Apple was one of the original founders of the business entity that licenses the ARM architecture these days. Apple sold the share of that business that they directly controlled.

But the overall result is that specific terms of Apple's license to ARM intellectual property have never been disclosed, and are thought to be quite broad, a license at least on par with architecture and foundry-level licenses.

Not sinister, just an exceptional relationship between Apple and ARM, historically.

You misunderstand.

An ARM architecture license is not a licensed to use an ARM designed core. It is a license to implement the ARM instruction set on your own non-ARM design. "Architecture" in this case comes from ISA: Instruction Set Architecture. :D

So, Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung (and Nvidia?) have ARM architecture licenses, and they then go and design their own implementations, from scratch (I don't know if the license lets them use ARM designed bits, you'd have to ask them :D ).

Most companies simply license an ARM designed core and blat that into their SoC - I assume it's cheaper but I don't know if that means the license is cheaper, or the total cost (e.g. including actually designing a cpu) is cheaper.