From what I’ve read previously, Apple has a special licensing deal already as they were part of founding Arm, although I don’t know if there’s any details on exactly how that works.
I believe its an architectural license which lets them design their own cores based on the the ARM instruction set. I think a few other companies may have this license but its not disclosed.
Apple cofounded ARM for use in the Newton product line; they released new Newton products from 1993-97 and discontinued them in 1998. They then used ARM again for the iPod, released in 2001.
They didn't design the iPod ARM SoC though, nor the ones in iPhones for quite some time, and the microcontrollers in Macs for power management and such were not ARM. (I mean, some of them might've been, but the one I'm thinking of was SH or something.)
> Apple didn't use ARM for something like a decade or two after that.
They used the ARM610 in the Newton in 1993 (ARM was founded in late 1990) and then an 8 year gap to the iPod in 2001 (ARM7TDMI which are ARM designs.) Their first in-house ARM design (I believe) is the iPhone 4 in 2010.
They definitely didn't "architect/design ARM" for nearly a couple of decades after founding ARM, yeah, but they did use them.
Yes. Watching it unfold, the whole misinformation self spread, and back into its loop is both interesting and tiring. It took months and some hard work to camp down Unified Memory being SRAM and something special. But this ARM deal? 5 years and counting.
It is two point;
Apple has an architectural license, which somehow became a "special deal" as if they are the only one doing it. They are not and even the Amphere Computing has one.
Apple was the part of the founder of ARM, and somehow this gave people impression they have a "special deal".
And had hajile not step up and provided the ARMv9 being a superset of ARMv8 etc etc I would have to spend some time to look up the detail of superset just to stamp out these type of non-sense. ( Each ARMv8+ and v9 have way too many features and optional extensions I dont even remember which is which )
And this is not the first time YouTuber Vadim Yuryev gave something out that is completely wrong.
