[ergo98]

Lots of evil has been committed under the guise of defense.

However Apple's potential here is hugely overstated. ARM licensees aren't at the whim of ARM -- they knew to sign generous IP agreements that essentially allow them to fork the technology. You have Apple on one side, with essentially a unchanged A8 created by Samsung, and virtually every other tech company on the other side -- Apple would quickly find themselves in another PowerPC situation if they bought ARM.

Speaking of PowerPC, Intel has been showing off some very impression demos of a smartphone powered by an Atom. Android of course is built from the ground up to be generally processor agnostic, so it wouldn't be a huge migration.

[Aegean]

"However Apple's potential here is hugely overstated. ARM licensees aren't at the whim of ARM -- they knew to sign generous IP agreements that essentially allow them to fork the technology."

Do you mean companies like Marvell have comprehensive licenses allowing them to design their ARM cpu at their own will?

[wlievens]

Almost anything you encounter is an "ARM-based" chip. I'm not knowledgeable on hardware stuff but I do know that ARM customers are engineers that build on the platform; it's not a plug-and-play business.