[wwice]

From this article https://www.imore.com/mac-moving-apple-silicon-not-arm

"First, ARM has two different kinds of licenses. One is for chipset designs. You pay your fee, you take your Cortex cores or whatever, you get them fabbed, and you've got your CPUs.

The other is an ISA license. With that, you get no chip design. None. All you get is the instruction set architecture. You have to roll the actual design yourself.

And that's what Apple's been doing. Making their own custom designs that use the ARM instruction set. For years."

[afroboy]

Isn't that what everybody doing Qualcomm, Samsung, huawei ..?

[kasabali]

No. They have architectural licenses but they use ARM designs.