[smoldesu]

Eh... why do they need them, though?

Think about it: ARM is basically a money printer. One company owns the patents and can license it to manufacturers for whatever the hell they want. The cherry on top? Now they don't even have to develop their own ISA extensions or standards, they just let Mediatek, Apple and Qualcomm fight over what they want in the next big version. Every dollar they spend on lawyers is worth 10 software engineers, frankly. They've transitioned to the kind of company where they behave like a dragon, guarding one big patent hoard until they die or someone purchases the mountain they live in. The writing is on the wall for proprietary RISC architectures, anyways: RISC-V beats the pants off ARMv8 in so many important benchmarks like SIMD calculations and performance-per-watt, once Chinese manufacturers catch word that they can make chips without paying tribute to Western think-tanks, we'll be mass-producing these on a scale that simply doesn't exist today. ARM's real business of putting a Cortex M53 in everything with a power cable will be donezo.