[kyaghmour]

ARM is likely well geared for managing and collecting royalties from chip vendors (hundreds?). It seems to me that setting up an organization to collect from actual device manufacturers (~10^6-10^7 or more?) is a completely different scalability scope and, therefore, a completely different business. Maybe this is rather a targeted game of chicken tailor made against a specific licensee?

Also, re RISC-V. I'm all for that. But an ISA does not make a chip. There is far more to what ARM offers than just its ISA: production-grade cores and surrounding blocks on bleeding edge nodes, etc. They could, theoretically, start selling a RISC-V fetch and decode unit (think of it as a Unix API on top of Windows) and still come out on top.

[UltraViolence]

If ARM starts licensing according to the client's wallet size we'll all be witness to the wisdom of Apple designing their own ARM cores from scratch.

Apart from the fact that Apple's a founding member of ARM and probably doesn't pay a dime and has the freedom to do with the ARM ISA as they see fit.

[usrusr]

Collecting from actual device manufacturers would be beyond crazy, fully agree about that. But it would be almost trivial to do for some core classes, at the upper end, if they really wanted to. Certainly even that would still be hurting themselves more than others.