[snvzz]

>monopoly? Here is a list of major ARM licensees...

None of these companies is able to license cores to third parties.

Only ARM can do that. ARM holds a monopoly.

>this is from DeepSeek, ymmv

DeepSeek would have told you this much, given the right prompt. Confirmation bias is unfortunately one hell of a bias.

[StillBored]

Sure, but i suspect for basically all of us (maybe Elon is surfing HN today), that literally means nothing. Few of us have the 100's of millions required to design and fab a competitive SoC, and for those that do, the arm licenses are easier to acquire than the knowledge of how to build a competitive system (see RISC-V). You might as well complain about TSMC not publishing the information on how to fab 2nm parts or the code used to generate the mask sets.

For the rest of us, what matters is whether we can open digikey/newegg/whatever and buy a few machines and whether they are open enough for us to achieve our goals and their relative costs. So that list of vendors is more appropriate because they _CAN_ sell the resulting products to us. The problem is how much of their mostly off the shelf IP they refuse to document, resulting in extra difficulties getting basic things working.

[igravious]

ARM holds a monopoly over ARM licences? Wow. Truly you are a genius unappreciated in your own time. /s