I think you have an oversized understanding of what ARM does, and what value it brings to companies using an ARM chip
It is not intel, it is making the chip or even really designing the chip, though they do have reference designs...
ARM is ARM exactly because companies can take the instruction set and design their own chips around it for their own needs, they are not holding out for the next AMD or intel design..
That however means the individual companies take on more of the design costs, and risk if the design is a failure.
No Arm should not be one of the largest companies in the world right now, not even close.
You would need to provide a source for both those claims
First off, Qualcomm just spent 1.4 Billion on a design firm, for the purposes to bolstering the internal design team [1]
Then there is a 99% claim, is that by sales, volume, etc? Has I know many companies that design their own ARM processor that make up more than 1% of the market, Apple, and Samsung alone would refute that statement
Qualcomm is using reference ARM cores these days so does Amazon in Graviton and Samsung in Exynos for example their latest and greatest SoC uses Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 cores with an AMD GPU, Apple is probably the only big player today with custom cores.
The small players also all tend to use Cortex cores.
You still need a design team to integrate ARM IP blocks with your own IP or within the constraints of a given manufacturing process but almost no one is making their own cores.
Qualcomm used to have custom core, and maybe they bought Nuvia for that after seeing that the X2 cores from ARM won’t be enough to compete with Apple. My own personal bet is that they’ll attempt to dabble with custom again and will eventually give up as it’s too expensive.
Apple managed to make it work because they are designing cores for their own use and they essentially poached an entire development team from Intel.
> You still need a design team to integrate ARM IP blocks with your own IP or within the constraints of a given manufacturing process but almost no one is making their own cores.
To emphasize this a little, I think the headcount needed for the this is quite a bit larger than the additional headcount need for making your own core.
There is a lot of working in making a high performance SoC using Cortex cores, and a lot of work in making a custom core, but I think some commenters here think that so many more custom cores are being made than in reality because they think that the rest is the easy part and the hard part is all cpu design, so if these fabless semiconductor companies are spending (overlapping) years per chip with thousands of employees it must be because everything is custom (regardless of what you can learn just looking up SoCs on wikipedia)
Yeah I would agree, there is ton of work that has to go into getting as much performance from the SoC given all the design constraints and designing your own cores would probably not help to remove enough of the problems you would need to solve to be worth while especially if you need to hit a very wide range of products and use cases.
Apple is in a unique position they both have a world class leading design team and they have complete control over the entire product so they have far more levers to tweak and they don’t need to compete with anyone but themselves.
And you can see that with how the went about with their SoC design. For the most part they had a single design with a few power envelopes for cheaper / less powerful products their solution was always to use SoCs from previous years.
Even for special cases like the Apple Watch etc they tended to repurpose cores from their existing designs. The S series SoC is essentially one or two efficiency cores from their A series further clocked down and sometimes on a more power efficient node to squeeze a bit more battery life out of them.
But beyond that until the M series it was pretty much always you get a new A series SoC for the new iPhone/iPad with the only major difference being the power envelope and everything else would use an SoC form 1-3 years earlier.
If Qualcomm could’ve play this game they might have still be using custom cores too.
more than 1% of what market? I think it is possible apple + Samsung produce less than 1% of all arm cores by volume. But sources for all of this would be nice, there is a lot of speculation in this thread, and most of it seems wildly uninformed (not a dig at you, thinking of elsewhere in the thread where a good portion of comments don't have a great grasp of what arm does).
Another factor to consider: I believe in-house designed core, on an SoC, ends up producing more ARM IP cores than apple/samsung/nvidia/whoever IP cores. 8 or 12 in house designed main cores may be supported by up to 20 cortexes as various controllers, boot processors, audio whatsits, and security widgets. I don't know if Apple made their own small space and/or low power designs for supporting processors, but that's not how other in-house arm core based SoCs I am familiar with worked.
As in, they failed to destroy the company for short term gains, like companies usually do.