Licensees[edit]
Arm offers several microprocessor core designs that have been "publicly licensed" 830 times including 249 times for their newer "application processors" (non-microcontroller) used in such applications as smartphones and tablets.
[83] Three of those companies
[84] are known to have a licence for one of Arm's most powerful processor core, the
64-bit Cortex-A72 (some including Arm's other 64-bit core the
Cortex-A53) and four have a licence to their most powerful 32-bit core, the
Cortex-A15.
Cores for
32-bit architectures include Cortex-A32, Cortex-A15,
Cortex-A12,
Cortex-A17,
Cortex-A9,
Cortex-A8,
Cortex-A7 and
Cortex-A5, and older "Classic Arm Processors", as well as variant architectures for microcontrollers that include these cores:
Cortex-R7,
Cortex R5,
Cortex-R4,
Cortex-M4,
Cortex-M3,
Cortex-M1,
Cortex-M0+, and
Cortex-M0 for licensing; the three most popular licensing models are the "Perpetual (Implementation) License", "Term License" and "Per Use License".
[85]
Companies often license these designs from Arm to manufacture and integrate into their own
System on chip (SoC) with other components such as
GPUs (sometimes Arm's Mali) or
radio basebands (for mobile phones).
In addition to licenses for their core designs, Arm offers an "architectural license" for their instruction sets, allowing the licensees to design their own cores that implement one of those instruction sets. An Arm architectural license is more costly than a regular Arm core license,
[86] and also requires the necessary engineering power to design a CPU based on the instruction set.
Processors believed to be designed independently from Arm include
Apple's (architecture license from March 2008
[87])
A6,
A6X,
A7 and all subsequent Apple processors
[88] (used in
iPhone 5,
iPad and
iPhone 5S),
Qualcomm's
Snapdragon series
[89] (used in smartphones such as the US version of the
Samsung Galaxy S8) and Samsung's
Exynos ("Mongoose" M1 cores). There were around 15 architectural licensees in 2013,
[90] including Marvell, Apple, Qualcomm,
[86] Broadcom
[91] and some others.