There comes a time in every technology company’s evolution, assuming it grows old enough, where management turns round to its customers and declares: “Hey, that’s my money!”
This is where Arm, or at least its parent Softbank, has now landed. Given that Arm already collects a royalty on each core used by its chipmaking customers, Softbank has apparently decided according a report by the Financial Times that its best course of action for collecting more money is to demand it from the customers of its customers.
Twenty years is also roughly the birth-to-peak lifecycle of a processor architecture that has made it to the top. IBM’s System/360 mainframe looked triumphant in the mid-1980s, two decades after forging the early computer industry. No-one got fired for buying IBM in those days. Yet, at the time, the Intel x86, which ironically benefited from IBM’s patronage, was chipping away at the foundations to become the pre-eminent computer architecture of the...