But why did Apple choose to do that if they could have saved money,
never paid Arm Inc a cent, and gone with RISC-V? Arm brings a lot of things to the table, and while Apple is alone in having done a CPU architecture change successfully not once, but twice, it's not something they do just for funsies, so I doubt a switch to RISC-V is imminent.
As people have pointed out. RISC-V didn't exist when they created the IPhone and wasn't even ready when they did the M chips.
>so I doubt a switch to RISC-V is imminent
I never claimed it was. My point was that Apple is not giving much money to ARM. So it really doesn't matter all that much.
My point was not that Apple would adopt RISC-V but rather that RISC-V would eat ARM market from below, and partly from the DC too.
The reason the original IPhone was ARM is because ARM was strong in the mobile market as they had many license in the mobile market already during the 90s and their chips were often together with mobile chips on an SoC.
But ARM already controls the mobile market almost totally, so there isn't much upside there, but lots of downside.
A switch to RISC-V isn’t imminent but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did switch in the early/mid 2030s. Apple tends to switch their CPU architecture every 15 years or so.
RISC-V doesn’t yet exceed ARM capabilities across the board but it likely will before this decade is over.
