Here's some more details from NextPlatform
Full NextPlatform article
Vince789
joined 11 months ago
Lunar Lake-MX looks like a direct response to Apple's M Series/Qualcomm's X Elite
Great to see Intel design a dedicated die for the 8-30W TDP market instead of just reusing their 15-28W TDP design
Although still no direct response to Apple's M Pro/M Max with huge iGPUs yet from Intel (AMD's Strix Halo is supposedly coming in 2025)
Note that's the GB6 ST in Windows, it would be around 3030 for Linux which is more comparable to Android
Still I'd agree IPC isn't amazing compared to Apple or Arm, which I guess sorta makes sense given NUVIA were originally targeting servers, where MT+efficiency is the main focus not ST
IMO how quickly Qualcomm can iterate on the X Elite will be critical to their success (that and Microsoft pulling their weight on the software front)
We've seen several companies release decently competitive custom Arm cores, but then fail to keep up with Arm's rapid yearly development
E.g. Samsung's Exynos M, NVIDIA's Denver, and Cavium's ThunderX2 all started reasonably competitive with Arm, but fell further and further behind in their following iterations
Arm makes money from Arm ISA from:
License Fees are an upfront payment to gain access to Arm ISA. The License Fees for ALAs (Architectural License Agreements) are far more expensive than for TLAs (Technology License Agreements, i.e. stock cores)
Royalties are a % per chip sold which are reflective of the level of Arm IP used. The Royalties for ALAs are far lower than for TLAs. That's because TLAs holders are using far more Arm IP, whereas ALA holders design the cores/IP themselves
Overall royalties make up a far larger portion of Arm's revenue, e.g. for 2022: $1.7B in royalties vs $1B for "non-royalties"
Hence why Arm has been increasingly concerned about the rise in ALA holders, especially Qualcomm switching back to their ALA
Sources:
Arm's statements from SoftBank's Annual Reports
AnandTech, it is very old but Arm hasn't changed their business model for ages, just the termology