Paul A. Clayton (paaronclayton.delete@this.gmail.com) on February 27, 2019 10:25 am wrote:
> If (when?) anyone can trivially assemble ARM design components, ARM will be hurting the profit
> margins of those licensing its designs. When a MediaTek chip that just assembles ARM design components
> is nearly as good as a Qualcomm product, it would become difficult to justify extra design effort
> from Qualcomm and higher prices (to fund such effort and increase profit).


What extra design effort? Qualcomm already gave up doing custom cores several years ago, now they use standard ARM cores. Maybe they are tweaking them a bit, but if they are it isn't enough to show up in benchmarks. So Qualcomm has no room to complain about ARM's licensing making them feel the pain of competition, because they are simply licensing cores themselves.

The only Android OEM designing custom cores is Samsung, and their M4 core was benchmarked by Anandtech and found to be about equal to the A75 cores in the SD845, and well behind the A76 cores in the SD855. But they probably don't care, they are saving a lot of money not paying the Qualcomm tax on the SoCs for Europe etc. that don't need US spec CDMA. I expect next year's Galaxy S11 to use Samsung's core in the US since CDMA won't be a factor anymore, they will still need it in China unless they add support for China's special 3G/4G sauce.

Qualcomm's value add is in the integration of everything you need, including cellular and other stuff like fingerprint readers. That's where they will have to do better than the rest to keep their competitive edge, but when modems from Samsung, Huawei, Mediatek and Intel become "good enough", and the other stuff is "good enough" then there isn't much room for them to get a bigger profit margin off their SoCs. That won't be ARM's fault though, anymore than ARM is to blame for the smartphone market being saturated and replacement cycles lengthening.