Arm IPO to kick off today
Technical question: why do people need ARM licenses? Surely you don't need anything from them to design a chip from scratch that implements the same instruction set, as Cyrix and AMD famously did to the ia32.<p>Are the licensees using parts of the actual chip design?  Are their own designs too far down the "derivative work" rabbit hole due to not being cleanroomed that they have no hope of ever not licensing?<p>What are the specifics?