<i>&quot;the license will not permit them to alter the architecture it&#x27;s all or nothing&quot;</i><p>Can you give a reference for that? As far as I know, Apple has an architectural license that allows them to ship anything that passes a test suite. Depending on the way the test suite is specified, that may not rule out shipping a superset of ARM, for example with a few extra instructions.<p>One that I _think_may_ be useful is one to load values from tagged pointers (caveat: I know little of CPU architecture)