Comment by ksec
MediaTek and others using ARMv9 design and pricing, heck even Qualcomm are selling their SoC on Windows PC at cheaper price compared to Intel or AMD.
Even at a higher IP price their final product are cheaper, faster and competitive. There may be a strategy about leaving money on the table, but it is another thing about leaving TOO much money on the table. If Intel and AMD's pricing is so far above ARM, there is nothing wrong with increasing your highest performance core 's pricing.
I would not be surprised in a 2 - 3 years time the highest PC performance CPU / SoC is coming from Nvidia with ARM CPU Core rather than x86. But knowing Nvidia I know they will charge similar pricing to Intel :D
So far, Qualcomm is not paying the royalty rate hikes since they are selling ARM hardware using cores covered under the ARMv8 architectural license that they obtained before SoftBank started pushing ARM to improve profitability.
It is interesting that you should mention MediaTek. They joined the RISC-V Software Ecosystem in May 2023:
https://riseproject.dev/
It seems reasonable to think that they are considering jumping ship. If they are designing their own in-house CPU cores, it will likely be a while before we see them as part of a mediatek SoC.
In any case, people do not like added fees. They had previously tolerated ARM’s fees since they were low, but now that they are raising them, people are interested in alternatives. At least some of ARM’s partners are paying the higher for now, but it is an incentive to move to RISC-V, which is no fee for the ISA and either no fee or low fee for IP cores. For example, the hazard3 cores that the Raspberry Pi Foundation adopted in the RP2350 did not require them to pay royalty fees to anyone.