Comment by ryao
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:
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.