Originally Posted by
sf49ers Cortex A9 is a cpu architecture type or class, this is the branding used by a company called ARM who owns and licenses the ARM based CPU architecture . Qualcomm, Apple, NVIDIA, TI and others license it and built hardware processor based on the ARM specification. The cortex A9 is one such standard and most mobile CPU's currently available are built on A9 architecture. The processor from Qualcomm may be called S4 as part of its own branding but is a cortex A9 and so do TI's OMAP 44xx series
ARM does two things - they either license out CPU designs (the actual blueprints) or they license out the architecture (more like guidelines).
TI, Samsung and Nvidia license ARM cores like the Cortex A9 and then add their own bits like GPUs and connectivity. That means they use ARM's own CPU blueprints in their SoCs.
Apple and Qualcomm are architecture licensees - they license the ARMv7 architecture and design their own cores that are compatible with it. Qualcomm's Krait cores in its Snapdragon SoCs are comparable to Cortex A9 and Cortex A15 cores. It's similar to AMD licensing the x86 architecture from Intel and building their own compatible CPUs without actually using Intel's designs. Intel has Pentium, AMD has Athlon, yet they're both compatible with each other.
I'm surprised Blackberry went with the TI SoC though. TI has left the consumer SoC business so it's an older design and the GPU performance is slower than the Snapdragon.
