Rene Haas
Analyst · Vivek Arya from Bank of America Securities
Yes. So let me take the first part of that question, Vivek. I'll address both the v9 transition, and then I want to make an important point regarding how to think about pricing inside the v9 envelope and then let Jason talk about the specifics. But first off, the adoption of v9 is going very, very well. We're seeing very, very strong uptick of it in mobile. All of our NeoVerse products are v9 and we're now starting to see the transition of it in Automotive and IoT. And I mentioned in the opening comments that we've now seen the first shipments from Apple that are v9. So we're very, very happy with the rate of adoption. And I think if you looked at the royalty -- the adoption rates on a quarter-to-quarter basis, it may not look linear, but it will definitely be increasing quarter-over-quarter-over-quarter when we start looking at it on a multi-quarter basis. That being said, I think there's a very important distinction that I want to make regarding how to think about royalties during the time that the v9 architecture is ramping. In contrast to version 7 and version 8 which, by the way, by way of reference, those architectures tend to have a life of approximately 10 years in terms of their peak run rate. During version 7 and version 8, once the royalty rates were fixed for that version, there was very little delta throughout the period, meaning that as those versions reached maturity in terms of saturation, the royalty growth would asymptote. That's not going to be the case with v9 and there's 2 primary reasons for that. Reason one is that generation on generation, we introduced multi year improvements in the technology and multiyear improvements in terms of the product, meaning that when we deliver a product, let's say, for a phone that goes into production in 2025, and then we delivered the v9 version for a phone that goes into production in 2026, because the product is better, 15% better, let's say, on performance and power, we're able to drive better value-based pricing for that solution. So during v9, even though the royalty rates are increasing from version 8 to Version9, we're going to see continued increases throughout the life of version 9 even as version 9 adoption increases. Secondly, in version 9, we've also introduced CSS, which we've mentioned several times, carries a higher royalty rate, in some cases, double, if not more, of what a standard version 9 core would be. So as a result, as we see growth in version 9 adoption, the royalty growth track higher than it has traditionally. And again, it's for those 2 factors. Number one, the value-based pricing that sees an increase because of the better economics delivered. And secondly, more of a transition to CSS. With that, I'll -- Jason, if you have any comments, I think maybe we answered the extent of that question.