They do, and their microarchitecture is unambiguously, hugely different to anything else (some details in 1). The last Apple Silicon chip to use a standard Arm design was the A5X, whereas they were using customised PowerVR GPUs until I think the A11.
They are one of a handful of companies that hold a license allowing them to both customize the reference core and to implement the Arm ISA through their own silicon design. Everyone else's SoCs all use the same Arm reference mask. Qualcomm also holds such a license, which owes to their Snapdragon SoC, just like Apple's A- and M-series, occupying a performance hierarchy above everything else Arm.
According to Hector Martin (the project lead of Asahi) in previous threads of the subject[0], Apple actually has an "architecture+" license which is completely exclusive to them, thanks to having literally been at the origins of ARM: not only can Apple implement the ISA on completely custom silicon rather than license ARM cores, they can customise the ISA (as in add instructions, as well as opt out of mandatory ISA features).
The only Qualcomm designed 64-bit mobile core so far was the Kyro core in the 820. They then assigned that team to server chips (Centriq) then sacked the whole team when they felt they needed to cut cash flow to stave off Avago/Broadcom. The "Kyro" cores from 835 on are rebadged/adjusted ARM cores.
IMO the Kyro/820 wasn't a major failure, it turned out a lot better than the 810 which had A53/A57 cores.
And then they decided they needed a mobile CPU team again and bought Nuvia for ~US$1 Billion.
Qualcomm did use their own design called Kyro for a little while, but is now focusing on cores designed by Nuvia which they just bought for the future.
As for Apple, they've designed their own cores since the Apple A6 which used the Swift core. If you go to the Wikipedia page, you can actually see the names of their core designs, which they improve every year. For the M1 and A14, they use Firestorm High-Performance Cores and Icestorm Efficiency Cores. The A15 uses Avalanche and Blizzard. If you visit AnandTech, they have deep-dives on the technical details of many of Apple's core designs and how they differ from other core designs including stock ARM.
The Apple A5 and earlier were stock ARM cores, the last one they used being Cortex A9.
For this reason, Apple is about as much an ARM chip as AMD is an Intel chip. Technically compatible, implementation almost completely different. It's also why Apple calls it "Apple Silicon" and it is not just marketing, but actually justified just as much as AMD not calling their chips Intel derivatives.
Kyro started as custom but flopped in the Snapdragon 820 so they moved to a "semi-custom" design, it's unclear how different it really is from the stock Cortex designs.
> Qualcomm did use their own design called Kyro for a little while
Before that, they had Scorpion and Krait, which were both quite successful 32 bit ARM compatible cores at the time.
Kryo started as an attempt to quickly launch a custom 64 bit ARM core and the attempt failed badly enough that Qualcomm abandoned designing their own cores and turned to licensing semi-custom cores from ARM instead.
To be blunt, you're asking about questions that could be solved with a quick google and you are coming off as a bit of a jerk asking for very specific citations with exact specific wording for basic facts like this that, again, could be solved by looking through the wikipedia for "apple silicon" and then bouncing to a specific source. People have answered your question and you're brushing them off because you want it answered in an exact specific way.
> NVIDIA and Samsung, up to this point, have gone the processor license route. They take ARM designed cores (e.g. Cortex A9, Cortex A15, Cortex A7) and integrate them into custom SoCs. In NVIDIA’s case the CPU cores are paired with NVIDIA’s own GPU, while Samsung licenses GPU designs from ARM and Imagination Technologies. Apple previously leveraged its ARM processor license as well. Until last year’s A6 SoC, all Apple SoCs leveraged CPU cores designed by and licensed from ARM.
> With the A6 SoC however, Apple joined the ranks of Qualcomm with leveraging an ARM architecture license. At the heart of the A6 were a pair of Apple designed CPU cores that implemented the ARMv7-A ISA. I came to know these cores by their leaked codename: Swift.
Yes, Apple has been designing and using non-reference cores since the A6 era, and were one of the first to the table with ARMv8 (apple engineers claim it was designed for them under contract to their specifications, but this part is difficult to verify with anything more than citations from individual engineers).
I expect that Apple has said as much in their presentations somewhere, but if you're that keen on finding such an incredibly specific attribution, then knock yourself out. It'll be in an apple conference somewhere, like WWDC. They probably have said "apple-designed silicon" or "custom core" at some point, and that would be your citation - but they also sell products, not hardware, and they don't extensively talk about their architectures since they're not really the product, so you probably won't find a deep-dive like Anandtech from Apple directly where they say "we have 8-wide decode, 16-deep pipeline... etc" sorts of things.
