Patent trolls patent things that already exist in some form and then seek to extract revenue through the legal system.

You can't call a company that literally developed the IP they patented "trolls."

Both cases you link to are about trademarks. Patents and trademarks are unrelated.

"Patent troll" has the connotation of an organization or individual who buys cheap patents and sue other organizations on mostly bogus claims related to these patents, hoping that the other side won't want to bother and just settle the matter. That's not Arm's business model.

They don't just hold the patents, but actively develop the ISA / designs too.

ARM doesn't have a big enough moat to stay static and just troll. There are competing ISAs, some free, and there isn't as big of an lock-in as for e.g. x86.

This feels different to me because Arm is designing these chips. It feels a bit more like a drafting company who draws plans but doesn’t build anything. They don’t just have some loosely defined patent.

The linked articles are about the brand name, Arm, used in a domain. You wouldn’t put “intel” or “nvidia” in your domain name without drawing attention. Maybe we need a moniker similar to x86 to define the arm architecture more generally.

I would add to this that people who make statements like the parent did are woefully ignorant of how the industry really works. Board producers rarely design the entire PCB. PCB designers rarely produce the board. Chip designers rarely produce their chips. Chip producers often do some portion of the design process. And on and on.

Computing is a complex business and few companies do everything in house. ARM's business model of focusing solely on the IP seems to have worked well for them. From the engineering side, it's certainly nice to have the ability to pick and choose which IP blocks we'd like to use and then shop around the design ourselves versus having to battle with Intel to get what we need while trying to poke through the various layers of obfuscation they tend to put in place.

If anyone replying to this needs you to define ISA for them, their input isn't very useful.

The links you provided are about copyright and trademark law, not patents.