That's right, although there is a difference between the IP licence and the SoC. The ARM Cortex was never part of the Akida IP.
The Akida 1000 IP was licensed for use with any CPU/GPU, so a bare licence would not have involved the ARM licence, but I suppose you could buy a package deal which included Cortex along with the concomitant ARM licence fee if you lacked the expertise/cash to design your own CPU interface connections.
The Akida 1000 SoC would have included the ARM licence which is not needed for the bare 1000 IP licence, but the 1500 PCIe SoC will not include the ARM licence fee.
We have also teamed up with SiFive and their RISC-V processor, so I expect that, at some stage, we can expect to see a SiFive RISC-V processor with Akida (sans Cortex) front end as a single SoC.
Similarly for Intel, and the ARM option will still be available.
In all cases, the 1500 will need to be configured by its associated processor, and a bit of the CNN2SNN processing will be carried out by that processor, unless the modifications to the 1500 have eliminated the need for the CNN2SNN CCPU processing.