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ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

abopen.com

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Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

#11

Post by LogicCowboy »

This is ARM's definite response to RISC-V. As people develop their FPGA products, they will have to decide what their long term target is. If the intent is to eventually turn the code into an ASIC, RISC-V maybe the economically more sensible solution since there is no licensing costs there. However they will have to be patient with the toolchain. If the idea if the code will only be a pet project, wouldn't benefit from RISC's customization abilities, or long term is expected to use an ARM core, this is definitely the right pick. The ARM toolchain being more mature is a draw for many hardware developers.

I'm definitely very interested in trying a project with either RISC-V or ARM.

Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

#12

Post by Zenst »

LogicCowboy wrote: post #11

This is ARM's definite response to RISC-V. As people develop their FPGA products, they will have to decide what their long term target is. If the intent is to eventually turn the code into an ASIC, RISC-V maybe the economically more sensible solution since there is no licensing costs there. However they will have to be patient with the toolchain. If the idea if the code will only be a pet project, wouldn't benefit fr…

Equally by offering this for Xilinx, it makes them more palatable over Altera offerings (owned by Intel). So a very tactile move on many levels.

But as an end user, I like competition like this, as long as there is competition tomorrow.

Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

#13

Post by valarauca1 »

The commetization of the CPU market was bound to happen eventually. As modern production techniques for chips and FPGA programming start to converge rapidly.

What is the ETA until we get a GNX "GNX is Not X86"? An Open source i386 core that people can run existing applications on? Much like GNU offered a standardized FOSS platform people could run existing Unix workloads on.

Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

#14

Post by paulgerhardt »

The press release linked by OP doesn't give the full story. For a better perspective see https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip...

If you're just joining us, Arm very much sees the up and coming RISC-V stack as an immediate threat to the future of their business and is taking pro-active countermeasures - doing everything from awkward, backfiring smear campaigns against RISC-V[1] to straight up license dumping their own product to prevent developers jumping ship.

It's interesting to see because RISC-V is wonderful and Arm seems to recognize that. Arm Holdings is acting rationally as someone in a privileged competitive position would do. At the same time, big players like Western Digital are migrating to RISC-V so Arm is internally freaking out [2].

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/

[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_str...

Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

#15

Post by TomVDB »

kbumsik wrote: post #4

Wow, not only FPGA-optimized Cortex-M1, they also releases Cortex-M3, one of the most popular MCU IP. BTW, are there many applications integrating a MCU core with FPGA rather than a AP core? I only have seen Xilinx products that uses Cortex-A core.

Super small CPU cores are fantastic for complex FSM replacement, especially on an FPGA which has unused block RAMs (so using them is essentially free.)

I’ve seen cases with relatively complex pure HW FSM being replace by a small CPU and 1KB of RAM where the logic used by the CPU ends up smaller than the FSM.

But now the CPU is programmable, so you can iterate much quicker in case of bugs, without the need to reaunthesize.

A good example are SDRAM controllers: almost all of them have a small CPU inside the controller that is used for calibration training.

Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

#16

Post by noselasd »

kbumsik wrote: post #4

Wow, not only FPGA-optimized Cortex-M1, they also releases Cortex-M3, one of the most popular MCU IP. BTW, are there many applications integrating a MCU core with FPGA rather than a AP core? I only have seen Xilinx products that uses Cortex-A core.

> BTW, are there many applications integrating a MCU core with FPGA rather than a AP core? I only have seen Xilinx products that uses Cortex-A core.

It's common enough that you'll have them available as part of the FPGA toolchain , Xilinx has Picoblaze/Microblaze and Altera has NIOS-II

Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

#17

Post by Taniwha »

valarauca1 wrote: post #13

The commetization of the CPU market was bound to happen eventually. As modern production techniques for chips and FPGA programming start to converge rapidly. What is the ETA until we get a GNX "GNX is Not X86"? An Open source i386 core that people can run existing applications on? Much like GNU offered a standardized FOSS platform people could run existing Unix workloads on.

A great question .... all the 386 patents are out of date now right?

Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

#18

Post by faragon »

I would love ARM releasing ARM1 and ARM2 processors (both with a 3-stage pipeline) for FPGAs, not because of economical interest, but because of historical and coolness purposes. And more, so you could e.g. run a synthesized Acorn Archimedes from a FPGA, for free, running Linux on top of it :-)

Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

#20

Post by dang »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #14

The press release linked by OP doesn't give the full story. For a better perspective see https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip... If you're just joining us, Arm very much sees the up and coming RISC-V stack as an immediate threat to the future of their business and is taking pro-active countermeasures - doing everything from awkward, backfiring smear campaigns against RISC-V[1] to straight up l…

Ok, we changed the URL to that from https://www.arm.com/company/news/2018/10/arm-expands-design-.... Thanks!
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