so how many LE's do these cores consume compared to a similar RISC-V or any other CPU design? Are there advantages just beyond familiarity of ARM?
ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs
31–40 of 93 posts
Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs
#32The 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…
Big and small players are interested indeed, from WD, Alibaba and Huami to 'some 300 companies already looking at or developing with RISC-V in China'[1], but not because RISC-V is so wonderful, it's just not bad and just enough for many tasks - and it's basically free.
[1] https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1333...
Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs
#33The 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…
Kinda off-topic, but I feel like they could gain a lot by opening their graphics stacks or simply by letting FOSS devs work on them, instead of making their work more difficult/impossible (see: history of the FOSS lima driver).
The problem with graphics is that it's a patent minefield. This is one of the main reasons why graphics stacks are usually so closed.
Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs
#34The 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…
Big and small players are interested indeed, from WD, Alibaba and Huami to 'some 300 companies already looking at or developing with RISC-V in China'[1], but not because RISC-V is so wonderful, it's just not bad and just enough for many tasks - and it's basically free. [1] https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1333...
What I don't understand is does it really cost a company like WD that much to license or just buy already manufactured chips?
It would seem taking risks on new architectures, and all the extra development time (both chip and tooling) would far outweigh the cost of just licensing arm.
Can someone explain the economics of it all?
Don't get me wrong, I am all for a free competitor to ARM's near monopoly on the mobile embedded space. I don't just get it.
Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs
#35Wow, 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.
Here is a ice40 fpga board that uses a cortex-M4 https://www.tindie.com/products/Folknology/blackice-ii .
Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs
#36The 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…
Big and small players are interested indeed, from WD, Alibaba and Huami to 'some 300 companies already looking at or developing with RISC-V in China'[1], but not because RISC-V is so wonderful, it's just not bad and just enough for many tasks - and it's basically free. [1] https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1333...
It's probably impossible to satisfy the level of 'wonderfullness' you'd demand in a modern (even if minimalist) processor. There are a lot of competing demands on what it should do. RISC-V seems to have made good decisions w.r.t. modularity and efficiency at least.
Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs
#37Wow, 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.
Yeah the newer zynq-MP have a 4 core A53 as well as two realtime class cores on there.
Those are actually silicon hardware cores all of these are soft-core applications.
Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big and small players are interested indeed, from WD, Alibaba and Huami to 'some 300 companies already looking at or developing with RISC-V in China'[1], but not because RISC-V is so wonderful, it's just not bad and just enough for many tasks - and it's basically free. [1] https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1333...
What I don't understand is does it really cost a company like WD that much to license or just buy already manufactured chips? It would seem taking risks on new architectures, and all the extra development time (both chip and tooling) would far outweigh the cost of just licensing arm. Can someone explain the economics of it all? Don't get me wrong, I am all for a free competitor to ARM's near monopoly on the mobile em…
I think the issue is really just one of scale. If you ship 400M drives a year (as the global hard drive industry did last year), a cost savings of $1 is a lot of money that goes into your pocket/R&D. If you're making 10000 of something, making a custom chip is almost certainly going to cost you a fortune; if you're making tens or hundreds of millions of something, that cost gets amortized very quickly, I imagine.
If WD is making their own chips, it almost certainly isn't to save a couple grand a year; it's probably to save many millions.
Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big and small players are interested indeed, from WD, Alibaba and Huami to 'some 300 companies already looking at or developing with RISC-V in China'[1], but not because RISC-V is so wonderful, it's just not bad and just enough for many tasks - and it's basically free. [1] https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1333...
What I don't understand is does it really cost a company like WD that much to license or just buy already manufactured chips? It would seem taking risks on new architectures, and all the extra development time (both chip and tooling) would far outweigh the cost of just licensing arm. Can someone explain the economics of it all? Don't get me wrong, I am all for a free competitor to ARM's near monopoly on the mobile em…
It is not uncommon to have lots of simple processors in one chip. One could manage low power mode, another encryption and boot, and another core functionality required in a hard drive. When you have 3-4 cores per device the license fees start to add up.
Re: ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big and small players are interested indeed, from WD, Alibaba and Huami to 'some 300 companies already looking at or developing with RISC-V in China'[1], but not because RISC-V is so wonderful, it's just not bad and just enough for many tasks - and it's basically free. [1] https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1333...
What I don't understand is does it really cost a company like WD that much to license or just buy already manufactured chips? It would seem taking risks on new architectures, and all the extra development time (both chip and tooling) would far outweigh the cost of just licensing arm. Can someone explain the economics of it all? Don't get me wrong, I am all for a free competitor to ARM's near monopoly on the mobile em…
When you get large enough, doing it yourself can become cheaper than buying it, and small %0.5 improvement projects can have big benefits since they accumulate.
RISC-V feels like CPU hardware's linux moment right now.