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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

#41

Post by jamiek88 »

steve19 wrote: post #34
snaky wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

Well WD has total sales of $15.13bn with a cost of goods of $10.8bn if the chip and license for arm costs $3 and they can get the costs to $1 with the chip doing exactly and only what they need at that scale it’s a meaningful impact on cost of goods thus bottom line.

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

#42

Post by Taniwha »

chasil wrote: post #21
Taniwha wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 all the 386 patents are out of date now right?

The wikipedia page says that AMD64 must be licensed from AMD. The market for a new 32-bit x86 clone would not be large. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86 "...x86-64 may require an additional license from AMD."

Yeah but a 386 and an x86-64 are quite different things ....

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

#43

Post by stcredzero »

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…

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

By any chance, does anyone know if Intel is funding RISC-V? According to the logic of "Commoditizing the Complement" one way of hurting a competitor is to make their product a commodity.

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

#45

Post by mmirate »

stcredzero wrote: post #44

How suitable is RISC-V for military use? If we were to redesign the F-16 from scratch in 2018, would be able to make it using hardened Arm or RISC-V chips in place of x86 processors?

The avionics and EW systems are probably being redesigned on a much more regular basis than ... well, than almost any other component of a fighter.

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

#46

Post by ffsc »

stcredzero wrote: post #43
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…

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 By any chance, does anyone know if Intel is funding RISC-V? According to the logic of "Commoditizing the Complement" one way of hurting a competitor is to make their product a commodity.

Intel Capital participated in SiFive's Series C funding round. Besides that I don't know of anything else Intel has done for risc-v.

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

#48

Post by mrtweetyhack »

stcredzero wrote: post #43
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…

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 By any chance, does anyone know if Intel is funding RISC-V? According to the logic of "Commoditizing the Complement" one way of hurting a competitor is to make their product a commodity.

I don't see any reason why Intel would support RISC-V because it would eat into their market too(in the distant future)

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

#49

Post by jacquesm »

daeken wrote: post #38
steve19 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I spent a little bit of time Logitech's R&D department back in the late 90's, they were doing all they could to shave two pins off a chip. It cost them a terrible amount of money, including a custom package and the difference in price per mouse must have been on the order of a few pennies. But the enormous amount of devices shipped more than made up for the R&D investment.

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

#50

Post by jacquesm »

monocasa wrote: post #28
faragon wrote: post #18

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 :-)

They come close to that here, a gate level simulation of an ARM1. http://visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html

That's how the ARM1 was made in the first place: by being simulated. On a BBC Model B. First silicon worked, which nobody really expected but they surprised themselves.
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