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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

#51

Post by kabdib »

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…

Yeah, in consumer electronics the hardware engineers have knife fights in the hallways over resistors. Well, not that bad. Probably.

"Can't you do that in software?" 50M units later you understand the reason why that hardware guy made your life a living hell for two weeks just before release, because what he did saved ten cents on the motherboard and at scale that's real money.

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

#52

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

Pretty much exactly right.

What I found interesting initially was how the 32 bit CPU was disrupting the 8 bit CPU market. People using Cortex M0 chips where they used to use ATMega chips. Identical package size, faster, more resources, not too much more memory. And some unreal bargains[1].

And now as FPGAs get cheaper and cheaper, RISC-V was becoming the default 'soft' processor because everything else cost money and didn't have any sort of ecosystem. Amazing times.

[1] Not sure how these folks make money -- https://satoshinm.github.io/blog/171212_stm32_blue_pill_arm_...

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

#53

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

The killer your missing is 'architecture license' versus 'IP' license. The former gives you the right to modify the architecture in your designs (add instructions, non-standard peripherals, alternate memory buses, Etc.) a standard 'IP' license just lets you essentially plop down a standard chip and innovate in the peripherals without touching the system controller at all.

Folks like WD want a processor that is cheap, and specialized like running an error correcting algorithm across spectrum. Generic CPU is too slow, custom CPU is fine. Custom CPU where there is already a lot of other support because other people are using it, is super fine.

Unlimited right to use / modify is a really valuable thing for these companies.

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

#54

Post by nerpderp83 »

Zenst wrote: post #12
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.

There are lots of other FPGAs that are still available for RISC-V to target that are precluded from this announcement.

ARM used to sue anyone trying to make an ARM clone and now this. Great news for RISC-V. At least one if not two low end FPGA manufacturers will be shipping a fabric with hard blocks supporting RISC-V.

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

#55

Post by jgome »

sweden wrote: post #33
jgome wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do Intel and AMD manage to make their own drivers mostly open-source, then?

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

#56

Post by phkahler »

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.

I'm not sure what value there would be in a 368. You can emulate that on a modern CPU if you need legacy software support. Otherwise just use RISC-V, it already runs Linux and thousands of programs. Oh, and it's got a 64bit version too.

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

#57

Post by userbinator »

Taniwha wrote: post #17
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?

486 too, and possibly the Pentium (P5) the last time I checked.

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

#58

Post by kikoreis »

jgome wrote: post #55
sweden wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do Intel and AMD manage to make their own drivers mostly open-source, then?

Having spent a few years focused on this (and other semiconductor enablement-related problems) my guess is they have evaluated their own patent portfolios and the risk of their implementations triggering a war, and have concluded it was worth doing. Note that Intel's GPUs are relatively simple, so AMD would seem to be bolder here, but I haven't dug into the detail to see how they have limited their exposure.

I find Intel is pretty solid about open sourcing everything they provide for Linux that runs on the host — it's a pity they haven't applied the same policy to the ME.

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

#59

Post by dang »

sweden wrote: post #25
k_sh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the GP said: > The press release linked by OP doesn't give the full story. For a better perspective see [the random blog post].

The blog post doesn't even cite the source of the news.

If you know of a more substantive link we can switch to it. Corporate press releases don't tend to be a good fit for HN.

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

#60

Post by broknbottle »

jgome wrote: post #55
sweden wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do Intel and AMD manage to make their own drivers mostly open-source, then?

patents and cross licensing agreements

https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/10/intel_and_nvidia_...

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