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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

#21

Post by chasil »

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 all the 386 patents are out of date now right?

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."

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

#22

Post by sweden »

dang wrote: post #20
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!

Why did we change from an official press release with some content to some random blog post?

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

#23

Post by slededit »

wyldfire wrote: post #10
phire wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beer. Pretty sure they will be precompiled RTL blobs.

Not even. You have to pay a royalty to ship one of these M0 designs, still. It's just designed to be more appealing to research.

The blog post said royalty free though... I agree its not exactly super clear.

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

#24

Post by k_sh »

sweden wrote: post #22
dang wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why did we change from an official press release with some content to some random blog post?

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].

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

#25

Post by sweden »

k_sh wrote: post #24
sweden wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did we change from an official press release with some content to some random blog post?

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.

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

#26

Post by jgome »

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…

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).

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

#27

Post by vanjoe »

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.

Yeah the newer zynq-MP have a 4 core A53 as well as two realtime class cores on there.

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

#28

Post by monocasa »

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

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

#29

Post by monocasa »

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?

They are. We're pretty close to Pentium Pro in terms of patent expiration.

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

#30

Post by Dylan16807 »

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."

That changes in a couple years though.
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