
ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs - Thorondor
https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip-to-combat-fossi-threat/
======
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...](https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip-to-combat-
fossi-threat/)

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/](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...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_strategy/)

~~~
stcredzero
_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.

~~~
ffsc
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.

~~~
CalChris
They were one of the funders for RISC-V at Berkeley but that may have been
funding EECS rather than RISC-V.

[https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/Data/106902...](https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/Data/106902.html)

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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.

~~~
Zenst
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.

~~~
JoachimS
The release of the M1 is not just for Xilinx.

ARM is releasing the M1 for Xilinx, Altera, Actel FPGAs. These are firm (i.e.
technology mapped) cores adapted for each FPGA family.

Here for example is the documentation for the Altera version. Note that it
sports the Altera Avalon bus interface which would not be used in a Xilinx
design.

[https://developer.arm.com/docs/dui0395/latest/introduction/a...](https://developer.arm.com/docs/dui0395/latest/introduction/about-
the-processor)

And here is the announcement/information about the M1 core for Actel/Microsemi
FPGAs:

[https://soc.microsemi.com/products/ip/search/detail.aspx?id=...](https://soc.microsemi.com/products/ip/search/detail.aspx?id=652)

~~~
JoachimS
This article from EE Times lists all FPGA vendors as well as EDA vendors
supporting the M1 cores:

[https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1303843](https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1303843)

------
kbumsik
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.

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

~~~
neuromancer2701
Those are actually silicon hardware cores all of these are soft-core
applications.

------
phsilva
Let the battle begin! Wonder how RISC-V movement in the open source ISA front
has influenced this decision.

------
ingenieroariel
Sounds really good. Is it only free as in free beer or editable too?

The interesting applications for RISC-V are Vector Extensions and other
application specific mods.

~~~
phire
Beer. Pretty sure they will be precompiled RTL blobs.

~~~
wyldfire
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.

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

------
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.

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

~~~
chasil
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86)

"...x86-64 may require an additional license from AMD."

~~~
Dylan16807
That changes in a couple years though.

------
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
:-)

~~~
monocasa
They come close to that here, a gate level simulation of an ARM1.

[http://visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html](http://visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html)

~~~
jacquesm
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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peter_d_sherman
Free != Open Source. Are NDA's/vendor secrecy required? Is the core, in
whatever form it is provided in, not obfuscated in any way, and well
documented? Does ARM permit companies using it to modify the design? Free !=
Open Source.

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spilk
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?

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stevefan1999
Why did the article claim that "Free and Open Source Silicon" is a threat to
ARM?

Thinking further, we already have RISC V up and running, but doesn't it really
impact traditional chip OGs like ARM and Intel?

~~~
nickik
Of course RISC-V impacts ARM and to a lesser extent Intel. Most costumer that
goes to RISC-V would have picked ARM.

Of course changes like that don't happen in 1-2 years. RISC-V is still young,
2015 is when it actually went public with the foundation.

Not to mention that back then many things we not frozen, so now basically
everything you need for a Linux stack is frozen.

------
stcredzero
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?

~~~
mycall
I wouldn't assume the F-16s have Von Neumann.

~~~
fooker
Do you have a source for this?

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jhallenworld
Will there be a version for Lattice FPGAs? These are more interesting targets
because they are lower cost than Altera or Xilinx.

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mmirate
Single-digit Cortex-M models? Dinosaurs, all.

Hold your applause until we can see the innards of an AArch64 implementation.

~~~
jononor
Several billions of such chips are shipped per year. Many established segments
are still moving from 8 bit to 32 bit micros, and new segments are still
growing rapidly. So shipments of Cortex-Mx devices is likely to grow quite a
bit still.

