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> You still need a design team to integrate ARM IP blocks with your own IP or within the constraints of a given manufacturing process but almost no one is makin

by uxp100 5y ago

> You still need a design team to integrate ARM IP blocks with your own IP or within the constraints of a given manufacturing process but almost no one is making their own cores. To emphasize this a little, I think the headcount needed for the this is quite a bit larger than the additional headcount need for making your own core. There is a lot of working in making a high performance SoC using Cortex cores, and a lot of work in making a custom core, but I think some commenters here think that so many more custom cores are being made than in reality because they think that the rest is the easy part and the hard part is all cpu design, so if these fabless semiconductor companies are spending (overlapping) years per chip with thousands of employees it must be because everything is custom (regardless of what you can learn just looking up SoCs on wikipedia)

dogma1138 5y ago
Yeah I would agree, there is ton of work that has to go into getting as much performance from the SoC given all the design constraints and designing your own cores would probably not help to remove enough of the problems you would need to solve to be worth while especially if you need to hit a very wide range of products and use cases. Apple is in a unique position they both have a world class leading design team and they have complete control over the entire product so they have far more levers to tweak and they don’t need to compete with anyone but themselves. And you can see that with how the went about with their SoC design. For the most part they had a single design with a few power envelopes for cheaper / less powerful products their solution was always to use SoCs from previous years. Even for special cases like the Apple Watch etc they tended to repurpose cores from their existing designs. The S series SoC is essentially one or two efficiency cores from their A series further clocked down and sometimes on a more power efficient node to squeeze a bit more battery life out of them. But beyond that until the M series it was pretty much always you get a new A series SoC for the new iPhone/iPad with the only major difference being the power envelope and everything else would use an SoC form 1-3 years earlier. If Qualcomm could’ve play this game they might have still be using custom cores too.

by uxp100 5y ago

dogma1138 5y ago

Yeah I would agree, there is ton of work that has to go into getting as much performance from the SoC given all the design constraints and designing your own cores would probably not help to remove enough of the problems you would need to solve to be worth while especially if you need to hit a very wide range of products and use cases. Apple is in a unique position they both have a world class leading design team and they have complete control over the entire product so they have far more levers to tweak and they don’t need to compete with anyone but themselves. And you can see that with how the went about with their SoC design. For the most part they had a single design with a few power envelopes for cheaper / less powerful products their solution was always to use SoCs from previous years. Even for special cases like the Apple Watch etc they tended to repurpose cores from their existing designs. The S series SoC is essentially one or two efficiency cores from their A series further clocked down and sometimes on a more power efficient node to squeeze a bit more battery life out of them. But beyond that until the M series it was pretty much always you get a new A series SoC for the new iPhone/iPad with the only major difference being the power envelope and everything else would use an SoC form 1-3 years earlier. If Qualcomm could’ve play this game they might have still be using custom cores too.