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If you are making a custom chip, you will still license a ton of different IP blocks that you will pay licensing costs for. What is special about the CPU? I gu
by stefan_ 5y ago
If you are making a custom chip, you will still license a ton of different IP blocks that you will pay licensing costs for. What is special about the CPU?
I guess it's nice to have a free CPU core but at the end of the day you want USB, external RAM, a bus to connect all these things and so on.
Maybe we will have free implementations of those at some point but it probably won't be from the current crop of chip designers - there have probably never been more ungrateful, non-reciprocal users of free software.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoRight. When you are talking cores, this is all fine. A completely valid topic for academic discussion. When you are talking chips with peripherals and packages and memory configs, it gets a little more muddy. When the conversation moves from academic to trying to buy a chip and ship a product. I am aware of a popular chip vendor next year making a three core chip. Core0 the fastest and primary is a RISCV, it will be flanked by two smaller and weaker ARM cortex m0 or m4s. They’re doing that because they have peripherals established for the ARM and almost none for the RISCV.
- charcircuit 5y agoRISC V cores are not necessarily free.