I guess you could argue that, if you bought a device with this CPU, you should be able to replace the CPU with one of your own that’s derived from this one. I

I guess you could argue that, if you bought a device with this CPU, you should be able to replace the CPU with one of your own that’s derived from this one. I think that’s the spirit of the GPL in a hardware context, but I don’t think it’s a given (by a long stretch) that courts would accept that argument. A somewhat clearer case would be if you bought a device that implements a GPL licensed design in a FPGA. I think you could argue such devices cannot disable the reprogrammability of the FPGA.