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ARM produces a design people incorporate into their chips. I'm not entirely certain you cannot take an ARM core and enhance it if you pay the right fees (when

by qdog 15y ago

ARM produces a design people incorporate into their chips. I'm not entirely certain you cannot take an ARM core and enhance it if you pay the right fees (when I worked on them, I don't think we did, but we just need a core to do management for our hardware-based video decoder). Not sure if IBM fabricates any chips for people right now, but we used UMC and TSMC, so it's really not about ARM for the manufacturing process, it's about those two companies. I don't know what UMC and TSMC are advertising as their current process, it might be a little behind Intel, but I'm sure they'll continue to shrink processes. The question is why would an x86 processor need to be put on your phone? I guess because the history of Intel so far is all x86, their other processor lines have all been phased out (I hesitate to say failed, but that might be the right word). Intel really doesn't want to compete on low-power, low-margin chips, they like making money on the desktop and server. From my limited experience, ARM is vastly easier to work on than x86, as far as assembly programming is concerned. I personally hope this chip fails, because I'd prefer not to have x86 polluting the world anymore than it already has.

rsynnott 15y ago
> I'm not entirely certain you cannot take an ARM core and enhance it if you pay the right fees You can. There are at least two licenses, a core license and an architecture license. Qualcomm has an architecture license; the Scorpion (Snapdragon's ARM core) is an ARMv7 core somewhat similar to an A8, but is not actually an A8. Companies with core licenses have also modified them; the Samsung/Apple/Intrinsity Hummingbird/A4 used an A8 core modified by Intrinsity to work efficiently at 1GHz; TI later followed suit. Intrinsity's main business model, in fact, was optimization of other peoples' core designs.
- qdog 15y ago
  Ok, cool, I should have looked it up, but the sentence in the article was "Except for Qualcomm, which makes its own ARM-compatible cores, every other ARM chip on the market uses reference CPU cores", which I didn't think was true (and I don't think 'compatible' is the right word for Qualcomm, probably 'extended' ?). Also, he talks about this future 22nm process from intel for 2013, as though the other fabs are going to sit at 28nm forever (even though Intel is also currently at 28nm). It just seems like a poorly written article, or someone who copied a little too much from Intel's PR.
wtallis 15y ago
You have to pay ARM extra to be able to tweak their cores or design your own. Qualcomm does this with their Snapdragon processors, and the Samsung/Intrinsity collaboration that spawned Apple's line of SoCs and a few for Samsung is also based on modifying the ARM cores. Most everybody else goes for the cheaper ARM licenses.

by qdog 15y ago

rsynnott 15y ago

> I'm not entirely certain you cannot take an ARM core and enhance it if you pay the right fees You can. There are at least two licenses, a core license and an architecture license. Qualcomm has an architecture license; the Scorpion (Snapdragon's ARM core) is an ARMv7 core somewhat similar to an A8, but is not actually an A8. Companies with core licenses have also modified them; the Samsung/Apple/Intrinsity Hummingbird/A4 used an A8 core modified by Intrinsity to work efficiently at 1GHz; TI later followed suit. Intrinsity's main business model, in fact, was optimization of other peoples' core designs.

qdog 15y ago
Ok, cool, I should have looked it up, but the sentence in the article was "Except for Qualcomm, which makes its own ARM-compatible cores, every other ARM chip on the market uses reference CPU cores", which I didn't think was true (and I don't think 'compatible' is the right word for Qualcomm, probably 'extended' ?). Also, he talks about this future 22nm process from intel for 2013, as though the other fabs are going to sit at 28nm forever (even though Intel is also currently at 28nm). It just seems like a poorly written article, or someone who copied a little too much from Intel's PR.

wtallis 15y ago

You have to pay ARM extra to be able to tweak their cores or design your own. Qualcomm does this with their Snapdragon processors, and the Samsung/Intrinsity collaboration that spawned Apple's line of SoCs and a few for Samsung is also based on modifying the ARM cores. Most everybody else goes for the cheaper ARM licenses.