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I wish the RP2350 would include a fuse to disable for good the ARM cores for those who want only the risc-v cores (and maybe not pay ARM royalties on those chip
by sylware 2y ago
I wish the RP2350 would include a fuse to disable for good the ARM cores for those who want only the risc-v cores (and maybe not pay ARM royalties on those chips).
- jsheard 2y agoSee pg.1259 in the datasheet, the ARM_DISABLE fuse does exactly that. Putting that in was a smart move because it means they can always make a RISC-V-only variant of the chip without having to tape out new silicon - they just have to blow that fuse at the factory.
- londons_explore 2y agoI'm not sure "arm-core-disabled-by-fuse" is gonna be sufficient to persuade arms legal department to stop charging royalties...
- axoltl 2y agoThat's actually a super common way to handle licensing in hard IP. You don't want to spin different revisions of a chip with and without the IP, that's expensive. So you build in fuses to permanently disable the IP. This happens a lot with hardware video encoder/decoder blocks.
- mschuster91 2y agoOr you do it the other way around in software - remember the Pi 1/2 era where you had to buy separate licenses for MPEG/h264 HW decoders, tied to the Pi's serial number?
- sylware 2y agoThat's why the fuse, with proper sales accounting, is so much important.
- sylware 2y agoGood! Upon buying a board with a RP2350, do you know of a reseller who burns the fuse before shipping it to you (and don't pay ARM royalies on that sale)?
- _Microft 2y agoMaybe this is just not the microcontroller you are looking for?
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoOne imagines that at some point they will release a pure risc-v chip, once community adoption of the new RP2350 cores is widespread.
- sylware 2y agoIt means the chip CPU cores won't be tied to ARM PI enforcement, and won't have to pay for the license to implement ARM ISA (or implement ARM core design).
- numpad0 2y agoSo no words about Cadence-Synopsys duopoly? ARM bad lazy, that's it?
- sylware 2y agoRome was not built in one day.
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoYes, correct.