ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

The press release linked by OP doesn&#x27;t give the full story. For a better perspective see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abopen.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip-to-combat-fossi-threat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abopen.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip...</a><p>If you&#x27;re just joining us, Arm very much sees the up and coming RISC-V stack as an immediate threat to the future of their business and is taking pro-active countermeasures - doing everything from awkward, backfiring smear campaigns against RISC-V[1] to straight up license dumping their own product to prevent developers jumping ship.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to see because RISC-V is wonderful and Arm seems to recognize that. Arm Holdings is acting rationally as someone in a privileged competitive position would do. At the same time, big players like Western Digital are migrating to RISC-V so Arm is internally freaking out [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;10&#x2F;arm_riscv_website&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;10&#x2F;arm_riscv_website&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;01&#x2F;wdc_risc_v_edge_strategy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;01&#x2F;wdc_risc_v_edge_str...</a>

This is ARM&#x27;s definite response to RISC-V. As people develop their FPGA products, they will have to decide what their long term target is. If the intent is to eventually turn the code into an ASIC, RISC-V maybe the economically more sensible solution since there is no licensing costs there. However they will have to be patient with the toolchain. If the idea if the code will only be a pet project, wouldn&#x27;t benefit from RISC&#x27;s customization abilities, or long term is expected to use an ARM core, this is definitely the right pick. The ARM toolchain being more mature is a draw for many hardware developers.<p>I&#x27;m definitely very interested in trying a project with either RISC-V or ARM.

Wow, not only FPGA-optimized Cortex-M1, they also releases Cortex-M3, one of the most popular MCU IP.<p>BTW, are there many applications integrating a MCU core with FPGA rather than a AP core? I only have seen Xilinx products that uses Cortex-A core.

Let the battle begin! Wonder how RISC-V movement in the open source ISA front has influenced this decision.

Sounds really good. Is it only free as in free beer or editable too?<p>The interesting applications for RISC-V are Vector Extensions and other application specific mods.

The commetization of the CPU market was bound to happen eventually. As modern production techniques for chips and FPGA programming start to converge rapidly.<p>What is the ETA until we get a GNX &quot;GNX is Not X86&quot;? An Open source i386 core that people can run existing applications on? Much like GNU offered a standardized FOSS platform people could run existing Unix workloads on.

I would love ARM releasing ARM1 and ARM2 processors (both with a 3-stage pipeline) for FPGAs, not because of economical interest, but because of historical and coolness purposes. And more, so you could e.g. run a synthesized Acorn Archimedes from a FPGA, for free, running Linux on top of it :-)

Free != Open Source. Are NDA&#x27;s&#x2F;vendor secrecy required? Is the core, in whatever form it is provided in, not obfuscated in any way, and well documented? Does ARM permit companies using it to modify the design? Free != Open Source.

so how many LE&#x27;s do these cores consume compared to a similar RISC-V or any other CPU design? Are there advantages just beyond familiarity of ARM?

Why did the article claim that &quot;Free and Open Source Silicon&quot; is a threat to ARM?<p>Thinking further, we already have RISC V up and running, but doesn&#x27;t it really impact traditional chip OGs like ARM and Intel?

How suitable is RISC-V for military use? If we were to redesign the F-16 from scratch in 2018, would be able to make it using hardened Arm or RISC-V chips in place of x86 processors?

Will there be a version for Lattice FPGAs? These are more interesting targets because they are lower cost than Altera or Xilinx.

Single-digit Cortex-M models? Dinosaurs, all.<p>Hold your applause until we can see the innards of an AArch64 implementation.