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Hardware

Arm Offers Free Access To Its Chip Designs To Early-Stage Startups (techcrunch.com) 38

Posted by EditorDavid from the hands-on-hardware dept.
An anonymous reader quotes Techcrunch: Arm — the U.K. company behind the designs of chips for everyone from Apple to Qualcomm to Samsung — is hoping to kickstart developing by offering up access to around 75% of its chip portfolio for free to qualified startups.

The move marks an expansion of the company's Flexible Access program. With it, Arm will open access to its IP for early-stage startups. While some of the biggest companies pay the chip designer big bucks for that information, the cost can be prohibitive for those just starting out...

Interested parties can access the full list of available IP here.
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Arm Offers Free Access To Its Chip Designs To Early-Stage Startups More

Arm Offers Free Access To Its Chip Designs To Early-Stage Startups

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  • This costs 0 engineers initially, then they bump it to 1/8 engineer ($75k), then it becomes 1 engineer ($200k) yearly. Be prepared.

  • Open cores gettng traction? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Saturday May 02, 2020 @04:55PM (#60015864) Journal

    Does this mean open cores (RISC-V and/or openRISC) are gaining enough traction that ARM thinks they need to head them off?

    • That was my thought as well. I've always viewed companies offering these kinds of sweet deals as akin to drug pushers. The first hit is always free, but once you get someone roped in, you essentially own them more than they own your product.

    • Does this mean open cores (RISC-V and/or openRISC) are gaining enough traction that ARM thinks they need to head them off?

      Probably not. My guess is ARM sees a wounded Intel being challenged by a virile AMD and thinks this is their chance to become the "alpha CPU" while the other two battle it out.

      • I think this is more about the mobile and embedded SoC market.

        You only need the IP if you want to integrate an ARM core directly into your own silicon for a single die solution.

        Nobody does that with x86.

        • I still don't see how this has anything to do with RISC-V / OpenRISC...which is the point of my previous comment.

          There's widespread rumors that Apple may move their laptops to a ARM architecture. They would also create their own silicon like Qualcomm also does. But the question in my mind is whether other x86/x64 vendors will jump ship given the performance, power efficiencies, and modularity of the ARM architecture.

          • No other laptop/desktop/server vendor has pockets anywhere near as deep as Apple.

            They may jump to an ARM-based design, but only after Apple is successful.

            • That's my thinking too. ARM might be hearing those rumors...or even aware of Apple's plans...and preparing ahead in the event of a market shift.

          • Lots of new RISC-V chips and dev boards are on the market this year, and that's directly competing with ARM. Really it is the only viable competitor at the low end.

            • So noted. Nobody I know has worked with them and I hadn't been reading much about them on the tech news websites. I'm curious to see if they'll get much uptake given all the low cost ARM SBCs out there.

              Hey, what's going on with Intel in that space? Last Intel Atom board I worked with was my Soekris net6501. It was pretty sucky. I replaced it with a PC Engines apu2c4 that hosts an AMD GX-412TC CPU when devs mostly walked away from compiling 32 bit code.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Kjella ( 173770 )

            But the question in my mind is whether other x86/x64 vendors will jump ship given the performance, power efficiencies, and modularity of the ARM architecture.

            There are already ARM Chromebooks from all the major x86 vendors, so if there's a market they'll build it. But they know from WinRT that changing consumer momentum is hard and that they'll get a lot of returns and customer support questions so I think most are lukewarm about the idea. It's easier to own the whole stack like Apple and say okay switching would have a big cost, but we'll eat that for the long term success of the Apple ecosystem. That is if Apple actually switches, there's been rumors every yea

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        I think it's probably a precautionary measure against RISC-V. AMD and Intel aren't licensing designs for other designers, just selling chips. ARM isn't selling chips, they are enabling people who think they want to design a chip.

        To get started with ARM, you had to engage with both a fab and ARM. Going RISCV was appealing enough to get some niche players to start playing it up. Given the choice between half-assed RISCV for free versus a much more developed ARM ecosystem, it's hard to resist the temptation

      • Probably not. My guess is ARM sees a wounded Intel being challenged by a virile AMD and thinks this is their chance to become the "alpha CPU" while the other two battle it out.

        The Alpha, as with all other pure RISC designs touting 'simplicity', lost the performance war.

        RISC marginally wins until you go superscalar, and then RISC loses badly.

        • There is a reason I didn't alphabetize "alpha" as I was using it as "first" or "top" as in "alpha male," not as a reference to the Alpha microprocessors. I didn't think there would be any confusion there and am frankly a bit surprised that anyone remembered the DEC Alpha AXP ISA, but hey, good for you. I don't hang with too many serious compute nerds nowadays.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          The Alpha, as with all other pure RISC designs touting 'simplicity', lost the performance war.

          RISC marginally wins until you go superscalar, and then RISC loses badly.

          Nope. Intel, AMD and all that ship RISC processors. The Pentium was the last processor that actually executed x86 instructions natively. From the Pentium Pro onwards, Intel (and AMD) started implementing very fast RISC cores paired up with a x86 frontend that basically emulates an x86. Effectively, every chip is RISC with an x86 emulator in ha

    • Exactly. Itâ(TM)s been happening for over 2 years now. First ARM pushed that dubious website with marketing FUD and then pulled it. Then they offered their low end cores for âoefree.â

      Theyâ(TM)ve been scrambling to make their licensing terms easier to deal with but when you talk to their sales guys, theyâ(TM)re as confusing as ever.

      RISC-V is the way forward, and now there are several parts available. Including a new one from the ESP32 guys.

  • They give away their older stuff to startups that can't afford the newer stuff. If a startup is successful they're entrenched with ARM and moving to something else is expensive. Then ARM can sell them the newer stuff that isn't free.

    I'm also assuming ARM charges for the "free" stuff when it's actually a product shipping thousands or millions of units. The "free" part only applies to demo units and the first 100 units produced.
  • ...What's to stop a big company from founding a 'small independent' startup to get free access, buy a bunch of of chips through them, and disband/create a new startup as soon as it gets too large? Rinse & repeat, never pay again?

    • Cheap up front, royalties out back.

    • ...What's to stop a big company from founding a 'small independent' startup

      1. There is an application process. Almost certainly one of the checkboxes on the application form is "Are you a subsidiary?"

      2. Only older cores are being offered for free. A big company with a track record of high sales volumes would be better off paying for a newer design.

    • Lawyers?

  • Yes, but ... (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Saturday May 02, 2020 @06:15PM (#60016072)

    Using their IP will still cost you a leg.

  • Arm Holdings were probably the "crown jewels" of the UK IT industry, so it was shocking to me when the Japanese Softbank Group just bought it lock, stock and barrel in 2016, with barely a murmur from anyone in the UK it appears.

    Is there any other UK IT company who has impacted the global IT market the way Arm Holdings has in the last couple of decades? Although I might think of Vodafone or British Telecom, I'm not sure either of these have global influence.

  • If "ARM" stands for "Acorn RISC Machine", and "RISC" "reduced instruction set computer", how does that jibe with a 1000-2000 page reference manual?
    • ARM used to be "Acorn RISC Machine" until the joint venture of Acorn (owned by Olivetti at the time) with Apple (Newton) & VLSI Technology (which at the time produced the ARM chips, later bought by Philips Electronics and then spun off with Freescale [former Motorola's semiconductors division] as NXP Semiconductors which still produces ARM processors today) when it was renamed to "Advanced RISC Machine".

      ARM was a truly simple CPU when it was designed in the mid-1980s, even after DEC (StrongARM, sold

  • Several early stage startups are actively pursuing risc-v now that tooling and os support is in place.

    Dealing with ARM just isnâ(TM)t worth it anymore.

  • ARM needs to take off the training wheels and release a proper desktop CPU. These designs are still mobile oriented. I want to see a proper ARM desktop/computer with a socketed CPU, expansion slots, motherboards, etc.
  • At a first glance I thought the headline was about a limb becoming sentient. It makes more sense to think about sentient weapons though...

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