On: Why It’s So Hard to Create New Processors

[artemonster]

cost. it is stupidly expensive to include any sort of commercial MCU core(s) in your chip. Ancedata: ARM won't even talk with small ASIC fabless companies, even if they are willing to shell out big upfront costs and royalties per chip that ARM demands. Having free or affordable alternaties is a great driving force for the industry.

[lechienquipete → artemonster]

> ARM won't even talk with small ASIC fabless companies, even if they are willing to shell out big upfront costs and royalties per chip that ARM demands

[Citation needed] There's literally 0 upfront costs for a Cortex-M3 [0]

[0] https://developer.arm.com/products/designstart

[nrclark → lechienquipete]

That's pretty recent for ARM, as they face growing pressure from companies switching to RISC-V for their internal MCUs.

[petra → artemonster]

What about other companies besides ARM, licensing cores. Are their costs exaggerated ? Are they affordable for processor customization ?

[seemslegit → artemonster]

That makes sense but goes under the "increasing the number of players" benefits