ATI Licenses Tensilica's Xtensa Configurable Processor

[asicnewbie]

Tensilica only charges for a processor once (though you have to pay again if you change the custom instructions), plus royalties. ARM has a re-use fee, plus royalties. I'm not sure about MIPS, since we rejected them for technical reasons (size and power).

My coworker just told me the cost of the ARM-processor actually depends on the foundry-merchant. As of late last year, the upfront (NRE) cost for using an ARM9xx core on TSMC's process was over $600k USD, not including royalties and other recurring use-fees. That pricing structure changed earlier this year, and when TSMC (or ARM) found customers pursuing other 'options', either other embedded CPU or foundry choices.

Some IDMs (such as Fujitsu, Samsung) already license ARM, and have some special business arrangement, which allows Fujitsu and Samsung's foundry-customers to use an ARM-core at much lower cost than say TSMC/UMC. For ASIC-products with low to mid volume, the savings more than offset the IDM's higher per-wafer pricing.

 

[RussSchultz]

The instruction set is too non-standard to be used as the "main" processor for anything.

Given nobody writes RISC assembly (or much of it) in standard applications, I don't think that matters. They use the GNU front end and their own backend (from what I remember).

But beyond that, their instruction set is standard RISC load/store. What do you find 'non-standard' about it that would lead to it not being useful for general purpose processing?

 

[PC-Engine]

http://www.eedesign.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=51000480