ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs

Re:ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs by daeken on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @05:32PM (#18125892)

I think the issue is really just one of scale. If you ship 400M drives a year (as the global hard drive industry did last year), a cost savings of $1 is a lot of money that goes into your pocket/R&D. If you're making 10000 of something, making a custom chip is almost certainly going to cost you a fortune; if you're making tens or hundreds of millions of something, that cost gets amortized very quickly, I imagine.

If WD is making their own chips, it almost certainly isn't to save a couple grand a year; it's probably to save many millions.

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Re:ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs by kabdib on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @06:41PM (#18126326)

Yeah, in consumer electronics the hardware engineers have knife fights in the hallways over resistors. Well, not that bad. Probably.

"Can't you do that in software?" 50M units later you understand the reason why that hardware guy made your life a living hell for two weeks just before release, because what he did saved ten cents on the motherboard and at scale that's real money.

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Re:ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs by vvanders on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @11:29PM (#18127441)

Oh man, so much this. I'm going to steal the "knife fights ... over resistors". That so perfectly captures the whole process.

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Re:ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs by jacquesm on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @06:26PM (#18126227)

I spent a little bit of time Logitech's R&D department back in the late 90's, they were doing all they could to shave two pins off a chip. It cost them a terrible amount of money, including a custom package and the difference in price per mouse must have been on the order of a few pennies. But the enormous amount of devices shipped more than made up for the R&D investment.

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