Over-interpreting the extended ARM

At first glance, the new Xilinx announcement on extending ARM licensing to include Cortex, as well as embedded memories and AMBA communication peripherals, would seem to be a PR challenge to Altera taking the form of “Anything MIPS can do, ARM can do better.” We’ve already talked about ARM dominance in the FPGA world in a previous column.  It’s fair to say that Xilinx sees its Power license as limited, and wants to join the dominant RISC team.  It’s also important to point out that Xilinx has worked with ARM in the past, albeit not in direct core integration.

But something slightly different is occupying my mind today. Analysts and journalists seem to be hyper-sensitized to any expansion of the ARM kingdom, whether it’s a new licensee or an expansion of an old licensing pact. When Broadcom Corp. signed a multicore ARM pact a couple weeks ago, outsiders were certain the action spoke volumes about the company’s intent to become more aggressive in handheld devices.  Only a few days ago, analysts began speculating about NXP Semiconductors Inc.’s intent to combine two types of ARM cores in future devices.

But if we look at historic licensing deals in Sparc, MIPS, Power, etc., we find that most licensees want to follow the developer of the instruction set down paths of greater complexity and more features. This is not a necessary indication that those features will be put to immediate use, it’s merely a sign that the licensee wants to have a full portfolio, and be seen as a full-line supplier. Xilinx benefits by licensing Cortex and working with ARM on AMBA, to be sure, but let’s not over-analyze this. As Freud once said (or maybe not), “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

But sometimes an ARM license gets exaggerated in significance when certain instruction-set originators are opening technical conferences that day. Not that there’s anything wrong with talking up a Cortex license as the ARM TechCon3 conference opens. But poor Tensilica launches a new architecture, the Xtensa 8, on the same day, and gets stampeded by all the ARM minutae.