Xilinx - ARM ... Hard or Soft Cores? |

Xilinx - ARM ... Hard or Soft Cores?

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Re the recent Xilinx - ARM announcement (see http://bit.ly/2hEIIm) ... I'm now taking bets on whether they will be going for HARD and/or SOFT cores ... what do you think?

Discussion started by Clive Maxfield , on 23 October 01:51 PM

Replies

Clive Maxfield, 2009-12-17 09:00:12

Ah ... programmable analog capability -- that's the big question isn't it. Actel have their FUSION mixed-signal FPGAs which are really nice -- and Cypress have their PSoCs which contain programmable analog and programmable digital ... I haven;t heard anything about this from anyone else, but I watch and wait in anticipation :-)

Bob Dyke, 2009-12-17 08:06:29

I’ve heard there will be ARM based hard cores in the next generation (post V6) Virtex devices. This is a huge change for Xilinx that will impact not only silicon but the tools and potentially software (i.e. drivers) as well. We boot Linux on a PPC inside a V4 device so we are watching this development with great interest. I think the keys to early success will be what other hard cores are in there and how robust the driver offerings are. Xilinx has done good work in this area in the past so I suspect they can pull it off. Any bets on adding analog capability?

Antti Lukats, 2009-11-04 00:26:58

Clive, it has been known for almost an year that Xilinx plans/planned to have ARM hard-core in Spartan-6 series. So no need to take bets, they are planning for hard-core, but its to be seen when it comes. It should have much more hardcores than only the CPU, so it more like SoC with FPGA added, not FPGA with cpu core. Xilinx kind of has to make it, as they are no longer offering hard-core CPU's at all any more (no PPC in V6).

Actually if I think of the timeline, Xilinx should have inhouse silicon with the new ARM hardcore already, so pretty much everything should be known internally in Xilinx already.