Open ISAs Gaining Traction

Emphasis on flexibility, time to market and heterogeneity requires more processing options.

semiengineering.com

Open instruction set architectures are starting to gain a foothold, often in combination with other processors, as chipmakers begin to add more specialized compute elements and more flexibility into their designs.

There are a number of these open ISAs available today, including Power, MIPS, and RISC-V, and there are a number of permutations and tools available for sale based on those architectures. What has opened the door to making these more acceptable in designs is that one or more of these architectures may be included in a chip alongside processors from Arm, Synopsys, Cadence, Achronix, Flex Logix, or even Intel.

There are a number of reasons why open ISAs make sense, and other reasons why they don’t make sense everywhere....

To read the article by Ann Mutschler, click here.

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