Arm dumps risk for CISC – Chip Indies Skip Costs: Early-stage startups can pay $0 to access CPU, GPU blueprints

Arm hopes to entice early-stage chip-designing startups into licensing its blueprints – by slashing the cost of entry to zero. If your organization has bagged less than $5m (£4m) in funding, Arm will let you pick CPU and GPU cores, and other technologies, from a selection of its blueprints and drop them into the homegrown chip …

[Joe W]

Oooh, a praeteritio!

"Now we could mention ..."

(though methinks the praeteritio is overused a tad, also by myself, but I won't mention that....)

[amanfromMars 1]

When things are unlikely, anything and everything is bound to be surprising. *

So, say you're working on a system-on-chip for some product, and you're a hard-up upstart with minimal funding. You contact Arm, you get access to the catalog of blueprints for free. You pick a CPU core to run your firmware code, some interconnects to join everything up, and some basic on-die peripherals because you're too lazy or busy to define a UART and SPI in SystemVerilog. You drop the blocks into your system-on-chip around your custom logic and workload acceleration, and verify and prototype it ahead of production. When ready, you license the tech from Arm by getting your checkbook out. You tape out the chip, fabricate, test, and ship it, and pay royalties to Arm.

Hmmm.? How about you bypass all of that guff if say you're working on a system-on-chip for some product, and give contacts in Arm access to sections/selections of one's own novel proprietary intellectual property for their rendering as if of their own making ..... in the full and reasonable expectation of any and all success to provide fair APT dividend payments.

And with stage payments due as processing progresses along Supplied Novel Proprietary Intellectual Property Lines ...... with new seeds growing into virgin feeds for almighty needs and sterling deeds ...... aiding and abetting AI and IT ProgramMING. .... Minded IntelAIgent Networking Games ...... Providing Source Comfort and Succour ...... Heavenly Bounty in Just Dessert Rewards ..... which is an Amazingly EMPowering Compensation one finds Impossible to Prevent and Deny.

That a much better type of Flexible Access for Startups program.

* And whether good or bad is an important choice to make, for one will break one whilst the other one will never ever.