Levelling the playing field.
Intel have been dickheads about licensing their cores into architectures that would suit embedded machines, such as cell phones, tablets, etc... This leave it to beaver(ton) attitude has surely cemented their enormous success in the mobile market.
They aren't the only moghuls on the hill. Not all ARM licensees are created equal, so while some have to struggle to minimize the royalties they have to pay the japanese banks, others can put as many as they want on an SOC without affecting the bottom line at all. A more flexible arrangement permits using say an intelligent component in a place where you might think a dma controller or iommu might live. Distributing io resources in this way permits much higher io bandwidth with much less power, greater security. and a better design.
One of the promises of a truly open architecture is that designers are not hampered by penny-pinchers. There have been *open* designs in the past, for example Sun threw one edition of SPARC over the wall, but this isn't really *open source*, it is *abandonware*. Open source is all about the future.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
