Industry Expert Blogs

Tensilica has been around for quite a long time. Their key technology is a system for generating a custom processor, the idea being to better match the requirement of the processor for performance, power and area as compared with a fully-general purpose control processor (such as one of the ARM processors). Of course generating a processor on its own isn't much use: how would you program it? So the system also generates custom compilers, virtual platform models and so on. Everything that you need to be able to use the processor.

I've said before in the context of ARM that what is most valuable is not the microprocessor design itself, it is the ecosystem that surrounds it. That is the barrier to entry, not the fact that ARM does a reasonable job of implementing processors.

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