Peter Clarke, EETimes
(10/19/2009 1:24 PM EDT)
LONDON — The information provided to me so far about the ARM-Xilinx programmable systems collaboration was long on canned quotes and short on detail which of course leads to all sorts of questions and speculations.
From where I am sitting it seems a fairly important announcement. ARM has worked with programmable logic vendors in the past, such as Atmel and Actel, but in heavily prescriptive ways. There have even been versions of older ARM processor cores that could be synthesized and smeared across FPGAs although in general that was not considered a useful strategy, throwing away the power savings associated with ARM processor cores.