OpenCores.org ARM Clone Removed From Web

An Anonymous Coward writes: ""A clone of the ARM7 32-bit RISC processor core, previously available free for download from the Internet, has been taken down or hidden" pending discussions between the core's designer and a Chinese representative of ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England)." Remember, this is a reverse-engineered "clone in the form of a synthesizable Verilog language description."

Comments

Wow

[Archanagor]

This sets a particularly tricky prescident for anyone writing emulators for any sort of processor.

I guess the big question that looms over my mind is "Why are they fighting this so hard?"

Besides, didn't AMD, Cyrix and such win becuase their clones of the x86 processors were legal?

Maybe I've missed the boat, here.

Quite Understandable

[Aztech]

I must say that ARM are a pretty cool company not the usual nasty corporate bully that Slashdot likes to portray, it's nice to think a bit of the Acorn lives on in nearly every mobile phone and PDA's etc.

However... remember ARM are purely an IP company they don't manufacture stuff like Intel so IP is their sole source of income, if you remove that, they die, I don't blame them for defending it, whether is was 'reverse-engineered' or produced from original designs is beside the point... it implements the ARM instruction set and therefore infringes upon ARM's patents.

Of course people here will probably bleat on about how any company could have the audacity to creative new products and patent stuff, but they make good products and spent a lot of cash producing those designs, revenue is needed in order to produce better products, like X-Scale for example, Intel have a ARM architecture license due to numerous entangled lawsuits and cross licensing.

I don't think ARM has much to worry about anyway, if a fab actually started producing cores on this design then ARM en masse then they could sue the hell out of them or the companies that use them in final products, ARM designs permeate many chips and designs out here so gaining access to a legitimate design is not a monumental task, but fabbing millions of chips illegitimately is not easy to get away with since people would definitely notice.

Be careful here

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Be careful how you interpret this stuff; the headlines are much more inflammatory than the situation warrants.

If you go through to the original EE Times article, you'll discover that the nnARM implementation was radically incomplete: no interrupt handling, no virtual memory, no coprocessor instructions, no THUMB support. For what the guy in question was doing, that's fine; he can be perfectly comfortable building a GPS receiver w/o any of that -- but no large-scale embedded system builder would be interested in this chip. (A cell phone manufacturer would need to qualify any such chip set...no way. Linux and WinCE won't run on it. QNX won't run on it. Although I suppose ucLinux might run on it, that would require a full port to a new instruction set width, and that would cost much more than anyone would save by doing it.)

That puts quite a different light on this than the articles in the Reg implied. A chip like this poses no threat to ARM's licensing revenues. What it does do is confuse people about what an ARM core can do. In my opinion, ARM has a legitimate beef about that.

But isnt reverse engineering protected ?

[Anton Anatopopov]

I thought the constitution allowed reverse engineering. Or is this some new side effect of the DMCA that I wasn't aware of ?

what is the point of cloning the ARM anyway, it is relatively cheap, and hardly at the cutting edge of processor performance ?

I mean, I despise the undemocratic murderous quasi-talibanic Chinese regime as much as the next American, but really there are other issues that we could criticise China for apart from trivial copyright infractions.

I think this shows the hidden capitalist bias of slashdot. People's rights are infringed on a daily basis in China, they are committing genocide in Tibet, and what does slashdot whine about ? Intellectual Property.

I realise Americans are insular and capitalistic, but have the events of Sept 11th gone completely over your heads ? Or are you in denial ?

Re:An instruction set isn't IP; it's an interface.

[j7953]

I think (but please correct me if I'm wrong) Verilog is a hardware description language, not an interface description language. So this case is about the description of an implementation of the ARM machine code instruction set, not a description of the instruction set itself.