Something that occurred to me over the weekend... ARM essentially licenses out various forms of chip IP, whether it is the post-synthesis IP blocks that licensees then connect to their own chip extensions or in other cases where the vendor pays a significant amount more for the data they actually get the ARM core VHDL, Verilog, or whatever other HDL might be used to describe the core so that vendor can optimize the processor they create in a very fine-tuned manner for whatever their specific application is. (Please correct me if my terminology or understanding of ARM's licensing schemes are inaccurate for the purpose of this discussion)
Anyway, the point I am getting at is that when it comes down to it processors are described in such hardware definition "language" which in a way makes it more than just patentable hardware, but software also--to which one might apply free or copyleft software licenses. So I guess it would be interesting to hear the perspective of someone who has been working at ARM for that long on such prospects as well as what he thinks of groups like Open Cores http://opencores.org/ as a potential competitor for ARM since it is in the enlightened self interest of vendors who would otherwise have to engage in heavily restrictive licensing agreements with ARM to get core IP to contribute back to such projects. Also, I haven't done much reading on the latest work in unifying the various machine and platform directories in the Linux kernel's arch/arm directory, so maybe my question could better be answered simply by reading mailing lists, phoronix, lwn.net, etc...but still it would be interesting to learn his take on that effort since it might mean that more vendor specific patches would actually make it back to the mainline kernel. How much effort does ARM put into directing efforts like that? It seems like they are well-placed to make important strategic decisions in that process. Anyway, have fun with your interview or whatever. wayne On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 10:54 AM, Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross <[email protected]> wrote: > Would you have any thing you would like me to talk about? > Whatever you want me to discuss is of interest to me. Remember I am hardware > newbie. > > He is one of the 7 chaps from the beginnings of ARM and still employed. > > I have also asked here: > http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2012-October/005795.html > (lots of discussion here) > http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/pipermail/discussion/2012-October/009897.html > and on the FSFE discuss ML. > > -- > This sig is a long one and in dev... > > I'm on StatusNet var identi and Diaspora. > http://social.aross.me > > Please use the address [email protected] in public places. This is part > of my spam control. > > Please add to your contacts and use to contact me "<You first name and your > last name>[email protected]". This is future prof. Part of my anti spam > plan. If I have not created a <1st&lastname>[email protected] address > please bug me. > > > > Please do not send me Microsoft Office/Apple iWork documents. Send > OpenDocument instead! http://fsf.org/campaigns/opendocument/ > > > Decent, recommended by me, non-proprietary, patent free, royalty free, FOSS > archive formats: > > XZ http://tukaani.org/xz/format.html > TAR.GZ or TAR.BZ2 (If you must.) > PEA http://www.peazip.org/pea-archiving-utility.html > > A multi platform archiver progam: > http://www.peazip.org/ > A comparison of formats: > http://tukaani.org/lzma/benchmarks.html > http://www.peazip.org/peazip-compression-benchmark.html > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_archivers > > > mp3,acc,wma,rma,ect audio formats are all rubbish! > Decent audio formats: > > Vorbis (lossy) http://www.vorbis.com/ > FLAC (lossless) http://flac.sourceforge.net/ > Speex (for voice, lossy) http://www.speex.org/ > > For multimedia containers, I like/love: > MKV http://www.matroska.org/ > WebM http://www.webmproject.org/ > OGG http://www.xiph.org/ogg/ > FLAC (Audio only. Use with the FLAC audio format.) > > Good Video formats: > > VP8 http://www.webmproject.org/ or H.264 (Not nice legal wise.) > Theora http://www.theora.org/ > > Take you time with encoding. I don't mined waiting for 12hour long ones, > hope that's ok with you! Aim for best quality too. Do not think you have to > reincode stuff to send it to me. I like my quality even if that means > downloading 4GB mpeg 2 yuck but you will hate uploading that. > > > The word “hack, hacker, hacking, hacked, etc” is often misused. It does not > mean nasty, evil stuff. Cracker is the word you want. See: > > http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Hacker > > > Stop Software Patents! > > Proudly using distributions of GNU/Linux. No m$ or bapple! No lock-in, > dependence, drm, limits :). >
